RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

WRITTEN BY JESSICA OWERS

At the 2021 Gold Coast Yearling Sale, one particular result barnstormed Australasian bloodstock, and it wasn’t because it topped the sale or broke financial records.

It was for the simple fact that it reminded breeders of the brilliance of placing the right horse at the right sale, no matter where that horse is coming from.

In the early parts of the 1900s, when it was steamships pushing traffic between Australia and New Zealand, Wanganui studmaster George Currie was something of a pioneer. As early as 1909, he was shipping yearlings to sell in the Sydney marketplace, an expensive exercise that proved useful, though not sensational.

By the 1920s, Currie was less inclined to do it. At his Koatanui Stud, he stood the brilliant stallion Limond, who would be Champion Australian Sire in the 1931/32 season. Limond was a stallion in fetching demand, but his owner wouldn’t send his stock to Australia. The Sydney Sportsman said it was a case of ‘Currie’s patriotism being stronger than his desire to make money’. Wily George Currie died in 1960, the high panjandrum of Koatanui Stud. Since him, the practice of sending yearlings to sell in Australia has become normal and, at times, the results spectacular. Part of this is due to the convenience of today’s air travel, the steamships long gone, but part of it is due to opportunity, something that Waikato breeders The Sunlight Trust know all about.

Last January, Murray and Marg Hardy and Paddy Preston (they three making up The Sunlight Trust), sent a draft of just one to the 2021 Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale. It was a colt by the Frenchbred, Cambridge Stud shuttler and first-season sire Almanzor. It was a neat and correct yearling, with one white sock and a coat the colour of walnut, and he was the third foal from the stakes-placed mare Lazumba.

From early in his life, a buzz hung around the colt because he was so good, and, defying the obvious logic of selling locally, The Sunlight Trust committed its young horse to the Gold Coast. The colt was Lot 470 in the Bhima draft, that outfit spending weeks putting the polish on him, and he realised $800,000, more than double what his breeders had expected in their wildest dreams.

“The three of us were quietly hoping that we would get $500,000 for him, but you’re always realistic as a breeder,” Murray Hardy says. “There’d been one or two Almanzors sell earlier than him at the sale, and the best of them made $380,000, so we were hopeful that he would get to that at least.” Hardy and Preston were at Haunui Stud when their colt was led through the ring. The pair was inspecting yearlings they had set for Karaka, and they made a quick detour into the stud office to watch the stream live from day three on the Gold Coast. “It was an incredible feeling,” Hardy says. “When you pass $500,000, you’re thinking ‘wow’. I think it went in bids of $50,000 from there, and it was unbelievable after that. It was just under double the best result we’d ever achieved with a yearling before.” Ringside, Lot 470 went to Dean Harvey’s Baystone Farm, which bought on behalf of Ultra Thoroughbreds. The result propelled Almanzor into the parking spot of leading freshman sire at the sale by average and, on day three, he sat behind only Not A Single Doubt and I Am Invincible on leading sire overall. It was a magnificent show of faith in the Cambridge Stud stallion, and a magnificent leap of faith by The Sunlight Trust. The breeding interests of The Sunlight Trust are contained in a neat collection of broodmares at Lodge Hill, a thoroughbred nursery along Ngahinapouri Road, Ohaupo, which is south of Hamilton. It’s a pretty district of the Waikato, and a region that lends its name to ‘a place of breeze at night’. A little to the east is Cambridge, and to the northeast is Matamata. It’s proper horse country, land that lends itself to the growing of fine racehorses. The Sunlight Trust has had plenty of success, but they don’t advertise it. They’re quiet achievers in New Zealand breeding, and among thier highlights is breeding Princess Jenni, the High Chaparral mare that won the Australasian Oaks in 2019, plus the brilliant Kiwi filly Veloce Bella, who ripped through six Group wins. “We’ve been breeding as The Sunlight Trust for 10 years,” Hardy says. “We came up with the name ourselves. We liked it because it was part of the universe, and we liked what that suggested. The whole operation is the three of us, and our partnership began back in 2003. Marg and I bred Veloce Bella that year, but Paddy and his late wife Helen, with another couple, raced her. And that’s where it all started.”

The partners want The Sunlight Trust to be synonymous with top-quality horses, and that ambition became more realistic after the sale of its Almanzor colt.

“We’ve produced a Group One winner from our progeny (Princess Jenni), and earlier on we produced Veloce Bella,” Hardy says. “Going forward, it would be wonderful to produce a Group winner every year, but most of all we really want to produce a line of horses that would fit very well among the best, horses like the Almanzor colt.”

The Sunlight Trust want three or four of him in its yearling draft every year, which Hardy admits is easier said than done. However, the colt’s $800,000 windfall is hard to go back on, and there’s definitely a new benchmark set among the co-breeders. “It gives us confidence,” Hardy says. “As a breeder, you know the highs and lows so well, and all breeders know a bit about both. The hardest part for breeders such as ourselves is crystal-balling two and a half years out from a sale when you’re deciding on a mating, and a lot can happen, both positive and negative.” The Sunlight Trust could not have predicted how much of a boom would occur on the Wootton Bassett sireline when it sent Lazumba to Almanzor in the spring of 2018. Hardy says it easily could have gone the other way, but it didn’t. Wootton Bassett was a star on the rise, one that has kept going, but he was still a relatively obscure star in 2018. Still, the Trust thought his son, Almanzor, was bankable.

Murray & Marg Hardy and Paddy Preston

“It was a matter of looking at our options with this mare, and there were a lot of top-class mares going to Almanzor in his first year,” Hardy says. “Lazumba was a stakes-placed Australian mare by Sebring, and she matched up extremely well with him. We thought he was an obvious fit for her, and we also thought the progeny would certainly be in the top 20 per cent of that crop, which he proved to be.” The Hardys and Preston had been told the colt was among the top three of Almanzor progeny on the ground. Auctioneer Steve Davis had said as much, as had Marcus Corban, both of whom worked closely with The Sunlight Trust in getting the colt to the Gold Coast. It gave the breeders confidence that a result was possible and, while they had sold with Magic Millions before, they had never sold at the January showcase.

IT REALLY WAS ABOUT PLACING OUR YEARLING IN A SALE THAT WOULD SUIT,

Hardy says. “All the way through, he was a standout, but we knew with Magic Millions that we had to have a horse that was early maturing, well-developed and absolutely spot on, and he was.” Bloodstock agent Paul Moroney was ringside when Lot 470 did his thing at Magic Millions. By then, Waikato-based Moroney had been on the road since July 2020, leaping through all the hoops and over the hurdles presented by COVID and its affected states and nations. For close to eight months, he based himself in North Queensland on an impromptu, and admittedly costly, working holiday, but it meant he was at the Bundall sales complex to see The Sunlight Trust colt sell on January 15. Moroney’s part in the play dates back to 2018. That year, he sourced a number of broodmares for the Trust, and one of them was Lazumba, who he picked up at the Magic Millions National Sale for $280,000. On performance, she was second in the Gr2 VRC Sires’ Produce, and on pedigree she was the family of multiple Group winner Excited Angel. On type, she was just about perfect. “She had a lot going for her,” Moroney says. “She had a good cover going into the sale, and that filly, by Hinchinbrook, is one of the best fillies in Sydney right now. She’s called Latino Blend, so it was a good story right from the start.” The following year, the decision to send Lazumba to Almanzor was two-pronged for Moroney. Firstly, the stallion was an interesting addition to the New Zealand ranks, but secondly, the bloodstock agent had previously tried to buy the horse. “I’d had an opportunity to buy him when he was in England, but unfortunately I couldn’t get anyone in,” Moroney says. “Almanzor went on to win four Group Ones after that, so he was a horse that I always followed closely and I was excited when he was announced for New Zealand. I said to The Sunlight Trust that he was a horse they really should be backing, and Lazumba was the very first mare they sent him. They were richly rewarded.” COVID wasn’t an ideal environment to be shipping horses from New Zealand to Australia. There were border headaches and quarantine hassles, and health orders in Australia were changing from week to week. But the Hardys, Preston, Corban and Moroney, along with Steve Davis, didn’t allow anything to change their mind about selling in Queensland because the sale was cherry-ripe for their racehorse. “We thought there’d be a lot of competition for Almanzors in New Zealand, because there were a stack of them there” Moroney says. “We decided he should go to an Australian sale, and because he was a particularly good early foal, we thought Magic Millions would suit him best. And it did, because he was the highest-priced Almanzor sold at auction anywhere in the world this year.” If Murray Hardy was surprised at the price tag, so too was Paul Moroney. He had the yearling pegged at half-a-million dollars, but it takes only two to drive demand. Moroney recalls only two parties arguing over the colt past the $500,000 mark and, if his memory is correct, the underbidder was Danny O’Brien, who has ended up training the colt anyway. In Moroney’s opinion, the result was a game-changer, but not in an earth-shattering financial sense. The Sunlight Trust’s colt didn’t break sale records, and he didn’t top proceedings at the end of selling. But what he did do was reset the New Zealand mindset a little, that opportunity beckoned at January and it was worth chasing. “I think there’s been a shift by certain breeders to broaden their horizons and sell their wares not just in New Zealand,” Moroney said. “There’s only X amount of sires in New Zealand, and it doesn’t make sense to sell them all in the one place. Results like the Almanzor colt, and there have been others like him, suggest that there’ll be more New Zealand breeders spreading their horses around, and they’ve got to get their horses to market, especially in times like these when people from Australia are struggling to jump on a plane and get to New Zealand to look at horses.”

Paddy & Murray with the Almanzor colt as a foal

Moroney says that Lot 470 also reminded Kiwi breeders that investment in high-class stallions could be viable, and that the Australian market would accept imported class from Europe. “Australian breeders do seem to know that the imported bloodlines from Europe suit New Zealand very well,” he says, “but this result shook things up a bit. I think a few people were gob-smacked by how much that horse made, but it just gave an idea that if you do invest in high-class bloodstock coming from the other side of the world, there will certainly be attention from all around Australasia for those horses.” Back at Lodge Hill, many months after the beers and cheers of January, The Sunlight Trust had the business of Lazumba to attend to. Her next foal was a chestnut colt by Written Tycoon, a mating that was planned in consultation with Brad Thomas’s X Factor Pedigrees. Like his Almanzor half-brother, the colt is destined for the 2022 Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale. He was shipped first to Haunui Stud and then Bhima in October, where the buff will be applied in the final months before selling. After that, it’s all lap of the gods and lightning striking twice. “All things being equal, if you’ve found a successful pattern for the mare’s progeny, you’d be foolish not to follow the same path,” Hardy says. “So that’s what we’ve done this year, because it’s been an effective pattern for us.” For the second successive year, he won’t be on the Gold Coast to see the sale live, but he’s got no regrets about that. Hardy knows that the industry hasn’t skipped a beat since COVID grabbed the world by the scruff of the neck, and he’s got every faith in technology bringing him the result, whatever it may be.

THE RESULT IS THE OVERWHELMING FACTOR ABOUT A SALE, AND THAT DOESN’T CHANGE JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT THERE,” HARDY SAYS. “I DON’T MIND WATCHING IT LIVE BECAUSE I THINK WHAT THE BLOODSTOCK INDUSTRY HAS ACHIEVED FROM THE GET-GO OF COVID HAS BEEN REMARKABLE. IT’S BEEN RESILIENT AND INNOVATIVE, AND IT’S GOING TO CONTINUE TO BE, WHETHER THERE ARE PEOPLE AT THE AUCTIONS OR NOT.