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2022 Gulf Festival Special Mohammed & Abdulla bin Fahad Al-Attiyah
Munir Du Soleil wins HH The Amir Silver Sword in 2021 ©QREC After the success of Munir Du Soleil in the 2021 HH The Amir Silver Sword, the brothers Mohammed and Abdulla bin Fahad Al-Attiyah are looking forward to this year’s HH The Amir Sword Festival. They also have their sights firmly set on more international competition and are continuing to invest in developing their breeding programme. Having always taken an interest in racing, initially as a hobby, they soon realised that they needed to move on, to race locally was not enough, they wanted to be competing on the global stage. Visiting the international races, they saw what they needed to do to get to that level, and began by starting their own breeding programme, under the banner of MBF (for Mohammed bin Fahad) and investing in young racehorses with good bloodlines. Though their horses race in different silks, they see themselves as a team, which also extends to their first cousins at Al Wasmiyah Stud, whose focus is on thoroughbreds. As Mohammed explains: “We
are like one team, working together. There is also no rivalry between my brother and I. When the time comes to select horses to run in our colours, we discuss it and choose which ones we like, we are not competitive between ourselves, it is all for the family.” Discussing sourcing their horses Mohammed says: “We look at all the sales, mares, foals, everything, but we also go to the trainers every year. We take around two to three months in Europe, just going around each trainer looking at all the horses, to see the next generation and what might be suitable to buy.” With Munir Du Soleil, Abdulla takes up the story saying: “We were at Thomas Fourcy’s and saw him in training. Before his first race, we bought fifty percent and we said to Lisa [owner-breeder Lisa Deymonaz] that we need to see how he runs, if he did something special, then we would buy the remainder.”
THE ARABIAN RACEHORSE
