10 minute read
The Asian century
Northern Farm leads the tide of success in Japan, a country in which horses are supported (and promoted) like football teams, writes David Morgan
IN A WORLD OF CONFLICT, uncertainty and misinformation there is at least one absolute truth we can take out of 2023, and we don’t need an IFHA (International Federation of Horseracing Authorities) get-together in London to tell us: Equinox was the world’s indisputable champion.
Silk Racing’s superstar announced himself globally when he ran his rivals into submission in Dubai in March, then returned home to triumph in three of the strongest Group 1 races on earth that year. His Japan Cup was particularly awesome.
Another truth is that Equinox’s controlling interest, Northern Farm, is continuing to lead the field in Japan, which is well on its way to becoming the 21st century’s most relevant racing sphere.
Since Seeking The Pearl nailed a breakthrough offshore Group 1 at Deauville in 1998, Japanese raiding parties have picked off many of the world’s biggest prizes be that in Britain, France, Australia, Hong Kong, or the US. No major arena anywhere is outside of Japan’s scope now.
Underpinning this coming of age is the Yoshida family’s decades-long strategy of purchasing of prized breeding stock from around the world, most notably the great stallion Sunday Silence and innumerable good mares.
It is true that the central government-supervised Japan Racing Association (JRA) makes for an efficient navigator in steering the pari-mutuel-only Japanese racing product: solid administrative management combined with slick marketing campaigns on TV, on downtown billboards and across Japan’s public transport network keep the sport in focus.
The JRA’s marketing arm has elevated the sport’s heroes, so capturing new fans and driving the numbers that matter: attendances across 288 race meetings a year pre-Covid averaged about 21,000 and the 2023 figures, when released, should mirror those; the 2022 betting turnover was a 21-year high of about £18 billion; average prize-money per race meeting that same year was the equivalent of around £2.3 million.
To give that figure some context, a Dirt track maiden in January this year carried a total purse of about £57,000.
But, alongside the navigator, there in the driver’s seat is the Yoshida family group of companies and, currently working the gears and the accelerator, is the impressive Northern Farm operation, Japan’s leading breeder in 18 of the last 20 years and for the past 13 seasons consecutively.
“Northern Farm is a good competitor, but its is ahead of everyone else at the moment,” said Mitsumasa Nakauchida, the trainer responsible for guiding the career of Northern Farm’s latest darling, Liberty Island.
“Northern Farm is the leading breeder, but also running in front of everyone with the technical aspects: every approach to the racehorses, the breeding, the foals, the mares, everything.
“It is really important because what the farm is doing is improving everyone else, and they are open, they support lots of different trainers and jockeys.”
Equinox and the fillies’ triple crown heroine Liberty Island were the two standouts for Northern Farm during its sparkling 2023, which ended in December with Sunday Racing’s juvenile filly Regaleira making history by winning the Group 1 Hopeful Stakes against colts.
Impressively, Northern Farm bred the winners of 17 of Japan’s 25 Group 1 races in 2023 – that includes four Classics, the Japan Cup, both Grand Prix races and both versions of the Tenno Sho – and 14 of those wins went to horses owned by its affiliated racing clubs.
NOrtnern Farms is headed by Katsumi YOshida, who has longbeen a familiar presence at major sales and Group 1 race days aroound the world. Lean, angular, astute, a passionate horseman and excuding gravitas, he is the second of three sons of Zenya Yoshida who established Shadair Farm in 1995 and looked outward.
"It all started when Zenya, the patriarch, came to Keeneland and started buying mares all those years ago, and we've seen it continue with his sons and now it is continuing with his grandchildren, they all have that same passion," says Keeneland's Chip McGaughey.
“Those pedigrees have been fruitful for the Yoshidas and their breeding programmes, their racing clubs and everything involved.
“Katsumi and his son Shunsuke Yoshida, with the rest of the team, are always looking to secure pedigrees that complement the mares at Northern Farm, and also the stallions they have standing at Shadai Stallion Station.”
Zenya’s great breeding and racing empire continues under three fraternal strands Katsumi’s Northern Farm being one, with elder brother Teruya Yoshida overseeing Shadai Farm and Haruya Yoshida heading up Oiwake Farm.
While individual members of the Yoshida family own horses in their own names, the majority race under the banners of racing clubs associated with Shadai, Northern and Oiwake. These clubs offer ownership shares to the public and are key drivers in maintaining the sport’s popularity.
Shadai has Shadai Race Horse Co. Ltd with its famous yellow and black stripes; Oiwake has the G1 Racing Club with its black and red silks, and then there are Japan’s three most successful clubs of recent times – Sunday Racing, Carrot Farm and Silk Racing, all affiliated to Northern Farm.
Racing club syndicates are nothing out of the ordinary, but the scale and influence of the Yoshida-connected clubs is extraordinary. In 2022, those five clubs made available more than 188,000 shares in more than 800 horses.
Sunday Racing was the JRA’s leading owner in 2023, ahead of Carrot Farm in second, third-placed Shadai, and Silk Racing in fourth, with G1 Racing ranked ninth and Katsumi Yoshida himself 12th on the list.
And there was nothing unusual in that, it was Sunday Racing’s seventh leading owner Katsumi Yoshida title in a row and 14th in 19 years back to 2005: Carrot Farm topped the list in 2014 and 2016.
Prior to the Sunday Racing dominance, Shadai Race Horse Co. Ltd which was established in 1980, was the JRA’s champion owner 25 times, including consecutive seasons from 1983 to 2004.
This model, emulated by numerous non-Yoshida racing clubs, has proven to be a strength to Japanese racing as it fosters fan participation, turning members into“owners” and forming deep connections.
Many of those who invest in a Sunday Racing horse, for example, will support Sunday as if it is their team, like a soccer fan would.
It gives ordinary folks the opportunity to share in the ownership of a champion such as Gentildonna, but also when that mare is, as per agreement, bought back by Northern Farm to breed those club “owners” have an option to invest in that mare’s offspring, such as her Group 1-winning daughter Geraldina.
Racing club conditions stipulate that their mares must retire by the March of their sixth year, but that in turn means they do race through multiple seasons, which is why stars such as Almond Eye, Gentildonna, Gran Alegria, and Lys Gracieux were still engaging fans and winning Group 1 races at age five.
There is no such limit on colts and, unlike in the US and Europe, it is uncommon for a star Japanese colt to retire to stud at the end of his Classic season. The owners and the fans want to see them tested to prove their status.
A couple of months after the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Ace Impact bowed out prematurely with a record of only six races for two Group 1 wins, while this year in Japan not one but three winners of the Japanese Derby – all bred by Northern Farm – were among the deep field for the Group 1 Arima Kinen at Nakayama.
One of the vital fuels to all of this is the continuing investment in quality bloodstock from around the world, be that stallions bought to join the Shadai Stallion Station roster or elite race mares purchased to join the broodmare bands at the farms.
“Northern Farm buys in the US and in Europe, and is prolific down in Australia as well; the team is also buying mares down in South America, it’s a smaller world now and that model has really worked for them.
“The farm buys the best and breed to the best, and hope they get the best; they’ve made it a focal point of their operations and it’s paid dividends for them,” McGaughey observes.
AND THE BEST does not mean the most fashionable, the most handsome or the most beautifully bred: pedigree is important, but so too is athletic performance.
Northern Farm has been especially prolific and successful in purchasing quality breeding mares with proven race track performance.
In that regard, Liberty Island is a good case study: a daughter of the late Northern Farm-bred stallion Duramente, a champion sire last year despite his premature passing, she is out of the rags-to-riches Australian Group 1 winner Yankee Rose, purchased privately upon retirement by Katsumi Yoshida for a lot more than the A$10,000 she cost as a yearling.
The Northern Farm supremo showed again at breeding stock sales this past autumn that the overall strategy of buying quality mares from around the world is not stopping, even with the yen being weak.
At Keeneland in November he picked up the $400,000 Viareggio and at Tattersalls in December his purchases included the 1,000 Guineas first and second Cachet and Prosperous Voyage, bought for more than two million guineas apiece, while the Northern Farm-linked Lake Villa Farm paid 625,000gns for Mauiewowie, a Listedwinning granddaughter of the Classicwinning Group 1-producing mare Nightime.
Northern Farm’s boss was then sighted at Sha Tin in December where he witnessed eight Northern Farm-connected horses contest the Hong Kong International Races.
Japan’s failure to take home one of those four Group 1s served as a reminder that JRA horses abroad still face stiff competition, but such is the collective confidence that the reaction to those disappointing defeats felt like a pragmatic “on to the next”.
With Hong Kong in mind, it was at the start of the 37th Asian Racing Conference in Seoul, South Korea in May 2018, that the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s (HKJC) supremo Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, wearing his hat as chairman of the Asian Racing Federation (ARF), outlined the need for a “transformational vision for the development of a global brand for racing, all in the context of this most dynamic of times, the Asian Century.”
Hong Kong’s tentacles are stretching ever farther thanks to its World Pool product, as the HKJC does what it does: innovating to counter any decline in domestic turnover and advance its business, the expansion of which is otherwise hamstrung by being essentially a two-track jurisdiction with no breeding industry.
Singapore racing’s impending closure and Macau’s feared doom show that not everything is golden in Asia, yet there is enviable strength in Japan, with its successful breeding farms and healthy racing product.
And the Yoshida family has been building and developing its brand – brands in fact –for many years.
What we see now are the fruits of Zenya Yoshida’s own long game of a “transformational vision,” which has been highly successfully carried on by his sons and his sons’ children.
