10 minute read
Group 1 glory
A Case For You’s Abbaye victory was a first success for trainer Ado McGuinness at the highest level, and the Irishman is now chasing Grade 1 victory in the US
IT HAS BEEN A BUSY MEDIA STINT for Irish trainer Ado McGuinness – a google search of his name reveals zoom interviews, features and TV appearances most of which have taken place within the last month.
He has become an object of this media scrutiny after his Lusk-based yard produced A Case Of You to win the Prix de l’Abbaye (G1) at ParisLongchamp on Arc day, giving McGuinness a first Group 1 victory in his training career.
“We’re an overnight success after 20 years of training!” laughed McGuiness on our own zoom call. “It is the result of a lot of quite hard work and long graft. We’ve gathered together a nice team of horses now, and we’ve been able to spend some nice money and have invested quite wisely in some horses.
Over the past four or five years, McGuinness, alongside his cousin and assistant trainer Stephen Thorne, has bought a lot of horses in training, mainly at public auction at the Tattersalls and Goffs Autumn HIT sales, and at the Tattersalls July HIT Sale. It has become a lucrative source of winners for the team, and good ones, too.
However, A Case Of You in a slightly different tact, was bought privately from Irish producer John McConnell. He had run the horse three times for himself – after a first time out third in a maiden at Bellewstown, the colt, a son of Hot Streak, broke his duck over 7f last September at Dundalk and then followed up in the Anglesey Stakes (G3) at The Curragh – the race a frequent precursor of three-year-old talent. The victory gave McConnell his own first Group race success.
Post-race the trainer admitted that he wanted to sell the horse, but he did want him to stay in the yard. McGuinness and Thorne had other ideas and picked the horse up as a Guineas possible for owner Gary Devlin.
Plans were big in the training yard in Lusk, hopeful that a potential Guineas horse had been purchased, it was a radical upgrade of ambition and a change of approach for McGuinness.
He explains: “Look, you will be sitting at home watching Paris or watching the Breeders’ Cup and you’ll be saying you know, ‘I’d love to get there, but I know I never will.’
“Most of the horses good enough to take an Irish trainer on those journeys would be sold on – we’d have to sell because we can’t afford to keep them.
“At the start of the year the Paris journey was not something that we had in mind when we were making the plan for A Case Of You.
“When we bought him he had won over six, but people were saying he wanted further and we thought he was going to be Guineas horse.”
The colt won on his first start for the new yard at Dundalk in March over 6f, but finished 12th of 12 behind Poetic Flare in the Listed Ballylinch Guineas Trial over a 7f.
The yard took the hint and successfully dropped the colt back to 6f to win the Group 3 Glacken Stakes, but a first attempt at Group 1 level resulted in a down-the-field result on the heavy ground in the Commonwealth Cup – the colt took a keen hold, and returned with a missing shoe.
A Case For You winning at ParisLongchamp
After a month off and a regroup through July, his next outing saw him finish third in the Phoenix Sprint Stakes (G3) over 6f at The Curragh, he then went a place better over a furlong shorter in the Group 1 Flying Five on Champions Weekend before collecting on the big day in France.
“Basically, his first outing over 5f was in a Group 1!” laughs the trainer, adding: “He had been showing us a lot of tactical speed at home. He is very fast, and that’s why we decided to go down that road.
The colt now has another trip planned: this time in a plane and stateside, the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint the next ambitious target.
McGuinness confirms: “The horse is in great form, and he will have travelled over before your readers see this.
“He worked yesterday [October 19] and was very good. We’re very happy with him and hopefully we can keep him as healthy as we can for the next two or three weeks. It will be my first trip to America.”
McGuinness admits that while he enjoys the travelling experience he would perhaps prefer to be back with the horses in the yard.
“Listen, I suppose I did enjoy Paris and I was at Ascot on British Champions Day, but I’d rather be at home on my tractor doing the gallops and watching my horses!” he says, before reflecting: “But to be in the position to go out is a thrill. I’m going out on Monday and the horses will be out of the two-day quarantine when I get there so I can see him out.
“He is quite a sensible horse – he eats, he sleeps, he drinks, so it’s great. When we travelled him to France on the long boat all he did was sleep and eat!”
Taking on the US sprinters in their back yard is no easy feat, so does his trainer think that A Case Of You has that inherent and required speed to take them on?
McGuinness says: “He is very fast, and how this horse really excels is that he is as fast in his last furlong as he is in his first furlong. He finishes very strong, and a really good 5f horse needs to finish strong.
“At the start of the year when we ran him at Dundalk, and we’d only had him I think six or seven weeks, we destroyed Logo Hunter, who was the top sprinter in Ireland in the middle of the summer as well as Jack Davison’s horse [Mooneista]. We gave one 5lb and the other 10lb – and we beat them 3l and 4l on a fast surface!
“So it doesn’t worry me – he handles soft ground, but I think he’ll be better on a better surface.”
It was a successful mission. Bowerman won the mile Irish Thoroughbred Marketing Cup, giving the yard its first international success, while Saltonstall finished an honourable fourth in Riyadh picking up £36,496 for his efforts.
Sourcing horses to target these sorts of races is very much on the agenda for the team moving forward – McGuinness goes through the catalogues, while Thorne despatches himself to the sales responsible for buying under his Shamrock Thoroughbreds and syndicate banner.
The partnership with Thorne kicked off the development of a strategy to bring a more commercially sound footing to the yard.
“There was a big squeeze in this country back in 2006 and 2007,” recalls McGuinness.
“It was just really really difficult and basically I called myself a ‘survival trainer’ because that’s all you were doing, just trying to survive, just to stay going and it was very hard.
“Ireland is probably the hardest country in the world to train horses because we have the best horses, some of the best trainers, and the biggest operations in the world to compete against. We’d always we’ve be looking at offers, all the time to sell on horses just to keep going.
“Steven is a cousin, he’d worked with me and then went off to work in Australia before getting on the Flying Start – he did a lot of travels and met a lot of people. He came back and I thought he was only home for Christmas, but he came up to me and said, ‘Do you mind if I stay around?’
“I said, ‘Great!’ We had a good chat and we decided that we had to try and up the ante, try and get better horses. We bought one or two cheap-ish horses, and it worked well, Steven’s syndicate went well.
“I met our yard sponsor Bart O’Sullivan – I met him by chance on the beach – and he introduced us to the Dooley brothers.
“We got some capital into the yard, found some nice horses and worked it from there.
“The Dooley brothers love coming over and they love Galway and they’ve had a lot of winners at Galway over the last few years – we’ve won a lot of the big races at Galway, three consecutive runnings of the Colm Quinn Mile, and that probably really helped us to move forwards.”
Of the effort that goes into sourcing at the horses in training sales, McGuinness outlines.
“You look at their form and you don’t want one with too many miles on the clock, you want them quite fresh, you don’t want them with 20 or 25 runs on them.
“There’s a lot of things you have to look in to, and we have bought some really nice horses but who came with problems – Saltonstall was a horse who had bled. Bowerman was the same and he had a screw in a joint as well, but he was very lightly raced, even though he was a five-year-old.
“Some people won’t go near a horse such as him, but for us, as he’d only had a few runs, there was not much wear and tear; if they are high-class horses then you have a good chance of keeping them.”
ALLIED TO McGuinness’s natural horsemanship – the son of a vegatable farmer, the horse interest first developed for him in the showjumping sphere – the god-given facilities at the yard could be a key factor in helping these horses get over any issues they might arrive with.
The beach is only a three-minute box drive away (it used to be in riding distance but the ongoing development of the local town has rendered that too dangerous) and on the easy days many of the horses head to the beach for a spa day.
“In most yards the day after galloping, they will go on the walker, be thrown out into the paddock or have jog around the gallop, but we take them down to the beach, walk them knee-high in the water, give them a little canter and then go back in the water,” explains the trainer.
“I think if they are a bit achy and sore it must be a whole lot better than having a jog around the gallop.
The lucrative prize-money opportunities is the main reasoning behind the journeys overseas, but there is little more strategy, too.
“The prize-money is obviously a massive attraction and the organisations cover a lot of expenses, too,” he says, before adding: “But it is also just great to get out. You know you will meet people and it’s all about trying to attract more owners to your yard and get more people in.
“It’s quite a hard thing to do to attract new clients and we have to go and approach them, they don’t come to us.
“But you need to have good horses to be able to go to these places and they don’t come cheap!”
Bowerman winning the ITM Cup in Doha, a first international race win for the team
