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BREEDER OF THE MONTH
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NH BREEDER OF THE MONTH – February 2014
GEORGE SELWYN
Fiona Evans The two latest monthly breeders’ awards have been determined by Grade 2 winners for Midnight Legend at Haydock. In January, Wychwoods Brook won the Peter Marsh Chase and in February, Seeyouatmidnight captured the Rendlesham Hurdle. Just for good measure their sire had yet another high-profile winner in February, with Bally Legend in Kempton’s BetBright Chase. Geographically speaking, Seeyouatmidnight embraces two extremes as he was bred in Devon by Fiona Evans (who wins a supply of TRM’s world-famous Calphormin plus a bottle of premium Irish whiskey) at her Whiddon Farm, Abbotskerswell, and is trained at Greenlaw in Berwickshire by former Scottish rugby international Sandy Thomson for his wife. Thomson bought Seeyouatmidnight privately for £20,000 at the DBS Spring Sales last May, the five-year-old having won a maiden point-topoint in Ireland after the catalogue was printed. He had originally been purchased from his breeder as a two-year-old at Doncaster in January 2010 for £6,000. The son of Midnight Legend has proved a revelation since going north of the border and is now unbeaten in three starts over hurdles, ridden by last season’s Grand National-winning jockey Ryan Mania. Although Seeyouatmidnight is related to Oscar Whisky, the first two generations of his pedigree unimpressive. He is the last of only three progeny of his homebred dam Morsky Baloo (by Morpeth) and she died in the same year that he was foaled. Unraced, she was a daughter of Sky Baloo (by Skyliner), who was placed in a bumper and had just two winning hurdlers to show for a stud career spanning 18 seasons. Those two winners are Jaguar Claw and Morsky Baloo’s brother, Haloo Baloo. Their sire Morpeth was a Sadler’s Wells horse who stood with the Frost family, just down the road from Evans in Buckfastleigh, where they trained him. Seeyouatmidnight’s pedigree has an unexpected historical duplication. Sire Midnight Legend was bred by Graham Rowles Nicholson’s Limestone Stud in Lincolnshire (for some inexplicable reason none of Weatherbys’ otherwise excellent stallion publications ever record the breeder), while his third dam Lane Baloo (unraced) was by Lucky Brief, a horse whom Clifford Nicholson, a great supporter of jumping during the 1950s, stood at Limestone. With an extraordinary ability to improve his mares, Midnight Legend, who is now 23 years of age and has spent all but his first four
Seeyouatmidnight, foaled in Devon but trained in Scotland
covering seasons with David and Kathleen Holmes at their Pitchall Farm Stud, seems to have two other attributes not normally associated with a National Hunt stallion. First, he was a proven performer under National Hunt rules himself and second he seems to get a good proportion of daughters who excel on the racecourse. When he first retired to stand in 1998 at Don and Liz Harrington’s Conkwell Grange Stud, she remarked somewhat prophetically: “I think he is just the horse to carry us through to our retirement.� Although fate intervened so far as the Harringtons were concerned, that legacy still lives on. One of Midnight Legend’s additional winners during February was Barton Rose and the homebred mare carries the colours of Lady Clarke, whose late husband raced her sire and retired him to stud under the Barton Stallion Partnership banner. Furthermore, Barton Rose is trained at Conkwell Grange by Neil Mulholland, who must have handled as many Midnight Legend winners as anyone.
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