On the very same day that Ka Ying Star (Cityscape) took his form to a new high in the G1 Queen’s Silver Jubilee Cup at Sha Tin, his dam foaled his full-brother at New England Stud, Newmarket.
Ka Ying Star’s second place in the seven-furlong race behind the world’s highest-rated miler, Beauty Generation, took his earnings to £1.25m. Beaten half a length at level weights, with four time G1 winner Beat The Clock among those behind, the performance has raised the first-crop son of Cityscape to a career high rating of 121. That puts him among the top ten horses in Hong Kong and makes him the best British-bred in the territory.
His dam is Emma Balding’s Sinndar mare Casual Glance, a half-sister to the G2 Oettingen-Rennen and G3 Diomed winner Passing Glance. Another of her half-brothers is the high-class son of Cityscape’s sire Selkirk, Hidden Meadow, who won the European Free Handicap and the G3 Prix du Palais Royal back in the 1990s.
Ka Ying Star began his career, like them, at Kingsclere. Trained by Andrew Balding and running as Urban Aspect, he won all his races after his debut and was sold to Hong Kong after beating older horses in a York handicap. He has been running over as far as 2000m in Hong Kong, competing in the Classic series and the Hong Kong Derby last year, but has raised his form to a new high dropped to 1400m.
Cityscape enjoyed tremendous success with his first-crop, who are now five-year-olds, also producing the G3 Fred Darling heroine Dan’s Dream and the G3 Musidora winner Give And Take. He has 5% Group winners to runners from that crop – the same as Kingman achieved with his first-crop runners and behind only Camelot and No Nay Never of all stallions with first three-year-olds in 2018 or 2019. Quite something considering his best offspring, Ka Ying Star (who has yet to win at Group level, despite his high level of form) does not appear in the statistics. After that start, the Overbury Stud stallion covered his best book of mares in 2019 and is still standing at £5,000 Oct 1, SLF – the fee he retired to stud at – in 2020.
Emma Berry’s photo shows Casual Glance held by Peter Stanley with her new Cityscape colt at New England Stud. He was foaled on 16th February.