Tom I’ve just been reading your blog and wanted to thank you for writing it. You publish the facts that are so lacking in many areas of horse breeding. I’ve wanted to know for years how many offspring each stallion has produced compared with how many outstanding athletes that result. As you say, without the denominator (number of foals produced) the rankings mean nothing. Although the stallion I chose for dressage (Silvermoon) was based on much looser calculations than yours the thinking behind it was the same: a stallion who has covered very few mares and produced two international grand prix horses from small crops of foals. Both his successful offspring were from very different bloodlines indicating that he may mix well with a variety of mares. And he’s a line bred Trakehner so he should have quite tight genetics meaning, hopefully, that the chances of him passing on the qualities that Matine and Succes have used to get to GP should be passed on to a reasonable % of his offspring. As I said, nowhere near as scientific as your approach but the best I could manage with the data I could find. 
stolensilver and YankeeLawyer: Thank you!
[QUOTE=Rival;4262214]
What is your definition of an Ami ride? To me when people ask that question what they are really asking is, is it pretty but not particularily athletic.[/QUOTE]
I always considered a good ami ride a horse that was forgiving under saddle and pleasant on the ground.
[QUOTE=paulamc;4262263]
Has any one heard/read the statistic that only 6% of horses specifically bred for dressage, are actually capable of the grand prix movements such as piaffe, passage, canter pirouettes and 15 tempi changes in a row?
This 6% also provides for the horses all being in the hands of riders that are capable of riding grand prix
I have read this statistic a few times, just wondering what others think of this
Paulamc[/QUOTE]
it is my old dilemma-why top quality is so rare even with top breedings and even if gaits looks top and horse is under top fei rider-it is still small chance for big GP.thst is why stables ilke Isabell werth have 50,60 horses(top qquality youngsters that are regularliy selected due to gp movements quality-i guess) other stables that dont have that amount of talented youngsters to choose after some period of training-they are buing older horses that are expensive but already started advanced movement so easier to predict that they will do gp.But even as a breeder you can be suprised how rare is the quality when regularly checking all auctions videos from hann,old,westf,etc
