9 minute read
Staying power
Owner-breeder Bjorn Nielsen explains how important it is to retain stamina in influences in pedigrees
Bjorn Nielsen is a man currently pretty content with his racing world: pedigree, breeding, property and bloodstock investment decisions are providing some substantial dividends.
His superb four-year-old stayer Stradivarius, bred out of the mare Private Life who was purchased with Blandford Bloodstock in 2006 for 70,000gns, won the inaugural Weatherbys Hamilton Stayers Million, is unbeaten so far in 2018 picking up the two Group 1s and two Groups 2s in the staying series and may run again this year in the Champions Long Distance Cup (G2).
His filly Agrotera won the Listed Sandringham Stakes at Royal Ascot, recently finished second in the Listed Prix de la Cochere and is on target for a run in the Group 1 Sun Chariot Stakes.
He has foals by Galileo, Sea The Stars, Dark Angel, Golden Horn and Frankel with many of his 13-stong well-related broodmare band back in-foal to many of the same sires. Their ranks include the homebred mare Danilovna, a Dansili close sister to Lillie Langtry, the dam of wonderful champion three-year-old filly Minding. Danilovna is carrying her maiden pregnancy to Galileo, the sire of Minding.
“I have been saying every year since I was 20 – for whatever reason, mainly in horseracing – that this will be the golden year,” smiles Nielsen. “I have to admit that this was probably that year!”
A commodity trader who splits his time between home in New York and his base in Lambourn at Kingsdown House, with an attached training yard rented out to trainer Ed Walker, who also trains a number for Nielsen, the South African-born ownerbreeder’s bloodstock passion really stems from the analytical study of pedigrees.
“I find it very enjoyable going through pedigrees, thinking what’s the combination I want – not just the bloodlines but also type to type: speed, stamina, size – all those things,” he explains.
“Even with that it is a kaleidoscope, there is a load of glass in there and every time you turn it around the combination comes out different. Otherwise a great broodmare would produce great foal after great foal after great foal, but they don’t. They might produce a great one, but the odds after they won’t produce another one as good as that.
“There is a huge amount of luck involved, but some people maybe improve their odds a bit – they have a lot of knowledge of pedigrees or what their horses are – for example, Tesio he owned, bred and trained them and he knew them back to front, knew everything. It must have been be a huge advantage.
“But no matter how much work you put in, luck is needed!”
For Nielsen the planning starts even ahead of a successful purchase of a potential broodmare. “The most interesting part for me is finding a mare you like, and then thinking about who you’d mate to her if you bought her,” he explains. “Then once you’ve planned those matings, who you would send her daughters to. It is quite a long process to do that.
“I find myself – now that I am just into my 60s – asking why am I thinking so far down the road, I am not going to be around!” he laughs, but only with a small shrug of the shoulders, before adding: “When you have a mare and you see what she produces, it is trial and error, and most of what you do is wrong. But you get to think about it, and say ok ‘when I did that with that particular stallion I got x, and so what was the missing ingredient?’
“You then get the chance, hopefully, to look again and work things out.”
The breeding of Stradivarius is the happy result of the re-working of that model, the continual improvement on each mating.
“Private Life, a daughter of Bering, was a very well-bred mare from the Wildenstein family of the champion three-year-old filly Pawneese, and she herself was Listed placed,” he says.
“It is a stamina-laden family and I bought her fairly inexpensively, but she had already produced a good two-year-old by Monsun called Persian Storm, who was placed in the premier German juvenile race – I was pretty impressed that she could get such a good two-year-old and I thought that could obviously produce.
“I sent her to Dansili as the Danehill line has worked well both with Bering and with the bottom line of her pedigree, and I thought it would give a bit more speed. That mating produced a good horse rated in the 90s called Plutocracy – he had a great temperament, trainer David Lanigan said that he’d never had a horse with temperament like his. He was, though, a little bit effeminate, a bit narrow.
“I had in mind that I wanted a daughter out of the mare and Nureyev had worked well with Bering, and in the pedigree is Peintre Celébrè.
“There were no Nureyev line stallions available apart from Peintre Celébrè himself, so she went to him to again to put some speed back in – I regarded him as a mile and a quarter horse and, as I was hoping to get a daughter, I didn’t mind doubling up on bottom line.
“In the end I got a colt. We called him Rembrant Van Dyck and he was a really talented horse, he had a real turn of foot, but he was really quirky, obviously because of the inbreeding – as it has turned out I know that for sure.”
By this point the first crop of three-yearolds by Sea The Stars was about to hit the racecourse, and the Gilltown Stud-based champion son of Cape Cross held appeal for Nielsen.
Bjorn Nielsen with The Queen at Royal Ascot
“Like Plutocracy, Rembrandt Van Dyck was also quite a neat horse and I felt Private Life needed some size. Sea The Stars is a big stallion, and again Bering had worked well with Danzig line horses.
“Stradivarius was always a very nice foal and a very nice yearling. We took him to the
sales, but I wound up keeping him – I didn’t really want to sell. The buyers they weren’t actually far away from the figure I wanted – trainer John Oxx came back after to the yard, luckily I declined his offer.”
As has been widely reported, for Nielsen the Epsom Derby is the race that he would most dearly love to win. With that in mind, his horses are all bought or bred to be Derby winners, and through the process has wound up owning five top class stayers, including Assessor, Masked Marvel and Stradivarius. It is not too bad a complaint.
“It is some luck they have turned into very good staying horses,” he says. “I do love the staying division, and I do love having stayers.
“I do think the really good stayers are often horses who may have just missed the Derby or Classics, they were just not there at that point in time.”
Unsurprisingly, he is a strong advocate of the staying division and for variety of intertwined reasons; the new bonus scheme – which he reports is not a definite goal for Stradivarius in 2019 – and the prize-money increases for the Ebor and Cesarewitch also get the nod of approval from Nielsen.
“It is great that the staying division is being encouraged by the authorities in an attempt to encourage staying horses to be bred,” he confirms. “It will take time, but it is important to try and reverse the trends of breeding just speed horses.
“It is the whole game. You can see what can happen if you breed your staying blood out – you wind up having, as you do in another country, eight-race cards with just 6f and 7f events all the way through, it is just like dog racing.
“Then racing just becomes so monotonous, racegoers get bored seeing the same thing, they won’t go racing, the crowds will be lost, it would be the end of the sport.
“Often the crowd’s favourite races at the big meetings are the staying races and usually it is the best horse who wins. In the sprint races, a hell of a lot of the result is due to the draw, or luck in running – if you get one little bump early on, you are out of it… there is a lot more luck involved.”
Furthermore, stamina influences on pedigrees are important to maintain for the health of the sport, the quality of those top class races as well as to give the depth to the breed.
“If we lose our staying blood, we can never get it back once it has gone,” he continues,
before explaining: “Stayers are not slow horses – they are fastest at the trip they are being asked to run over.
“A 5f sprinter will stay the Gold Cup distance, but just a lot slower. If you breed all staying blood out, you would have a bunch of sprinters running in the distance races and they will all stay, but just at a much slower pace… and times will get much worse.
“Usain Bolt could win a marathon if it is run slow enough because he will be the fastest over the last 100yds, but he is not going to beat the marathon runners because they are faster than him over that distance because he can’t carry his speed,” he reasons.
“And that is what it is kind of like… you can see in the US that the times for the Kentucky Derby have slowed down.
“Secretariat and Northern Dancer were running 50 years ago in faster times than today because horses since then are being bred to run to be quicker.
“In the Dirt races it is all about getting to that first bend in the first four or five, then they they run really hard for a mile but are walking home for the last furlong. That last furlong will be run in 26 or 27s, which is probably 10-15l slower than Northern Dancer and Secretariat.”
For those who try and cash in by breeding or buying a potential blitzing rocketfuelled two-year-old, Nielsen also believes that is a too short-term and blinkered approach to racehorse ownership and breeding.
“The trend is to breed speed horses, because buyers are after two-year-olds to win at Royal Ascot,” he says. “But only a couple can do that and then those owners better hope that the horse is going to be a sprinter who could win the Commonwealth Cup, otherwise they are only going to win tiny races with little prize-money.
“Buyers are taking such a gamble if they are just after the juvenile speed horse – the opportunity with them has gone once you have got halfway through your two-yearold season.”
The bonus and the improvement in prize-money for the longer-distance races Nielsen believes has important and far reaching implications on the onward market for those horses who can get a trip.
“It is going to be harder for the Australians to buy our stayers if the horses can stay in training and owners can target races such as the Ebor and Cesarewitch with the chance of winning such good prize-money rewards,” he says. “That market for good stayers in training is going to be very strong.”
Nielsen moved to Britain from South Africa with his parents as a teenager and was already a keen follower of the sport; by a happy coincidence his non-racing parents settled in Epsom.
It meant that the avid young racing fan was able to put together his own individual and unique pre-Derby entertainment.
“I used to go up to the track in the morning two days before the Classic and watch Vincent O’Brien’s horses have a spin around with Lester,” he recalls.
“There was usually no one else there other than myself, and this was way before the breakfast with the stars mornings came along. It was a wonderful experience.
“I was at the Derby the year Snow Knight won in 1974 – I watched by sitting on a massive bookmaking sign!”
A sight that the young Nieslen would have seen: Lester Piggott exercising Sir Ivor at Epsom the day before the Derby
Kingsdown was purchased after sterling weakened in 2008 – the then US-based Nielsen’s initial plan had been to buy in London, but when prices weakened in the counties but stayed strong in London, the move to Berkshire was undertaken.
Much work has taken place at the property, and the owner-breeder seems very comfortable living on the outskirts of the training centre, just off on the main throughfare to the gallops; the clip clop of hooves a constant backdrop to his mornings.
Despite owning 13 or so broodmares and their followers, as well as a string of racehorses of varying ages, Nielsen has no plans to include a stud farm in his property portfolio.
“The communications here are excellent being so near to the M4 and I can go to London any time I want,” he explains. “This is beautiful countryside around here, I do love it.
“I keep all the mares at Watership Down and Kiltinan and the studs do a great job. They have produced some good horses for me, and they have had some very good horses themselves – as they have once again proved in the last month!
“There is not much wrong with what they are doing, and Watership is not far from here at all so it is easy to go and see the foals, the youngstock and any yearlings in sales prep. I go to Ireland around twice a year, too.
“There is no reason for me to change anything, and try and do that part of it too – people who know much more than I do can tell me what is right and wrong. I have no expertise, I’ll stick to reading pedigrees!”
