Go jockey go

day the world’s finest racehorse Sea The Stars made the short journey from John Oxx’s stables on the Curragh to the Gilltown Stud in Kilcullen, leaving behind a racing career that glorified him. It is a small price to pay for the flow of equine love he will be offered in his new life. The greater price (€85,000) will be paid by owners of broodmares good enough to warrant a visit to Sea The Stars.

From the moment Mrs Ling Tsui and her son Christopher decided to retire Sea The Stars, it was presumed he would stand at a stud in the country where he was conceived, foaled, raised, and trained. The presumption said much about an Irish bloodstock industry home to many of the world’s most successful stallions.

On the track Sea The Stars greatest rivals were his compatriots Rip Van Winkle, Mastercraftsman and Fame And Glory, all trained by Aidan O’Brien at Ballydoyle. Though the champion’s life changes at stud, Sea The Stars will still find his performance measured against compatriots, for it is Galileo, Montjeu and Danehill Dancer who are Europe’s best sires and they stand at Coolmore in County Tipperary.

Horseracing people, wonderfully detached from the world beyond bloodstock, witnessed another year of Coolmore’s rising influence in their world. If the measure is Group One winners the three most successful stallions last year were the Australian-based Encosta de Lago with seven, followed with six by Giants Causeway in Kentucky and Galileo. All three are Coolmore sires.
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Though this year has been dominated by Sea The Stars, it has also been a good year for the Coolmore/Ballydoyle axis. Most recently the two most important two-year-old races in Britain, the Dewhurst Stakes and The Racing Post Trophy, were won by Ballydoyle-trained horses and the highly impressive performance of St Nicholas Abbey in the Racing Post has not only made him short-priced favourite for next year’s Derby but has enhanced the lofty reputation of his sire, Montjeu.

This Saturday at Santa Anita in California, Rip Van Winkle will start favourite for the $5million Breeders’ Cup Classic and should he win the sport’s unofficial world championship race, his sire Galileo’s case to be considered the world’s top sire will be strengthened. Ripples from Coolmore’s success wash over European racing; this year, for the first time since goodness-knows-when, thoroughbred yearlings made better prices in Europe than the US, the surest sign that the best stallions are in this part of racing’s empire.

From the small town of Fethard in County Tipperary, you take the Kilenaule road and two miles on there is Coolmore Stud. One small sign stands on the right hand side of the road, “Coolmore Stud, 1km” but otherwise there is little to indicate that you have arrived at the epicentre of the European bloodstock industry and into the world created by John Magnier.

Outside of racing, Magnier is best known for his time as a leading shareholder in Manchester United football club and an acrimonious falling out with United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson over Rock of Gibraltar, the brilliant racehorse. For a man who prefers to live life beneath the radar, the very public nature of the row with Ferguson would have troubled Magnier but that didn’t mean he lay down when Ferguson asked for more than Magnier thought was right. Through a high-powered row, he was formidable.

Magnier once said doing interviews was against his religion, a reticence based in part on a natural sense of privacy but also on a desire not to seem boastful. Inside Coolmore’s headquarters in County Tipperary, there is little on the walls or the shelves to connect the achievement of the operation to its founder, and little that highlights the man who has shifted the balance of bloodstock power from the US to Europe.

Turn the clock back in time; to, say, early 1974, when the great trainer MV (Vincent) O’Brien was searching for his fifth winner of the Epsom Derby. At Ballydoyle back then, O’Brien trained close to 50 horses. All were bred in America because that’s where the best horses were. John Magnier was 26 and the junior member of a triumvirate involving O’Brien and the millionaire owner Robert Sangster.

They went to the major sales in the US, spent millions on potential champions and were very good at what they did. Vincent O’Brien believed Northern Dancer was the supreme stallion and so they relentlessly favoured his offspring, knowing that if they were right about the sire, O’Brien’s brilliance as a trainer would do the rest. They were right and with considerable help from Northern Dancer’s offspring, Vincent O’Brien became the greatest trainer in the history of horseracing.

While O’Brien was the masterful trainer, Magnier was a breeder and there was a fundamental to the success that bothered him. Why should the champion produced at Ballydoyle have to be retired to stud in the US and was it impossible to break the cycle of buying in America, creating the champion in Ireland, and retiring to stud in the US?

It was what John Magnier set out to challenge and change. He prepared methodically by building up a team of high quality broodmares for the day when he would be able to keep some of the best stallions at Coolmore. Without top-class broodmares, the greatest stallions cannot compete.

In the late 70s, The Minstrel and Alleged were the last of the Vincent O’Brien-trained champions to be send to American and Be My Guest became the first champion sire to stand at Coolmore.

WE are sitting in a room at Coolmore’s headquarters in County Tipperary and two of the older hands, stud manager Christy Grassick and director of sales, David O’Loughlin, are trying to pinpoint the moment when everything changed. Grassick has worked at Coolmore for 34 years, O’Loughlin for almost 25 years and they were present for what they believe was the tipping point.

“Be My Guest was the first,” says Grassick, “but we thought Sadler’s Well would be the one that would decide our futures. A son of Northern Dancer, he had everything you’d want in a stallion and when Vincent O’Brien, Robert Sangster and John Magnier decided not to send him to America but to stand him here in 1984, it was a big moment. They were very brave or very foolish, depending on how you saw it.

“Everybody was expecting big things from Sadler’s Well, his fee was a huge 125,000 guineas and if he didn’t produce really good horses, well, we didn’t want to think about that. His first crop raced in 1988 and for much of that season, they weren’t doing brilliantly. We were thinking, ‘he’s having a bit of a slow start.’

“At the end of the season the most important two-year-old race, the Dewhurst Stakes, ended in a dead-heat between Scenic and Prince of Dance who were both sons of Sadler’s Wells. You couldn’t have written it. It was like the horse was saying to us, ‘You thought I wasn’t going to arrive, well I have.’ And he was there then, right at the top, for the rest of time.”

Sadler’s Wells was champion sire for 14 years and a handsome contributor to the rise of Coolmore and to the creation of a more competitive bloodstock industry in Europe. “The dollar,” said O’Loughlin, “no longer dictated everything.” So good was Sadler’s Wells that people tried their damnedest to find weaknesses.

After 16 years at stud, they noted he had never sired an Epsom Derby winner. Then along came his son Galileo to win the 2001 Derby, which happened the day after his daughter Imagine had won the Oaks. Finally, people wondered if Sadler’s Well would produce the offspring that took his place at the top of the sires’ list. That seemed the ultimate challenge. Late in his stud career, Sadler’s Wells sired two foals, Galileo and Montjeu, who would become hugely successful stallions.

In a game where so much depends upon the random collision of genes it is easy to attribute events to chance. Americans say their industry was badly wounded by the loss in 1974 of Bold Reasoning who produced the great racehorse Seattle Slew but died suddenly at Claiborne Farm in 1974 after siring just 60 foals. No one at Coolmore plays down their debt to the almost freakish brilliance of Sadler’s Well at stud but even in a game of chance, Magnier’s vision has been central to important changes in the world bloodstock industry.

“In terms of Europe getting stronger against America, it would be impossible to underestimate the role of John Magnier in that,” says Bill Oppenheim, a columnist with the international Thoroughbred Daily News. “He pretty much authored it. He was also part of the small team that decided Northern Dancer was the best sire of his generation and that is all anyone could have known at the time.”

Magnier has been innovative as he refused to accept the conventional wisdom that the optimum number of coverings for a stallion was somewhere between 40, instead using veterinary advances to push the boundaries way beyond that number while greatly enhancing his sires’ earning potential. The rest of the bloodstock industry would follow. Equally innovative was the decision to shuttle some of his best stallions between Europe and Australia, maximising earnings by making the best bloodlines available to breeders on both continents.

“As well as the fact that Coolmore is a very professional operation,” says Tony Morris, the Racing Post’s breeding expert, “John Magnier’s management of the people who work for him has been very effective. Staff are treated very well.”

Magnier has been known to encourage those who do well at Coolmore to buy a broodmare and he will then give them a nomination to one of the stallions. It is opportunity for employees to have their own breeding interest while working for Coolmore. Countless stories testify to Magnier’s support for friends fallen on hard times and though no journalist should expect to see him on a visit to Coolmore, his influence is felt at every turn.

It is expressed in the loyalty of those who work for him and in their desire to do their jobs as he wants them done. It is as if the question goes through a filter which asks how the boss would respond. So they understate Coolmore’s place in the bloodstock world, they overstate how lucky they’ve been with the stallions, they marvel at the good fortune in finding Aidan O’Brien and they talk how good it is to be around in these times.

It was Magnier who first recognised O’Brien's potential and if the decision to locate Sadler’s Wells at Coolmore was his greatest decision in the 80s, getting O’Brien to Ballydoyle was his most important in the 90s. The trainer’s admiration for his boss is not understated.

“There are so many things about John,” says O’Brien. “He’s got foresight, wisdom, loyalty and there is a great integrity about how he deals with people. When you work with John Magnier, you don’t need a contract. A look, maybe a handshake, that is more than enough. Every day I deal with him, I learn something.”

There is, of course, a hardness about Magnier and agreement that he is a man you don’t want as your enemy. Coolmore’s relations with their principal rivals, Sheikh Mohammed’s Darley Stud, have long been described as cool. Each operation refuses to buy the other’s progeny. Yet amongst the photographs on display at Coolmore is one of Sheikh Mohammed, and Grassick and O’Loughlin speak easily of the Sheikh’s contribution to racing.

But this is also a competitive business and Coolmore’s graciousness comes partly from being the leading player. You only have to ask Grassick why any breeder with an elite broodmare would chose Galileo at €200,000 over Sea The Stars at €85,000 and, in an instant, his Coolmore juices are flowing.

“Well,” he says, “Galileo is the best in the world. He’s proved it.”

“But Sea The Stars with his pedigree, his looks, his temperament, the ability he showed on the track, he has the most incredible potential?”

“Potential is the word,” he replies. “But people are more cautious now, they have to be, and they want more certainty especially when they’re spending a lot of money. You’ve got to keep the risk factor down and we know Galileo’s stock can win a Dewhurst, we know he can sire a Derby winner and a week’s time, we may know he can produce a winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Maybe most important, we know he can top the sales, he’s done that, and he’s going to do it again. With the other horse you’re dealing with the unknown. Sea The Stars was a brilliant racehorse, no one can ever take that away from him, but we’re lucky to have a brilliant and proven sire.”

“That was a brilliant sales pitch, Mr Grassick?”

“Facts don’t lie. In life you can pitch as high as you like but if the product is not good enough, it doesn’t matter a damn, people will tell you it was no good.”

When you ask if Coolmore will send mares to Sea The Stars, Grassick says Magnier and his co-owners, Michael Tabor and Derrick Smith, will decide. You sense Grassick and O’Loughlin would rather see the best Coolmore mares go to Coolmore stallions but it would be a surprise if Magnier didn’t support the Tsui’s decision to stand racing’s greatest star in Ireland.

There is a bathroom off the reception hall at Coolmore. In it there is a photograph of Coolmore’s greatest stallions and an expanded caption makes a rare mention of John Magnier and from where he came. His great-grandfather Thomas stood a stallion called Edlington in County Cork’s Blackwater valley more than 100 years ago, and John’s father Michael stood Cottage, the sire of three-time Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Cottage Rake which was, of course, trained by Vincent O’Brien.

Then the caption names the line of pictured Coolmore stallions; Sadler’s Wells, Galileo, Montjeu, High Chapparal and Hurricane Run. “What you are looking at is history and more history in the making,” it says. The caption might have added, “and formidable bloodlines, both human and equine.” But that wouldn’t be Coolmore’s style.

Galileo v Sea The Stars: how the studs compare

- Galileo is the son of Coolmore’s Sadlers Wells, who won the Irish 2000 Guineas in 1984 and was champion sire for 14 years running, and Urban Sea, who won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1983 and died while foaling at the Irish National Stud earlier this year. Urban Sea is the only mare to produce two Epsom Derby winners, Sea The Stars (2009) and Galileo (2001). Sadlers Wells was sired by Northern Dancer, regarded as the greatest sire of the last century

- Like Sea The Stars, Galileo enjoyed a flat season annus mirabilis. In addition to his victory at Epsom in 2001, he also triumphed that year at the Irish Derby, the Ballysax Stakes and the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes. However, he failed in the Breeders Cup at the end of 2008, after which he was retired to stud in Ireland

- Galileo has himself now sired 11 Group One winners, including 2008 Epsom Derby winner New Approach, Soldier of Fortune, Rip Van Winkle, Red Rocks and Lush Lashes. His reputation was confirmed in 2007 when his fee increased from €37,000 to €150,000

- He is the older half-brother of Sea The Stars. They are the seventh set of siblings to win the Epsom Derby in its 229-year history. Sea The Stars will start his life as a stallion at a much lower price than Galileo

Morning C and C just had my Weetabix and read the article, good start to a Monday

cheers!