Sally Ann Grassick chats with... Cathal Beale, CEO of the Irish National Stud, about sales, stallions, mare syndicates and selling Invincible Spirit foals for €330,000

SAG: The Irish National Stud had some good yearling results at the Orby Sale, and overall things were good for the yearling draft?

CB: Yes, it was a good week, the same as everyone else – highs and the lows! Our Aimhirgin Lass colt by Invincible Spirit made €460,000 and went to Godolphin so we are delighted with that. He comes from a really nice family of our own and is a first foal out of the mare so it is great he’ll get a chance now with Mr Gosden or Mr Appleby; he’ll get off to a great start there. We also had a really nice Free Eagle colt who made €90,000 for a client. We had a home-bred Harzand, who was a lovely colt and who made €95,000. It was a very good start to the week, but it did get progressively more challenging as we went on! But we were happy to be able to say that we sold everything. We wish everyone well with their yearling purchases and hope they win plenty of stakes races next year!

SAG: How did you find the Orby Sale when you were talking to clients around the sales complex? I think everyone felt that all the buyers were there – Goffs and ITB had done a great job getting everyone here.

CB: Look, it is a challenging time at the moment in the wider world outside of our control, and I think that has to have a knock-on effect with the uncertainty that is going on geo-politically, so that is nobody’s fault. I think we proved that if you take a really nice horse to the Orby, it will sell well. We probably didn’t have enough really nice horses who ticked all the boxes and we were under no illusions with that.

SAG: Do you think buyers are being more choosy – they want the horse to have the page, the looks, they want everything there, they are not just buying a horse to fill orders?

CB: Everybody wants the best horse in the sale – it’s always been the same as that, there has always been a degree of polarisation, but I think it is getting more and more defined. The top 25 per cent seems to be selling even better than they ever have, while the bottom 75 per cent seems to be struggling more than they ever have. The Foran Equine and Irish EBF race series in Ireland, for any horse purchased as a yearling or two-year-old at auction for €72,000 or less, has been a huge success. There is the new Irish EBF median sires series which will have three levels of races, the majority of which will be for two-year-olds by a sire with an established median auction price of €60,000 or less, and the rest will be divided between a median price of €75,000 or less and €30,000 or less. There will be over 50 races and they will be worth a lot of money. It means people can come and race with horses who have not made so much at the sales.

SAG: Would you be worried with the way the middle and the lower end of the market is going?

CB: Every piece of the industry is part of a circle and has a knock-on effect. So if the pin-hookers have not had a good yearling season then that will affect the foal sales; if the breeze-up guys are struggling that will have a knock-on effect on the following year’s sales. The whole thing works in a cycle and, if breeders are struggling to make ends meet, then they will be struggling to pay to nomination fees in a year’s time when we are asking them to support our stallions.

So in 2019 we were very conscious of that and we kept our fees at reasonable rates. We were rewarded as most of the stallions were full and covered nice books of mares. When we set the fees for 2020 we were certainly aware that we needed to do the same again, that the fees have to be reasonable to try allow breeders to make a profit. Ultimately that is what the INS is all about – to try and help breeders do that.

We are very conscious that it is not easy for breeders to make money and there has to be enough room in the stallion fees for a margin. We would like to think that we have left that for them, that if they send a nice mare to our stallions and get a nice foal then there is a nice profit for them.

SAG: Free Eagle is enjoying a great start and his progeny are showing lots of promise

CB: We are delighted with him. I said at the beginning of the year that if he could get to ten winners, and two or three really nice horses we’d be delighted going into 2020, and he has pretty much achieved that. The great thing about Free Eagle is that his two-year-olds are winning a second time and are going to be even better as three-year-olds. I think that is critical for a stallion to come back with his three-year-olds and really put it up to the good horses.

Trainer Andrew Balding has Khalifa Sat – he won his maiden at Goodwood in good style and was put away after that. He is a lovely horse and he has an entry in the Derby – we are happy with that! The Ger Lyons-trained Justifier has won his Listed race already, Auxilia, also with Ger, is high-class and won her maiden by 5l at Naas; we are excited about her.

There are a lot of nice two-year old winners who were nice as juveniles, but are going to progress really well as three-yearolds – that’s the exciting thing about him. Of course, a good winners-to-runners ratio is important, but you want the two-yearolds to train on and for trainers to like them. The yearling sales have shown that trainers are coming back and buying them again – Ger bought one at Fairyhouse, Andrew Balding bought one at the Orby Sale.

Those trainers who have had a Free Eagle are coming back to buy another Free Eagle – that is important.

SAG: Now the next generation is coming through – you’ve foals coming through for Decorated Knight and National Defense They are two really exciting stallions –different types. Decorated Knight is obviously a Galileo and is the most spectacularly bred horse we have ever stood at the INS – he is by the best stallion in the world in Galileo out of a Storm Cat mare from the family of Gleneagles, Giant’s Causeway and so many more Group 1 winners.

He had a great start with his first sale horses at Goffs, including a foal belonging to his owner Imad Al Sagar who fetched €50,000; he has also been remarkably supportive of his stallion.

This horse is his stallion, he is the pinnacle of 25 years in the bloodstock industry, and he really wants to make this horse the real deal. We are delighted with how the foals have sold – one made €50,000, one €30,000 and his average was€36,800 for the week. They’ve just been really good foals made in his image, selling really well, and that’s what everybody wants. We want people to be able to make a profit with their foals and most people who supported him have at least covered their costs or made money.

National Defense is the only champion two-year-old available in Ireland and England, and he is by our own Invincible Spirit. He has just been an unbelievable supplier of stallions with Kingman, I Am Invincible, Charm Spirit and Cable Bay, who has had an exceptional start.

Invincible Spirit is an incredible sire of sires and this is the next one available to breeders. The National Defense foals are very much in his likeness; they are really good wellbalanced horses, they’re straight-forward and they are selling well with good people buying them.

Sun Bloodstock, as owners, came back and supported him. They purchased a few and were underbidders on another.

When somebody sends a good mare and produces a good foal, if everything checks out, they’re willing to put their hand in their pocket and support their star stallion. It was a positive few days at Goffs for both our new stallions; we are really happy with how the first foals by both of them have sold so far.

SAG: You have Phoenix Of Spain to look forward to and the Irish National Stud’s involvement could not have got off to a better start with his 2,000 Guineas win.

CB: It was a fabulous day at The Curragh and beyond our wildest expectations. We knew he was a good horse and we thought he would be better at three, he had done enough done as a two-year-old to suggest that.

He is from a wonderful family and his half-brother made €400,000 at the Orby Sale – it is a pedigree that is getting better and better. He is by a wonderful stallion who keeps going from strength to strength, while the Shamardal sire line in general is one that is remarkably strong at the moment.

The sire line ticked the box, the mare ticked the box, physically he ticked the box, he is a beautiful mover, he is from a very nice farm and was purchased by very good pin-hookers. He has been in very good hands all the way through, that’s a help, raised by good people and trained by a proper trainer in Charlie Hills – he has had good people all the way through his life which is very important.

He is an exciting horse for us; he is a Classic winner and if you look at the list of Classic winners from this year there are not many outside of Coolmore or Darley going to stud.

SAG: It was a gamble to buy him – you say he is a Classic winner, but he wasn’t when you made the offer to stand him at the Irish National. Was it tough to pick a horse and put forward a horse who had not yet won a Group 1? I prefer to use the term “calculated risk”!

CB: Of course, it was a gamble, but as a two-year-old he had won the Acomb Stakes so he was a Group 3 winner. He was beaten a short head in a Group 1 by what we thought was a really good horse who subsequently proved he was a really good horse in Magnia Grecia, who went onto win the 2,000 Guineas.

It was very much a calculated risk because so many of the other aspects stacked up – the pedigree, the sire line, the dam line, the physical – they were all absolutely certain, he just needed a little bit more race record to become the real deal. Thankfully, he managed to square that circle in the Irish 2,000 Guineas. You are trying to find a horse who ticks as many of the boxes as you possibly can based on your budget; just like us all when we are buying a foal or a yearling or a broodmare prospect.

There is a great saying in Kentucky – people say they have champagne taste but a beer budget! I think we are all a little bit like that as we all want to find the best we can for the money we can afford – thankfully with Phoenix it has worked out well.

SAG: Tell us a little about the Irish National Stud’s Mares Syndicate – you got a great result at the Goffs Foal Sale?

CB: It was an initiative we started a couple of years back. The idea is to get people to get into a portfolio of six mares and send the mares to some really nice stallions, hopefully produce nice foals and, then, hopefully, a profit . The existing Mares Syndicate is now in its second year and it was €16,000 for a share. It allows investors to move portfolios of risk across multiple mares and to follow their progeny. It is an attractive opportunity for people, who may not have their own farms, to get involved at a relatively inexpensive level. We have been selling foals from that syndicate this year and the highlight was the sale of the Invincible Spirit colt foal out of Boldarra to Godolphin for €330,000.

We had a champagne lunch after that! Each syndicate runs for four years, so we are halfway through the cycle. The big idea with this particular syndicate was that the foals would get the opportunity to run while the syndicate was still in existence.

We bred three mares to Invincible Spirit with the hope that those three foals would go out and win a stakes race as a two-year-old and make the mare.

The Irish National Stud draft has always been more predicated towards the yearling sales, but with the Mares Syndicate we can target the foals sales with some really nice commercially bred foals to try and make a mark in that element of the market as well.

SAG: It is a great idea – we’ve syndicates in racing, but as yet there are few on the breeding side of things...

CB: We’ve got a great bunch of people from all over the world involved in the syndicate and that is fundamentally why the Irish National Stud exists – to try and create those opportunities for people to get involved in the bloodstock industry at whatever level they can afford to.

Our role at the Irish National Stud is to try and create as many opportunities as possible for people to get interested in the bloodstock industry at various levels.

That can be a case of just paying the €12.50 entrance fee to come in and have a walk around the stud. The next step up from that is membership of the INS Racing Club at €399 and to enjoy six horses in training. The new Mare Syndicate that we are launching now is priced at €5,000. That involves us buying five mares for a total of around €500,000, so it will be a one per cent share for your €5,000. Then we will sell the entire portfolio of stock at the end of that four-year period.

We are running the syndicates in two-year cycles and we felt that a lot of people who were interested in the first one may not have been able to afford to pay €16,000 for a share. Hence the reason this next one is a little bit less expensive at €5,000.

It’s already starting to sell out actually so clearly it is being well received by people. We will be staying in for at least 50 per cent of the mares ourselves and the members will own up to 50 per cent of them. I think it is very important that the stud is completely and utterly invested in the project.

SAG: You’ve been in the job for a few years now, you’ve added some more stallions to the roster, brought in some new innovations, you obviously settled in well, are you pleased with what you have achieved so far?

CB:That is for other people to say! The most important thing was when I joined the Irish National Stud is that it was coming from a position of strength; the foundation had been laid strongly and had been such for such a long time.

So in that situation it is easy to be innovative, be bold and try a few new things because the foundations are there. We have a brilliant bunch of staff working and they allow me to take a flyer every now and again and try something different. If it works it works and, if it doesn’t, well we have a solid base to get us out of trouble, if and when that happens.

We tried some new things, we have our racing club, which has been really successful. It has 350 members and we want to try and grow it again next year.

Ultimately that is about getting people racing, getting people involved in some nice horses, creating a community of people who can come together and go racing.

We had a day in the summer when we took them to John Oxx’s yard and Dermot Weld’s, we had Jim Kavanagh give us a tour of the racing lodges at The Curragh and then had a tour of RACE on the way home. Everyone was just blown away.

We have a brilliant industry and I suppose getting that message out to the people who are interested in it – say to them ‘come in and have a look and see what we can do’. Those of us involved in racing take what we do with the horses a little for granted, but for those people slightly out of the industry, it is remarkable. It is amazing, faces just light up when they get to talk to John or Dermot or go into RACE to see the trainee jockeys.

We will provide lots of opportunities for people to get out, mingle with each other and see different things that perhaps they couldn’t access by themselves.

It is about that – creating opportunities for days out. We don’t promise that we are going to have six Group 1 winners, but we promise that we are going to have a good time and that we are going racing plenty.