2024 – Thoroughbred Female Horse
When it comes to rating the great claims in Canadian racing history, the $16,000 investment by Kevin Attard and his father, Tino, for Starship Jubilee rates as one of the best. The Attards were simply looking for a useful runner for Kevin and friend Soli Mehta to race at Woodbine while at Gulfstream Park in Florida in the winter of 2017. They came away with a diminutive Florida-bred filly with modest breeding but a great, big heart. They ended up with a Canadian Horse of the Year and multiple champion turf mare. By the time she retired, she had over $2 million in earnings.
Starship Jubilee became the people’s horse as she marched through graded stakes wins, including two Grade 1’s, from 2017 to 2020. Every time she won another big race, social media would light up with praise from horse people and media throughout the U.S.
A true Cinderella story, the tale of Starship Jubilee began when she was sold as a yearling in Florida for $6,500 to Laurence Leavy’s Starship Stable. She won three times for Leavy before the Attards claimed her early in February, 2017. That day, the daughter of Indy Wind stumbled very badly at the start and was hit in the face with a rival jockey’s whip; it was a miracle she wasn’t hurt.
Subsequently, she powered through five consecutive wins, moving up the class ladder to take the Grade 2 Nassau and Dance Smartly Stakes (in a dead heat). In 2018, she won the Sunshine Millions Filly and Mare Turf and the Grade 2 Canadian Stakes, doubled up in those stakes a year later and then took down the prestigious E.P. Taylor Stakes, a Grade 1. That fall, Attard and Mehta offered their prized mare at the Keeneland November sale, bought her back for $425,000 but then sold her privately to Kentucky-based Blue Heaven Farm of Adam Corndorf and Bonnie Baskin.
Kevin stayed on as her trainer and the best was yet to come. At the age of seven, Starship Jubilee was virtually unbeatable reeling off wins in another edition of the Sunshine Millions plus the Grade 3 Swannee River and Grade 2 Hillsborough. At Saratoga in July, she won the Ballston Spa and returned to Woodbine for the biggest test of her life, the Grade 1 Woodbine Mile. At odds of nearly 6 to 1, Starship Jubilee and jockey Justin Stein upset the likes of Preakness Stakes winning colt War of Will and others in the $1 million Mile.
She was retired to Blue Heaven after she had bad luck when losing her rider in her last race, the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf. Now enjoying her second career as a broodmare, Starship Jubilee has a 2-year-old colt by Medaglia d’Oro and a yearling filly by Quality Road. She produced her third foal for Blue Heaven this spring, a filly by great Flightline. If her offspring are anything like her, they should be fun to watch.