Speciosa - Background

Background

Speciosa, a bay horse with a white blaze and two white socks, was bred in Ireland by K Cullen. She was large, heavily built mare, standing 16.2 hands high as a three-year-old. Her dam, Specifically, a daughter of the Canadian champion Sky Classic won one minor race and has produced several other winners including Major Rhythm, a gelding who won the Stars and Stripes Handicap in 2006. Specifically was closely related to Touching Wood, a colt finished second in the Epsom Derby and won the St Leger in 1982. Speciosa was sired by Danehill Dancer, a stallion whose progeny have won (as of 2012), have won more than 700 races and more than £13m in prize money.

In April 2005 the two-year-old Speciosa was offered for sale at Doncaster where she was bought for 30,000 guineas by Pam Sly. At the time, Sly trained fewer than twenty horses at her farm at Thorney, near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. She was mainly known for training jumpers and until Speciosa arrived, she had never had a runner in a Group race. Pam Sly owned the filly in partnership with her son Michael and the London-based G. P. Tom Davies. Shortly after buying Speciosa, Sly engaged the Limerick-born jockey Michael "Micky" Fenton to ride her in a training gallop. According to Fenton, who has been described as a "journeyman jockey", the filly "flew down the gallops" and he became her regular partner, riding her in fourteen of her seventeen races. Speciosa was a highly nervous and temperamental filly: in her early career she was treated with magnesium in an attempt to calm her temperament.