At a glance
- Colt, Ontario-bred, foaled May 13, 2022
- By Danish Dynaformer out of Miss Medaglia
- Trainer: Kevin Attard
- Foundation development at Margaux Farm (KY)
- Acquired at 2023 Fasig-Tipton Kentucky October Yearlings Sale
Behind the name
This horse was named in honour of an award-winning Canadian writer and horse racing columnist who worked at The New Yorker for more than 50 years.
Audax Minor was the pen name of George F. T. Ryall, an esteemed Toronto-born turf writer who worked as the horse racing columnist for The New Yorker for 52 years. His first column on horse racing appeared in the magazine on July 10, 1926. By the time his final column appeared on December 18, 1978, Audax Minor had contributed more than 2,000 columns to the weekly publication.
Serving as a time capsule for thoroughbred racing, the articles that Audax Minor penned provide a view to the evolution of the sport over five decades, including the use of the first starting gate in 1929 and the introduction of pre-race testing in 1946. Most were “charming, jaunty, frequently irascible, yet always familiar dispatches issued in virtually every fresh issue of The New Yorker by a jocular correspondent who seemed never to have missed a race.”
Coming from a family that owned horses, his connection to thoroughbreds was deeply forged and his love affair with racing was enduring. An excerpt about Audax Minor from the book Here at The New Yorker reads “tips on horses emerge sideways and downward out of a corner of his puckered mouth, as if that were the way he received them from the horses themselves as they warily circled the paddock, sizing up their adversaries.” Providing a service to the sport, Audax Minor informed and entertained those intimately involved while capturing the appeal of the turf for those with a more casual connection.
In addition to “The Race Track” column in The New Yorker, he also wrote for The Blood-Horse (now BLOODHORSE Magazine), Town & Country, PM, The Sportsman, Polo, and Country Life. In 1972, he won the National Turf Writers and Broadcasters’ Walter Haight Award. Less than a year after Audax Minor turned in his last column for The New Yorker, he died at the age of 92 and his obituary was featured in the October 1979 edition of Time magazine. In 2013, he was posthumously selected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor.
Audax Minor described himself as a “peevish fellow who believes that every horse deserves a good name and that, on the whole, the better racers are well named”. The Canuck Racing Club wonders what he’d think of a horse named after him.
About the sire
Ontario-bred Danish Dynaformer was a graded stakes winner who retired with a record of 5-3-1 and $764,645 in purses. He won the Breeder’s Stakes, came second in the Queen’s Plate, and won the G3 Singspiel Stakes over the course of a career in which he met and defeated 16 grade 1 winners and 40 graded stakes winners.
Danish Dynaformer is one of the last sons of major sire Dynaformer, and his dam is a half-sister to Breeders’ Cup Mile winner War Chant. His second dam is three-year-old Eclipse champion Hollywood Wildcat, a multiple graded stakes producer and Grade 1 winner of $1.4 million.
His first-ever stakes winning progeny was Canuck Racing Club’s War Painter when she took the 2023 Victorian Queen Stakes.
About the dam
Our colt’s dam, Kentucky-bred Miss Medaglia, was sired by Kentucky-bred Medaglia d’Oro, a multiple graded stakes winner who retired after 17 starts with a record of 8-7-0 and more than $5.75 million in purse earnings. He won his two G2 races as a 3 year old and followed his second with a G1 win at the Travers Stakes. Of his eight wins, three were G1s and four were G2s. Of his place finishes, Medaglia d’Oro finished second in the Dubai World Cup and the Breeder’s Classic (two years in a row).
