Connors’ dozen

WALTER CONNORS could have spent the Cheltenham Festival in the Prestbury Park parade ring reminding connections of all the good horses he’d bought, raised and sold. After all, enough of them turned up at the four-day jamboree to keep him busy for most of the week. Instead, he followed the action on his phone parked up in a lay-by as he was dealing with his day job.

This unlikely vantage point is because duty comes first when you’re an in-demand veterinarian. And, moreover, it simply isn’t in his nature to go seeking the spotlight.

But even if Connors is unflappably modest about an impressive body of work in the NH world, those in the know hold him in the highest esteem. It is not for nothing that he is renowned as one of the sharpest pinhookers, most skilled producers and finest judges around.

This was in evidence once again during the festival when Envoi Allen, whom Connors bought as a foal in France, roared back to form in a pulsating Ryanair Chase. That was the son of Muhtathir’s third

Cheltenham triumph and eighth Grade 1 in total. In turn Envoi Allen is among 12 top-flight winners that Connors has unearthed.

That dashing dozen includes past Festival heroes like Don Cossack and Espoir D’Allen, as well as the likes of Bacardys and Mighty Potter, who surely has bigger days ahead after finishing third in the Turners Novices’ Chase.

As these names highlight, Connors takes a fluid approach to pinhooking. Although he sources the majority of his stock as foals in France, some race there before being traded (Espoir D’Allen), some head down the store sale route (Mighty Potter) and others are put into training on the track or between the flags (Don Cossack and Envoi Allen).

The process has been honed over the years and his Sluggara Farm system now runs like a well-oiled machine, but Connors still came at it from something of a standing start.

He was born into what he describes as a “rural family” in Dungarvan, County Waterford, and is the son of Nicky Connors, breeder of the Cheltenham Gold Cup hero Cool Ground.

“We’re rural people and my dad’s a vet so he had a few broodmares and pedigree Hereford cattle, so my introduction was through pedigree animals,” he says. “Whether it was the cattle or the horses, there was always more to them than them just being a beast out in the field. That fuelled my enthusiasm for pedigrees from flag fall.”

“From a very early age I saw the variance in breeding and that you have to take what you get,” he says. “Plus, when I was starting out, NH fillies had a very poor monetary value because there were no mares’ races, so I was looking at these filly foals and I was questioning the wisdom of breeding them at all. I thought we’d buy a few colt foals instead of having an extra two broodmares and that’s where we started. As time went on our pinhooking got bigger and our breeding shrank to being only a small number of mares.”

He began his pinhooking career at Fairyhouse and remembers a fairly typical introduction to buying bloodstock, saying wryly: “The first five foals we bought cost 21,000 punts for the five. That year we had 20,000 to spend so, like anyone in horses, if you had 20,000 to spend we spent 21,000.”

His veterinary work helped him form an association with Seamus Murphy, who Connors says is due plenty of credit for the development of the French enterprise, and it was in 2001 that the pair first journeyed to Deauville.

“Seamus was training a couple of horses at the time and when I went to see them he told me he was going to France because he thought their sales had something to offer,” he says. “The first few years we went to France we just had a map, there was no sat nav – it was a navigation just to get out of the car park!”

British and Irish pinhookers plundering France is now common practice, but few were heading as far afield at the time.

Connors says the only Irish voices he heard at his first sale in Deauville belonged to Arthur Moore and Jeremy Maxwell. While some would credit Connors with setting the trend, he says he and Murphy set out entirely in innocence rather than expecting to effect a market shift.

“I don’t know whether we thought we were breaking new ground but I was only recently qualified and there was a bit of excitement about it in a naive sense,” he says. “We didn’t really know what we were going for, we just thought that it was somewhere else to go.

He adds: “We couldn’t afford the horses by proven stallions in the beginning so we started, like a lot of the Flat pinhookers do, with the first-season sires.

“We felt our way and got lucky with some of those stallions; from the first of the Sholokhovs we had Don Cossack. The converse side is the ones who didn’t make it. We just had to trade out and move on.”

It wasn’t long until Connors had uncovered some significant talents. His early forays into France yielded Kazal, who won four Grade 2s for Eoin Griffin and also finished third in a World Hurdle won by Inglis Drever, and David Johnson’s highclass chaser Vodka Bleu. Crucially, for an outfit looking to balance the books, these horses, despite their inherent quality, were not costing the earth –especially compared to the prices back home.

“The first yearling I bought in Deauville was Vodka Bleu,” says Connors. “He was 11,500 punts and he was the third- or fourth-highest priced yearling in the sale. That’ll tell you how much has changed because the third- or fourth-highest priced yearling last year was €120,000.

“When they came in the top 25 per cent of foals got very expensive, and we were never going to be able to own them going up against the end users.

“That kept pushing us back to France, as well as us wanting to go. We were trying to elevate our stock and there was a big financial jump to get to that next level, so we felt maybe we had more of a chance in France.”

Connors’ French expeditions quickly developed from sales ring raids on Deauville to purchasing

stock privately out of farmers’ fields. He says this exercise, at least in the early days, simply involved venturing into the paddocks with the breeder and trusting your eye.

“Seamus is friendly with Nicolas de Lageneste and it was through him that we got our introduction to the farms,” he says. “And it was organic at the time as a lot of it was word of mouth. If you went to one farm then they’d tell you about the farm next door. One farm became four the next year, then those four brought on another ten. It was word of mouth from neighbour to neighbour.

“We’re a bit more knowledgeable now but in the beginning you’d go out in the field, see the foals and ask about whichever one we might like physically. We’d just see whatever they had and we’d make a makeshift pedigree and we often bought horses that we only knew sire, damsire and if there might be a good horse in the family.

The million dollar question is: what does Connors look for when he ventures out into a breeder’s field or when he’s scanning the pedigree of a potential pinhook?

“Nowadays everything is at your fingertips and we have more pedigree research done but we didn’t at the time.”

Those hoping for a silver bullet are out of luck, although he concedes his veterinary background has given him something of an advantage, at least as far as purchasing horses for point-to-pointing is concerned.

“We’re no different to anybody else because everyone wants the tall, well-grown foal that’s got a bit of movement about him,” he says. “Maybe because we were often buying with a view towards racing before we developed our sales side of it we weren’t as concerned whether an animal slightly toed in or slightly toed out.

“When we were buying we were buying for ourselves, so we weren’t under the pressure that the agents are under to have the perfect specimen.”

On the pedigree front, he adds: “We like to buy them out of mares or from families where, even if there weren’t champions, there were lots of horses who won lots of races – even if they were little races. That’s giving you your limb soundness and your wind soundness, and if you get the cross that works and the horse that has a bit of class, that’s the one for us that upgrades the pedigree.

“I much prefer that pedigree to a pedigree with one champion and very little else, because that probably means the rest were either no good or unsound – and one is as bad as the other.”

Of course, buying them is only one part of the puzzle, and plenty can change during the rearing process, particularly given the length of time the youngstock spend at Sluggara Farm before heading to the sales or into training. While he is aided by Murphy in finding the right foals, raising them is more of a one-man – or one-woman – show.

“I hand that over to my wife, Una, and she does the rearing of them.” Connors says. “She runs the yard and the farm and I’m only there on a Sunday. She says I have to look at them on Sunday so that I remember how many I’ve actually bought! Myself and Seamus have been guilty of buying one or two more than planned.”

Having had so many major talents through his hands, from Kazal all the way through to Mighty Potter, Connors is perfectly placed to opine on what common attributes the good horses have.

Taking the Grade 1 winners he has been involved with as test cases, he says: “They were all very different physically and they all had different pedigrees. The thing they had in common was that they never needed a vet and very seldom needed a farrier.

“They seemed to have that constitution that they were always capable of doing what was asked of them, both mentally and physically. They were the ones it was easy to keep condition on, they always ate when they should and were able to take the training – they’ve got to have the appetite for training physically and mentally.”

GIVEN HIS FLAIR for finding elite equine athletes, there is a temptation to wonder why Connors has never turned his hand to the potentially more lucrative pursuit of pinhooking Flat foals.

When this is put to him, his reply is self deprecating but unequivocal.

“I don’t know many of my limitations but I know some of them!” he says. “Our whole focus would have to change as those animals can’t afford any sort of a store period because they need to be on the go.

“We wouldn’t know what to do with them if they didn’t make a Flat yearling sale. We have the farm stocked with NH horses so we’d have to change the whole thing, and I’d say I wouldn’t be a very good judge of a Flat foal anyway.”

And perhaps there’s simply no need for Connors to diversify as NH sales are enjoying something of a boom period. He has been on the right side of this trend when horses like Envoi Allen sold to Tom Malone for £400,000, while more recently his highly touted Oldtown runner-up Jersey Des Brosses fetched £370,000 from Gordon Elliott.

However, these prices have had a trickle down effect, which in turn has made youngstock more expensive at source.

“There’s been a huge change and we’re lucky

we’re not starting out now,” he says on the NH economy. “Thankfully we were already on the ladder as the rising tide started to lift all the boats. Prices have increased privately, too. But then the good horses tend to be bred by good breeders, not by chance. And they’re good breeders because they know and understand their horses. They’re not fools, so if you think they’ve got a good foal, they’ll think they’ve got a good foal too.”

While landing a touch will always be welcomed in the pinhooking game, the financial side doesn’t figure when Connors speaks about what drives him to keep investing time, effort and money into producing young jumpers.

It’s the same reason he didn’t feel the need to be in the Cheltenham parade ring reminding everyone of his involvement, the same reason he spends his Sundays point-to-pointing and the same reason he continues to search far and wide for the next potential star, even though his day job provides him with ample financial security: it’s not about him, it’s about the horse.

“Where we get the most enjoyment is seeing a horse that we liked as a foal going on,” he says. “When he gets on the first steps of that ladder, there’s a certain nervousness because you don’t know where it ends. We feel that pleasure, not for ourselves from a pride point of view, but because we’re attached to the horse himself. I get more pleasure from somebody saying something good about a horse than we feel we had a champion.”

If previous form is any guide, people will have something good to say about Connors' horses for a long while yet.

The latest Grade 1 Cheltenham Festival win achieved by a Connors’ graduate was this year’s the Grade 1 Ryanair Chase victory for Envoi Allen – the son of Muhtathir has won three times at the big March meeting. After the horse won his point-to-point for Colin Bowe, Envoi Allen was sold by Connors for £400,000 at the 2018 Tattersalls Cheltenham February Sale

ALTHOUGH PINHOOKING has almost always taken precedence over breeding, Connors’ five-strong broodmare band now features a genuine NH blue hen. Matnie, a 16-year-old daughter of Laveron, has bred five winners, three of whom have won at Graded level.

Her most high-profile offspring is Mighty Potter, a four-time Grade 1 scorer sourced by Connors and Seamus Murphy as a foal, who was sadly suffered a fatal fall at the Fairyhouse Easter meeting.

He is joined by Robcour’s Grade 3-winning novice chasers French Dynamite and Indiana Jones.

“We bought the foals out of Matnie in the beginning because one of the farms we went to every year was Remi Cottin’s,” he says. “He was downsizing and Seamus said to me that he was selling his mares. The French breeders who were going to buy two of his in particular wouldn’t sell the foals so they wouldn’t be available to us. I bought the two mares and Matnie was one of them.”

Connors bought Matnie back in August 2021, at which point French Dynamite had shown himself to be above average but Mighty Potter was merely a Punchestown bumper winner and Indiana Jones had only a Cork maiden hurdle victory to his name. What has followed has been a pleasant surprise.

“At the time Mighty Potter had won his first bumper but that was all,” says Connors. “The rest just snowballed. We’re lucky to have her now and we didn’t realise she was going to be what she is when we bought her.

“We had a hunch that we liked Mighty Potter and I thought she’d do well just to be a commercial mare. I’d have never gone looking to buy her, only that it coincided with her coming on the market.”

There could be more to come, too, as the mare’s fourth foal, Sluggara Farm graduate Caldwell Potter, won a Punchestown bumper and has his hurdling career ahead of him, while her fifth offspring, Gigginstown House Stud’s Brighterdaysahead, looked an exciting prospect when topping the Derby Sale for Lakefield Farm at €310,000.

That daughter of Kapgarde made an impressive winning debut in a Gowran bumper in February. The dam also has a two-year-old and a yearling, both colts, by Doctor Dino on the ground.

Circumstances dictated that Matnie remain in France after her purchase but she is reportedly in fine fettle, is carrying her next foal and is set for a mating with one of the best sires later this year.

“She was in foal when I bought her so I left her there to foal and thought we’d bring her home then,” says Connors. “After she foaled she got a touch of colic so she went to the clinic and they said there was a possibility that she might have a recurrence, so on account of that I’m afraid to put her on the boat.

“We can bring her back if she’s barren and we’ll certainly bring her back when she’s retired but for the meantime she’s treated like a princess where she is so it’s not a problem.

“She’s due in April to No Risk At All and we’re pencilled in for Saint Des Saint, so presuming he’s hale and hearty we’ll go there later this year.”