The amazing story of Summer Pudding’s grandfather

The race card for this weekend’s Queen’s Plate Festival at Kenilworth is littered with the progeny of five-time champion stallion Silvano – not least among them Summer Pudding, South African racing’s newest star, in the Grade 1 Cartier Paddock Stakes.

The story of Silvano – recently retired after a magnificent career at stud, which followed a singular campaign on the racecourses of the world – is fairly well known.

Silvano won and was placed at the top level in six different countries. From the breeding shed at Maine Chance Farms in South Africa, he has delivered a stream of champions, including Heavy Metal and Hawwaam. And Summer Pudding.

Much of that bloodstock quality derives from his father, Lomitas, once described as “the best racehorse and stallion to have emerged from Germany”.

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Racing Post writer Graham Sharpe said Lomitas had a life with “twists and turns Dick Francis and John Francome together would have been hard put to invent”.

Born in 1988, the chestnut son of Niniski had to overcome a chronic phobia of starting stalls to reach stardom.
After being crowned Germany’s juvenile colt of 1990, despite truculence at the gates, he was favourite for the following season’s 2000 Guineas in Cologne. But he violently refused to enter the stalls on the big day – injuring handlers, jockeys and other horses and eventually throwing himself to the ground in defiance.

He got a hefty ban for that, but came back better behaved after a stint at the hands of famous American horse whisperer Monty Roberts, who identified claustrophobia as the problem.

Owned by Bremen’s Fahrhof Stud boss Walther Jacobs (grandfather of Maine Chance’s Andreas Jacobs) and trained by Andreas Wohler, Lomitas won three Group 1 races on the way to being named the best three year old in Europe in 1991.

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Then the trouble really started. Jacobs received threats that Lomitas would be harmed or even killed if a ransom was not paid.

The threats were ignored as the colt raced to victory in the Gerling-Preiss and Hansa-Preis before starting as hot favourite for a Dusseldorf Group 1 race. He disappointed badly – and poisoning was diagnosed.

Lomitas was moved to safety in England, in a clandestine operation, to the Newmarket yard of Susan Piggott, where he was renamed Pirelli and only exercised pre-dawn in order to avoid detection.

Then he transferred to California, but suffered hoof problems stemming from the poisoning. Soldiering on under trainer Ron McAnally, he placed several times in graded races before being retired in 1994, with 10 wins from 19 outings and earnings of nearly $1 million.

He returned to Europe to stand at stud – initially at Darley’s Dalham Park Stud in England and then back at the Jacobs family’s Fahrhof in 2007.

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Among his offspring were the well-performed Championship Point and Shalanaya, but Silvano was the shining light. Lomitas died aged 22 in 2010.

If you believe in that sort of thing, you can imagine the old soldier looking on fondly from horse heaven as his charismatic granddaughter puts the warrior genes to work in Cape Town on Saturday.

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