Top cat

Dan Ross meets Jan Vandebos, the breeder of this summer’s talented dual Group 1 winner Roaring Lion

Roaring Lion

In the sun-starched, vineyardstrewn Eden of California’s Santa Ynez Valley, there’s a blissful little ranch where horse and swallow, snake and squirrel, cat, dog and gopher all live amicably, side-by-side, in what owner Jan Vandebos describes as a “very special, very peaceful existence.”

It’s only fitting, then, that the ranch has a moniker as indelibly optimistic as Springtime Farm. And the more Vandebos reveals about the place and the role it has played personally, the more it becomes apparent that the name is a fitting metaphor for her approach to a life that has, over the past few years, led her into both the bleakest of winter nights and into the sunniest of summer days.

Two years ago her husband Robert Naify passed away after a long illness. Early this year Vandebos lost a mare she had bred and raced called Vionnet, with whom she had a kinship she describes as being like “mother and daughter”. Worse than that, Vionnet was in-foal at the time; the young filly was born premature and was simply too young to survive the trauma.

But, as with the earlyflowering spring blooms, there has also been, during

this time, much in which Vandebos has found particular joy. One highlight has been the emergence as a potent force in Europe this year of Vionnet’s son Roaring Lion, the courageous dual Group 1 winner whom Vandebos bred and sold under her RanJan Racing banner.

And then, of course, there’s Springtime Farm itself. A home, yes. A workplace, sure. But much more than that – a sanctuary for human and animal away from the frenetic tango of daily life, and somewhere for Vandebos to withdraw and reflect as she considers the latest skin-change of her chameleonic existence.

“I have my animals here,” says Vandebos. “I have a simple life, but it’s a good life. It’s really been everything to me.”

Vandebos has been a vital owner-breeder in California for nearly 20 years. But it took a while for her to dip her toes into the waters of the equine world. Not through choice, mind.

“I’d wanted a horse since I was a child, but my mother said we weren’t a “horse family”, we were a family of athletes,” recalls Vandebos, who then ticked off an exhaustive list of childhood pursuits: golf, swimming, running, competitive tennis, cotillion, and whatever else there was barely enough time for.

Vandebos initially pursued a career in journalism, and eventually found herself working in San Francisco as an executive for cable-television company TCI Media. At one time her future husband Robert sat on the company’s board of directors. Their paths crossed one Christmas party, and so the page began turning on her next life chapter.

Nearly 20 years ago, Vandebos formed Excelsior Racing in partnership with Robert – who was already an established California owner-breeder – and a handful of other close friends. This partnership wasn’t, however, what you’d call an immediate lightning strike.

“They kept saying, ‘when are these horses going to win?’ We just couldn’t get a winner.” And Excelsior Racing never did.

But Ranjan Racing, the partnership Vandebos subsequently launched with her husband, conjoining her first name with her husband’s initials, proved a wholly different sort of proposition.

Over the ensuing years, RanJan Racing bought, bred and raced with trainers such as Mike Puype and Richard Mandella a slew of top-notch runners, starting with a mare who would later become the blue hen of their breeding empire: Cambiocorsa, a dual Grade 3 winner who took to Santa Anita’s unique downhill Turf sprint slalom like Lindsey Vonn to the black diamond.

Cambiocorsa later became the dam of a handful of talented offspring, including Vionnet (placed third in the Grade 1 Rodeo Drive Stakes), Schiaparelli (winner of the Grade 2 Royal Heroine Mile Stakes), Alexis Tangier (stakes winner), and Moulin De Mougin (winner of the Grade 2 John C Mabee Stakes).

Cambiocorsa currently resides at Lane’s End in Kentucky alongside three of her daughters and four other RanJan Racing broodmares, including the Galileo mare Up, who finished second in the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches (G1) for Coolmore.

RanJan Racing went to $2.2 million for Up at the 2015 Keeneland January sales.

Equally as important for Vandebos are the ideal homes she finds for each and every one of her racehorses and broodmares – about 34 in all, with 17 enjoying the blissful luxury of what she calls a “life plan” at Springtime Farm.

Vandebos does a lot of the retraining herself, with the slack picked up by New Vocations, a racehorse adoption programme.

“If you are done breeding and racing them, well, you have to take care of them,” she says. “Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it is time consuming. But this is what you have to do if you’re a responsible owner, breeder, or racer.”

Vandebos’s Springtime Farm retraining programme looks something like this: bring the horse home, get them sound, turn them out for up to a year and a half, and then, “when they’re sufficiently bored,” she brings them in and begins the transformation process.

Vandebos, it should be noted, only took to the saddle some 15 years ago. Now, she spends many hours a day, reins in hand, retraining her horses. What with that, running her farm and breeding programme, writing the occasional article, her charity commitments and her love of music, the arts and opera, Vandebos spends her days chasing the sundial much more than she does sitting idly by watching it.

“It’s not a job when you love what you do,” she insists. Nevertheless, these time demands are why for the past couple of years RanJan Racing’s colours have been absent from California racetracks.

The itch is returning, however. She has a “beautiful” yearling filly by Ghostzapper out of Alexis Tangier, a cousin to Roaring Lion and whom Vandebos will keep to race. And when the filly goes into training, it is off to Europe she’ll go.

“Maybe I can talk John Gosden into taking her!” smiles Vandebos, only partially tonguein-cheek.

Why Europe? The style of training there meshes well with her own holistic approach to horse welfare.

“They get to go out on the gallops and they get to go out on trails. It’s just so great for their minds,” she says. “I know horses and horses need time, they need pasture, they need grazing. It’s conducive for making a good racehorse.”

Likewise, Vandebos credits Roaring Lion’s stellar successes to Newmarket’s pastoral majesty and the slow-cook nature of trainer John Gosden’s academy of champions. Not that Roaring Lion’s achievements come as any real surprise.

“I think it was a week after Roaring Lion was born, and I’d never seen a colt or filly run that fast for that long so young. It was about eight minutes straight with Vionnet, and she could not keep up. It was just so beautiful to see. I knew he was special from a week of age.”

As to RanJan Racing’s future, there’s much to whet the old appetite. This year alone, she has four yearling colts with glittering pedigrees headed to Keeneland’s September Sale: a Medaglia D’Oro out of Moulin De

Mougin, an Uncle Mo out of Cambiocorsa, and two American Pharoahs out of Up and Schiaparelli.

And though Vandebos’s professional relationship with Lane’s End is a mere handful of months old, she’s eagerly anticipating the fruits.

“One of the most important people in this country for sales is Allaire Ryan, who works closely with Alys Emson,” explains the breeder, singling out two key players at Lane’s End – Ryan being the farm’s sales director and Emson responsible for client management and sales.

“Those two ladies are so unbelievable. I’m expecting a really good sale because of them this year.” According to Emson, Vandebos’s high expectations are far from misplaced. “They’re four really nice horses in terms of substance and quality, and they’ve got the pedigree to match,” she confirms.

What’s more, Emson believes that what Vandebos has achieved with the likes of Roaring Lion epitomizes the strengthening transatlantic ties between the US and European bloodstock industries.

Indeed, one of the RanJan mares was bred this year to the Lane’s End stallion and Frankel sibling, Noble Mission.

“The US is obviously producing more and more horses who can compete at the top level on the Turf, too, which is so good to see,”she says.

When the feverish countdown to the sales begins in earnest over at Lane’s End, Vandebos will be found with her horses back at Springtime Farm marching to a much more sedate drumbeat, all the while surrounded by a veritable safari of creatures great and small, domestic and wild, each drawn to a place that seems to possess an almost preternatural enchantment.

The day after her husband passed away, a flock of swallows descended upon Springtime Farm for the very first time, nesting in the eaves of the hacienda. The swallows have arrived every year since on the very same day, April 8. Their numbers grow each passing year.

“I’m sure they sense the peacefulness here,” says Vandebos. “I’m the only person in the community to get them. It’s really beautiful.”

Vandebos with the young Roaring Lion