The men in black

by Jessica Owers

How do three mates turn a fledgling bloodstock business, with just a handful of mares, into a racing brand with one of the sharpest strike-rates in the country? Jessica Owers sat down with Black Soil Bloodstock to find out.

It’s midday on a Monday at Eureka Stud, high on a hilltop overlooking Cambooya in mid spring. The sun is warm and the flies wicked, and the pretty Mayne’s pest that lines the roadside, with its purple livery in full pop, is everywhere. For Harry McAlpine, it’s business as usual as broodmares step forward for routine vetting, until Tony Gollan and Brian Siemsen stroll into the yard. They shake hands, share a joke and pick up where last they left off.

These three are the blood, brains and business of Black Soil Bloodstock, a breeding and racing operation based here at Eureka Stud on the Darling Downs. Siemsen is its principal, “the finance guy”, and McAlpine its bloodstock agent. Gollan is its trainer, and, along with bloodstock consultant John Foote, they’ve had a hell of a year. It started last January when Skirt The Law won the Magic Millions 2YO Classic, collecting a $1.5 million winner’s cheque (that included an all-women’s bonus). Then in May, Black Soil was back at the Gold Coast to sell its stakeswinning star Isotope. Siemsen expected around $1 million, and Isotope sold to Yulong for $2.3 million.

Each of these men is very different. They’re a breeder, a horse trainer and an insurance guru. Siemsen is the founder and CEO of Claim Central, and a man that took just six years to turn a fledgling company into something worth $55 million. McAlpine, on his childhood home at Eureka, is a third generation studmaster and Tattersalls representative in this part of the world, while Gollan has been Queensland’s metropolitan premiership-winning trainer for 10 successive seasons.

But they’re all Queenslanders, reared on the dirt of the Darling Downs. The black soil. They’re a similar age and they’re genuine friends, and the success they’ve had with Black Soil Bloodstock has been a community effort. It’s also a long way from the original idea that was Boom Time Racing.

“What a terrible name,” Siemsen says. “Who came up with that?” The three men are sitting around Grania McAlpine’s dining table on the deck of the Eureka homestead.

“I’m pretty sure it was me, actually,” Siemsen adds, and McAlpine and Gollan chime in that it certainly was. It might be a thing they won’t let him forget.

Boom Time Racing was Siemsen’s foundation company. It kicked off around 2014 when the half-brothers Spirit Of Boom and Temple Of Boom ran first and second in the Doomben 10,000. Siemsen was a major shareholder in both horses, Gollan trained the pair and the McAlpines had bred them. The two horses raced in Eureka colours, and their success was the start of something very big for Siemsen.

“After Spirit was retired, I spoke to these guys about what I should do with my share,” Siemsen says. “I had 35 percent of Spirit Of Boom but I knew next to nothing about breeding horses, and I didn’t have a mare at that stage. I went to Harry to ask him about it, and then I spoke to Tony, who put me in touch with Johnny Foote and that inner circle. I ticked along like that for a couple of years, but it wasn’t until four or five years ago that we had a proper conversation about the actual business of Black Soil.”

Black Soil Bloodstock was registered in September 2018. McAlpine remembers it coincided with Spirit Of Boom’s breakthrough crop, which had left everyone spinning with its overnight success.

“I was leaving Inglis at about the same time to come back here to the farm to give them a hand,” McAlpine says. “That was about the time Brian wanted to become more involved, and Tony put us in touch to say we should sit down and look at things a bit more seriously, which we did.”

Siemsen doesn’t commit lightly. It’s not in his nature, which is usually how high-achievers operate in private enterprise. But, after committing to breeding racehorses, he discovered quickly that Black Soil Bloodstock wasn’t as simple as buying a mare, putting her to Spirit Of Boom and then counting the cash. It proved maddeningly difficult.

“Our first couple of seasons were awful,” he says. “But you get that in business. The first thing I was trying to work out was if we were doing anything wrong, but I also understood that’s just breeding. You can have a bad consecutive run and then get onto a good run. Harry had said we needed to get better mares, so the quality was what I wanted to concentrate on, remembering this was a time when I was still buying colts. I can tell you, those lessons the first couple of years were reasonably expensive.”

Today, the Black Soil mantra isn’t about colts. It’s about buying or breeding smart fillies, allowing Gollan to do something with them on the track, and then breeding them back to good stallions.

“We got disciplined,” Siemsen says, “but I wouldn’t even say we got real discipline until the last 12 to 18 months.”

Isotope was a maturity turning-point for Black Soil Bloodstock. In 2019, at the time of her purchase as a Magic Millions yearling in January, the group also bought the stakes winner The Actuary, whom they later sold privately, and Bleu Zebra, who is now part of the Black Soil broodmare band. These three fillies were among the four that McAlpine and Gollan picked up in one hit that summer on the Gold Coast.

“It actually coincided with me being in Europe and having nothing to do with the sale, so they did a good job,” Siemsen says. “But let me be clear. I gave them a spending limit, and by the time I woke up that morning on the other side of the world, these guys were celebrating four great purchases at double the value of what I had set.”

Laughter erupts around the table. There is no sympathy for Siemsen. “We were shooting well that year,” McAlpine says, and they all laugh some more.

In its first year, and with small numbers, Black Soil ended up with upwards of 44 percent winners to horses bought. The stakes conversion was even better, and these are figures that Siemsen keeps on top of. They’ve had horses like Isotope, the stakes winners Niedorp and Miami Fleiss, while Skirt The Law is the latest star. Loosely, Siemsen thinks that of the first 10 horses he raced in partnership with Gollan, McAlpine or both, six or seven were first-up winners.

Siemsen and Gollan go back a long way. They were 15 when they met at a softball game in Toowoomba, they shared a house later on in town, and Siemsen dated Gollan’s sister for four years. They’re good early memories before Siemsen went to Sydney to play first-grade football, and before Gollan was a household name.

“The first horse I trained for Eureka and the McAlpines was Temple Spirit, who was the mother of Temple Of Boom and Spirit Of Boom,” Gollan says. “I came out here to the farm one day to look at some spellers I had in the paddock, and I saw her and tried to bullshit my way through that I could buy her, a bit like Brian does, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t sell any of her. Luckily enough, Colin McAlpine called me up a few months later to give her to me to train, and I won seven or eight with her from 15. She was pretty handy.”

Temple Of Boom was Temple Spirit’s first foal, which Gollan bought as a yearling on the Gold Coast in 2008, costing $40,000. The following year he bought Spirit Of Boom for $90,000. This line of horses was how Gollan started training for the McAlpines, and it was a critical association that has had long-lasting consequences.

“I would describe it as life-changing,” Gollan says.

“I remember, as a young trainer in Toowoomba, wondering how I was going to get ahead. I knew the leading trainers up here all trained for the big studs, which were just on our doorstep, but I wasn’t really in with any of them. So I started to send some spellers out here to Eureka, and I was fortunate to have a terrific relationship with Harry’s grandfather, Colin, who was like a second father to me, to be truthful. We were mates and because of that, other owners saw the Eureka colours coming out of my stable, which was the best possible advertisement for me.”

Blood is thicker than water, they say, but not by much when it comes to these three. Harry McAlpine was just leaving school when Gollan was training Temple Of Boom.

“I remember he tipped the horse at its first start at 40/1,” McAlpine says, recalling the January 2009 when the gelding indeed won first up. “I thought Tony was a legend after that.”

It was always part of the plan that Gollan would train the Black Soil horses. Siemsen credits Gollan with that push to really understand the breeding side of the business, to not just wing it.

“I pestered these poor guys with probably the silliest of questions for the better part of a year and a bit,” Siemsen says. “But I’m not one to sit on the sidelines until I learn it all. I’m one to get in the game and learn as I go. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s bad. I don’t know. But I’ve found what the formula is right now, so why change it? These guys are buying horses that are winning in the colours, and it’s on rinse and repeat now.”

The Black Soil colours are distinctive, unmistakeable even. Niedorp was the first to carry them, and if you look at them correctly, the upside-down A is, in fact, a horse’s head with

two eyes, two ears and a blaze. When you see it, you can’t see anything else. When Skirt The Law won the Magic Millions 2YO Classic, she replaced the black livery with pink to represent her allfemale syndicate, and it was a day that none of them will forget. The filly pinned her ears and set her neck to win by two lengths from a typically sharp, typically quick Magic Millions field.

“It’s like winning a Group One,” Gollan says. “It’s not a Group One but it feels like one. It’s such a hard race to win. You buy a horse a year earlier, even within the year sometimes, and you think about all the thousands of people that are buying horses to win this race. Most people are harbouring ambitions to get back to the Gold Coast for it, but it’s an awfully hard thing to win.”

On the verandah of the Eureka homestead, it’s pushing mid-afternoon. The light is changing, shifting quietly to the west, and Siemsen and Gollan have planes to catch. It’s almost a twohour push back to Brisbane.

Nearby in the yards, Bleu Zebra is waiting to go back out with her colt foal by Stay Inside, and somewhere on Eureka, Niedorp is strolling around in the Queensland sun with her filly by I Am Invincible. So too Miami Fleiss in foal to Zoustar. They’re just three of the rockstars coming through for Black Soil Bloodstock, a company that is only just getting going.

“The exciting side of it is there are still fillies coming off the track,” McAlpine says. “We’ve really only retired three of them so far, and I could name five or six that are going to come to the barn when they’re done. So from only a small broodmare band of about five, we bred two Group Two winners last year and we’ve bred five stakes winners. It feels like we’re punching well above our weight.”

In simple terms, that’s a stakes winner a year since 2018. It’s unusual, and McAlpine says as much. Siemsen’s eyes, pale like a glass of water, light up, while nothing seems to surprise Tony Gollan. Their differences are what make these men an interesting set, and outside of the bloodstock and business, the banter is thick and the mateship good.

“We never argue, at least not over the horses,” Gollan says, and Siemsen chimes in. “There’s no point arguing with Tony,” and they laugh like old friends all over again.