Issue 25, September 10
Bart Cummings’ exciting colt So You Think, pictured as a yearling at the 2008 Karaka Premier Yearling Sale.
The colt Bart wanted When Windsor Park Stud’s marketing manager, the effervescent Michael Moran, was supervising Bart Cummings’s viewing of the farm’s draft at the 2008 Karaka Premier Yearling Sale, the wily trainer was showing interest in the stock of first season sire High Chaparral, a champion son of the great Sadler’s Wells, and a likely source of future Melbourne Cup winners. None had impressed him until a strapping colt from the mare Triassic stepped out between the barns. “Now you’re talking,” Cummings said as he circled the colt. Moran had a special reason to take note of Cummings’s thoughts about the colt, because he bred him. Cummings stuck firm and paid, through agent Duncan Ramage, NZ$110,000 for the colt for long-time client and friend Dato Tan Chin Nam – a good result for Moran and his
partners, but half what he expected. “John McArdle opened the bidding at $100,000 but his client, who was on the phone, went cold, so he didn’t bid again. At least, we knew the colt was going to the right stable,” Moran said. The colt has emerged as one of the most exciting horses in training, and Cummings, it is said, has privately labelled So Yo u T hin k as the best horse he has trained since Saintly. Last Saturday, So You Think came with monster strides to just fail to overhaul More Than Great in track record time in the Listed Ming Dynasty Stakes (1400m) at Randwick. Moran paid $16,000 for Triassic (b m 1990, Tights (USA)-Astral Row (NZ), by Long Row (GB)) at the 2005 Easter Broodmare Sale, in foal to Danehill’s moderately performed brother Nuclear Freeze. “She is a beautiful
looking mare who throws great foals, but she has been unlucky at stud. Her progeny have ability, but she hasn’t, until now, left the horse she deserves,” Moran said. “I bought her because she was a great racehorse. She won the (1994, Group 2) Sir Tristram Classic and should have won the (1994, Group 2) Royal Stakes. She was the ideal mare to bring back to New Zealand to put to a horse like High Chaparral.” Triassic, now 19, missed to High Chaparral in 2006, she has a yearling colt by Elusive City and she was mated in 2008 to the Danehill son Spartacus. Moran said the mare, who has been bred in recent years by partners Piper Farm, will return to High Chaparral this season around the time her son could be running in the Group 1 Victoria Derby. DANNY POWER
When Brent and Judy Hudson, of Lustre Lodge, at Jilliby, near Wyong, bought the young imported mare Asp en Falls they were investing in thoroughbred royalty. Aspen Falls (USA) (ch m 2001, Hennessy (USA)-River Crossing (USA), by Affirmed (USA)), as her name suggests, is very closely related to one of the great broodmares in history, Fall Aspen (m 1976, Pretense (USA)-Change Water (USA), by Swaps (USA)), who is a halfsister to Aspen Falls’ dam. Fall Aspen, a Group1 winner, is the dam of four Group 1 winners – Timber Country, Fort Wood, Hamas and Colorado Dancer – and another five Group and Listed winners, including the successful Victorian stallion Bianconi, and is the granddam of champion Dubai Millennium. Aspen Falls was imported by a client of Amarina Farm, near Denman, put into foal to Exceed And Excel, and put on to the market. “She’s a small, very strongly-built mare, and all her foals are small,” Judy Hudson said. One of those small foals caught the eye of Coolmore’s international buyer Demi O’Byrne, who paid $230,000 for a Fastnet Rock filly at the 2008 Inglis Easter Yearling Sale. That filly, Irish Lights, has emerged as a likely spring star after her powerhouse first-up win at Flemington last Saturday. Lustre Lodge is a beautifullyappointed boutique breeding farm that houses only 23 mares – just the place for a little thoroughbred princess to find the perfect home.