Jack Hobbs.

He was very impressive today Sageform, as John said hes not the most robust and will be given a short holiday before contesting the Prix Neil, but on todays showing he could be anything.

Anyone know just how big Jack Hobbs is? He look a big rangy horse on TV but sometimes that can be deceptive unless you see them close up. Halling as I recall was a medium size chestnut with no white markings but Selkirk was a much bigger horse with a lot of white about him. Kris and Diesis were also chestnuts so where does the dark colour come from?

We will never know their height and weight.  Pity.
We will know his claimed height when he goes to stud.

The stable and owners will know and anyone who went to Epsom or The Curragh will have a good idea.

Sageform, Jack Hobbs's dam Swain's Gold is dark bay.  In simplistic terms, chestnut is recessive to bay so Swain's Gold will have passed on her bay colouring.  If bay is passed on, it must be expressed.  Jack Hobbs will be able to sire chestnut in due course as he could only have received a 'chestnut gene' (again, simplifying the terminology slightly) from Halling, so he is a heterozygous bay - one bay and one chestnut gene.  Homozygous bays - like Sadler's Wells - can only sire bay foals.

Thanks for that.

did sadlers wells not get grey'?  El Prado,

Sadlers wells sired many a grey...Khan Tengri,Diamond Frontier,All My Heart,Dr Faustus,Tiffany Diamond,
Rostropovich,amongst others all being winning greys.

The greying gene is a dominant one and must be received from at least one actually grey parent. It will effectively mask the chestnut and bay genes. Aussie Rules for instance is a true breeding homozygous bay underneath the grey appearance, if the grey gene is not passed on.

Sadler's Wells's grey offspring all got their colour from their dams.  As Proxygene says, you can only get a grey horse if one of the parents is grey, so the greyness of some of SW's offspring has nothing to do with anything he has passed on.  Technically, grey isn't really a colour; it's something that happens to a colour (it's a 'modifier').

It's like a giant game of Top Trumps...grey trumps bay which trumps chestnut...

*At least one of the parents is grey*, to be more precise.