Aalborg trainer Tina Mortensen enters 2025 with one of the most interesting new acquisitions on the Scandinavian racing scene. The Danish company Lokalebasen.dk A/S has just imported the Listed-placed Siyouni daughter Blueridge Silver from Germany’s champion trainer Henk Grewe in Cologne.
“Blueridge Silver has been traded privately with assistance from Thore and Lennart Hammer-Hansen”, says Tina Mortensen and continues:
“Thore has ridden her in every single start this year, and both he and Lennart judge that she is good enough to win Listed races in Scandinavia next year. She is a beautiful and really exciting mare, and I am very proud to have been given the responsibility of training her for Maria and Jakob Dalhoff”.
Blueridge Silver has run eight times in her now completed 5-year-old season in the blue and red colours of Thore Hammer-Hansen’s employer Eckhard Sauren.
In June she finished strongest of all to take second place in the Listed contest Silberne Peitsche over 1200 metres at Hoppegarten, and in her next two starts she was third over 1200 and 1400 metres respectively in Listed assignments in Dortmund and Munich.
“In her latest start, on 13 October in Cologne, Thore rode her straight into the lead from the start, and in the home straight she galloped away from her rivals with ease and won by eight lengths”, Tina adds.
The race can be seen in the video below, with a subsequent winning interview with Thore Hammer-Hansen:
Blueridge Silver will in all likelihood come to Denmark with a converted handicap mark of 87, which places her high on the list of the Scandinavian elite mares for next year.
“And hopefully she can show a little more on the Scandinavian tracks than in the German competition, where she has several times met international rivals from the likes of Godolphin”, says Dane Jakob Dalhoff, who has come into racing over the past decade and bought his first horse, the Sceptre Stakes winner Margrethe (Juniper Tree) in 2017.
Since then Dalhoff has had shares in numerous racehorses, which have run both in his own colours and in joint ones. The best so far has been the Derby, Guineas and Breeders’ winner Slava Ukraini (Moohaajim).
Today Dalhoff has Margrethe stabled as a broodmare at York Stutteri, and earlier this year she foaled her first foal – a filly by Oasis Dream (Green Desert), who has been given the name Ice And Fire.
“We love watching our horses run and following them in training, but we have also developed an appetite for breeding ourselves, and we are going to keep Ice And Fire“, says Jakob and continues:
“The intention with Blueridge Silver is likewise that once her racing career is over we have a really exciting broodmare, whom we can send to a good stallion and breed on from ourselves”.
“Hopefully she has a couple more seasons in her legs, in which we will aim specifically at the Scandinavian Listed contests around a mile”.
It is not only in terms of merit that Blueridge Silver has an international character.
She is a daughter of the Group 1-winning breeding matador Siyouni (Pivotal), who in 2025 stands at a covering fee of €200,000 at HH the Aga Khan’s Haras de Bonneval in France, and who so far is the sire of 10 individual Group 1 winners – among them names such as St Mark’s Basilica, Tahiyra, Paddington, Mqse de Sevigne, Laurens and Sottsass.
Siyouni is also, among other things, the maternal grandsire of one of the best Danish-bred horses of the new millennium, the Søren Jensen-trained Good Fortune (Appel Au Maitre).
Blueridge Silver’s dam, the Giant’s Causeway daughter Blueridge Mountain is a Group 1 winner in South Africa, where she won the Majorca Stakes (Gr.1), Sceptre Stakes (Gr.2) and Sweet Chestnut Stakes (L), and was also second in the 2000 Guineas (Gr.1).
The maternal line also features Group 1-winning stallions such as Desert Wine, Menifee, Fasliyev and U S Navy Flag, and the Group 1-winning broodmares Misty For Me, Ballydoyle, Les Arcs and Roly Poly.
And if the name Blueridge Mountain rings a bell with anyone, it is probably because Blueridge Silver’s dam was bought last year at Arqana through Morten Buskop Bloodstock by Stutteri Hjortebo, where she is stabled and this spring foaled a filly by the Breeders’-entered Alson (Areion).
There will therefore be hopes from several sides that in 2025 Tina Mortensen gets the Siyouni mare saddled up for the promised Listed victory that just eluded her in Germany.
Blueridge Silver’s run through to second place in this year’s Silberne Peitsche (L) under Thore Hammer-Hansen can be seen below:
