Gold Coast Stages Yearling Season Opener

GOLD COAST, Australia–Five days of selling for Books 1 and 2 of the Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale get underway on Wednesday at the sales company's headquarters on Australia's Gold Coast, and vendors were in optimistic mood on what was for many the third day of inspections on Monday. The nearby Gold Coast beaches make for an idyllic setting to kick off the Australian yearling sale season in the height of the Australian summer, and buyers from across the globe continued to comb through the 1,062 yearlings on offer under sunny skies and temperatures hovering around 30 degrees celsius.

“Inspections have been phenomenal since the horses started parading,” said Magic Millions's Barry Bowditch, who will take over as Managing Director after the Gold Coast sale, with Vin Cox departing to head up Godolphin Australia. “It's been a good buzz around, the buyers are telling us they're liking what they see. Vendors are saying the interest is strong and they're getting good numbers through their drafts. The weather is holding out for us and everyone is in a good frame of mind.”

Bowditch said last week on-farm inspections had reached record numbers for the yearlings shipping from the Hunter Valley–just over half the catalogue–and he said that interest has transferred to the sales grounds, with shoppers equally keen on seeing the offerings from other jurisdictions.

“The vendors that got in early that aren't from the Hunter Valley saw the same level of interest,” he said. “A lot of buyers want to do full drafts and look at every horse in the catalogue so those vendors outside the Hunter Valley had big inspections to start with. Now people are getting into their second looks and getting around them. There's great depth to the catalogue and I think there'll be a big spread of buyers.”

The Gold Coast Yearling Sale catalogue is up in numbers this year, and Bowditch was keen to stress that horses at all levels of the market have their place in Book 1, which runs Wednesday through Saturday evening and comprises 853 lots.

“We say whether you have A$30,000 to spend on a horse or A$1-million, there will be a horse in Book 1 for you,” he said. “We keep marketing the sale that way and we keep taking nice horses that aren't going to make a lot of money, because there's a purpose for those horses. They're still worthy of being in our sale and can go on to be good racehorses.”

The Magic Millions raceday, which takes place annually on the Saturday of the sale and which offers A$10-million in purses for the second time this year, annually produces plenty of resounding success stories, and one such this year could be Sunlight (Aus) (Zoustar {Aus}), who heads to the A$2-million Magic Millions 2YO Classic as one of the favourites. The filly was one of the members of her sire's first crop to sell well at this sale last year, bringing A$300,000 out of the Widden consignment, and she will race on Saturday for an all-women's syndicate, making her eligible for the A$500,000 Racing Women's bonus. One of the members of the ownership group is Katie Thompson, wife of Widden Stud owner Antony Thompson, and the latter said on Monday, “we're very excited. Zoustar has always been that sort of stallion that we believed would be a big and important stallion for us. To see him doing what he's doing already, early days, we're very excited.”

Of the inspections, Thompson added, “With still a day to go we've had terrific inspections. The regular buyers and supporters are all here and some interesting new faces as well.”

First-season sires are the subject of plenty of scrutiny and interest at sales across the world, and perhaps nowhere moreso than at Magic Millions, where yearlings from the first crops of horses like Sepoy (Aus) and Pierro (Aus) have commanded seven figures in recent years. One of last year's first-crop darlings was Arrowfield's six-time Group 1 winner Dundeel (NZ) (High Chaparral {Ire}), and while he has had just one starter at this early juncture, Arrowfield's John Messara was bullish about the stallion's prospects.

“A few trainers that have three to five of them are very keen on them,” he said. “I think those that have them are going to come and buy more because they're showing a lot of early raceability. They want to go, and they do things right. A couple of them have won trials already, but you wouldn't expect them to be sighted until the end of their 2-year-old, early 3-year-old seasons, but he's certainly showing all the positive signs and I'm very keen on him.”

Arrowfield this year debuts its shuttler Olympic Glory (Ire), the son of another successful dual-hemisphere sire, Choisir (Aus). Arrowfield will offer 11 of the 19 Olympic Glorys set for sale, including lot 24, a filly out of a full-sister to Grade I winner Marsh Side (Gone West). Arrowfield will also offer a strong team but its leading triumvirate of Redoute's Choice (Aus) and his sons Snitzel (Aus) and Not A Single Doubt (Aus).

“A well-known judge said he felt our colts was as good a run of colts as any other farm had, and they're mainly by proven stallions–Not A Single Doubt, Snitzel, Redoute's Choice,” Messara said. “We have the produce of a relatively new sire in Dundeel, who only has 2-year-olds, and we have the produce of Olympic Glory, which we're very pleased with. It's a mixed bag of horses from different origins, and with a couple very nice Lord Kanaloas, too [click here for more]. Overall we're very happy with the 58 horses we have here.”

Messara said inspections have been “pretty steady,” but said he expected them to pick up with a number of private Hong Kong buyers expected to arrive only on Monday.

“Due to racing commitments elsewhere we haven't seen all our Chinese clients yet, they're arriving in today, so that should be a bit more of a guide,” he said. “There's no reason not to be optimistic about this sale because every other sale around the world has been quite buoyant.”

Messara said Australia's vibrant racing scene and healthy industry structure is driving growth.

“Frankly we've got the best racing metrics here in terms of prizemoney to racing costs so we have good fundamentals to our racing industry and I expect that will draw more people to racing and to buying yearlings both from here and from overseas,” he said. “It's all based on pretty solid foundations. I know in other places it's more about the emotion of winning, but here you can actually get a result out of racing, so it's going to get a broader demographic involved.”

The aforementioned record-breaking champion sire Snitzel is understandably a regular feature at the top of the market of this and all major Australian yearlings sales, and John Muir of Milburn Creek offered three progeny of that sire as the highlights of his 12-horse draft, which rarely fails to produce a headline horse. They are lot 12, a filly out of La Fluorescent (NZ) (General Nediym {Aus}), lot 480, a full-brother to Group 1 winner and first-crop yearling sire Sizzling (Aus) and lot 767, a half-brother to world champion sprinter Starspangledbanner (Aus) (Choisir {Aus}) out of Makybe's excellent producer Gold Anthem (Aus) (Made of Gold {Aus}).

“We started parading horses two days ago and we've been extremely busy,” Muir said. “People have been, naturally, for their first looks and are coming back for their second and third. We'll soon find out who are the popular ones and who are not so popular.”

The sale begins at 10 a.m. local time Wednesday through Friday, at 6 p.m. after racing on Saturday and at 11 a.m. on Sunday.