Page 38 - January 2021

J
ET DECK
and His Pedigree Backstory
by Larry Thornton
When January rolls around, we find the industry is gearing up for the foaling season and a new breeding season. Getting ready for the new breeding season allows us to focus on the stallions we will be breeding to for the foals that will come into our life in 2022. The mare owner will survey prospective
sires by looking at their race record, their conformation and their pedigree in hopes of finding a horse that will nick with their mare to produce a successful runner.
We look into the pedigree to see the type of genetic material a stallion will bring to the mare that will contribute to that successful runner. That pedigree will give us a clue as
to where that speed and conformation came from. We see horses in the pedigree that seem to show up a lot, serving as a “hallmark” or one of those individuals that has contributed to the success of our modern racehorse and seems to be almost everywhere in those pedigrees. Jet Deck is one of those “hallmark” individuals that has supplied his genetic material to the breed.
The life of Jet Deck will take us from
an incident that, had it gone differently, we would not have had him, and then we will see him go on to the height of Quarter Horse racing as a World Champion. Then, as he was well on his way as a sire, his life comes
to an abrupt end. He was in the prime of his life as a sire and we will see that, despite his short life, he made the most of it to become a “hallmark” in our pedigrees.
Jet Deck was born in 1960 and was bred by Michael Carter, the son of James V. A. Carter. The elder Carter started out as an Oregon rancher who developed an interest
in Quarter Horse racing. That interest went back as far as the 1930’s. The Carters began improving their horses and they learned about H. Bissel’s Corralitos Ranch in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The Corralitos Ranch was home to two stallions, a Quarter Horse named Midnight Jr and a Thoroughbred named Nassak. Carter wanted to introduce the blood of these two horses into his breeding program. Bissel had bought Midnight Jr from Walter
36 SPEEDHORSE January 2021