1999 Eclipse Award Champion Older Female
Sire: Maudlin
Grandsire: Foolish Pleasure
Dam: Beautiful Bird
Damsire: Baldski
Sex: Mare
Foaled: 1995
Country: Kentucky, United States
Colour: Dark bay or brown
Breeder: Farnsworth Farm
Owner: John C. Oxley
Trainer: John T. Ward, Jr.
Jockey: Jorge F. Chavez
Record: 25 Starts: 10 - 5 - 2
Earnings: $2,734,078
Major races: 2000 Personal Ensign Handicap, 2000 Hempstead Handicap, 1999, Breeders Cup Distaff, 1999 Personal Ensign Handicap, 1999 Beldame Stakes, 1997 Matron Stakes
Awards: Champion Older Female Horse (1999)
Post-racing career: Became a broodmare and has produced several offspring, including the stakes winners Take Charge Lady and Wilburn.
In a season packed with brilliant fillies and mares, somebody still has to be the best — and in 1999 that horse was Beautiful Pleasure. A bay mare foaled in 1995, she was bred by John A. Bell III in Kentucky and campaigned by John C. Oxley for trainer John Ward Jr., who would go on to win the Kentucky Derby a year later with Monarchos. Her pedigree leaned more workmanlike than fashionable: by Maudlin, a multiple Grade 3-winning sprinter and a son of Foolish Pleasure, out of the Baldski mare Beautiful Bid, with five-time American champion sire Nasrullah doubled 5×5 in her page. She was, in other words, the sort of mare who proves that great racing horses are not always great-looking pages.
Her four-year-old campaign in 1999 was where she rewrote her story. She raced in some of the deepest older-mare fields of the era — Banshee Breeze, Keeper Hill, Silverbulletday — and beat them. At Saratoga she took the Personal Ensign Handicap (G1) over Banshee Breeze and Keeper Hill; at Belmont Park she added the Beldame Stakes (G1) over Silverbulletday, the reigning two-year-old filly champion who had moved into older company. With those scores she went into the Breeders' Cup Distaff at Gulfstream Park as a co-favorite, and there she finished what she had started, edging Banshee Breeze in a stretch duel to claim the most important race of her division. She was voted the 1999 American Champion Older Female Horse, the unambiguous queen of her year.
She tried to defend her standing as a five-year-old in 2000 with mixed success and retired soon afterward to a quiet life as a broodmare. None of her foals matched what she had done on the track, but the racing record itself stood on its own — three Grade 1 wins in a single season against the toughest mare division of its decade, and a Breeders' Cup performance that turned a name better suited to a stable hand's poetry into the answer to a championship trivia question. Beautiful Pleasure died in 2008, but her 1999 season — and that head-to-head with Banshee Breeze in the South Florida twilight — remains an enduring picture of what a good mare looks like when everything comes together at once.
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