Tasmania is getting much better at recognising its vibrant thoroughbred history, but it is its prosperity in the future which is under question after a difficult yearling sale has set breeders on the back foot.
Longford, a sleepy town about 20km south of Launceston, home to recent champions like The Cleaner and Still A Star, boasts Australia’s oldest continually operational racetrack.
Last week, dignitaries and diehards gathered to unveil a large roadside information board paying tribute to that history.
The sign, framed by a couple of inviting-looking picnic tables and with words from local journalist Peter Staples and pictures from renowned local artist Michael McWilliams, sets out the remarkable history of a little race club that, over the years, has refused to die.
It is a club that stages one meeting a year, on New Year’s Day, while the rest of the time is a training base for a handful of horsemen and women.
Around 45km up the road, a statue of 19th-century champion Malua stands next to the information centre at Deloraine. Bred and raised at the nearby Calstock estate, he is a horse well worth immortalising, both brilliant and stoic, winning a Newmarket Handicap and a Melbourne Cup in the same year, then heading to stud before returning to the track to win a Geelong Cup and a Grand National Hurdle.
He embodied what they call ‘Tassie Tough’ in these parts.
Tassie racing is dotted with equine heroes but horses these days tend to be immortalised with races named in their honour, not statues and landmarks. The new sign, partly funded by the local council, erected outside the Longford racecourse seems an anachronism in an era where racing has been encouraged to fade into the background.
In a particularly historic part of a particularly historic state, it stands up against that, boldly proud of its role and contribution to the local community.
Between Longford and Deloraine sits the heartland of the Tasmanian thoroughbred industry, the Meander Valley, where most of the 300 horses produced in Tasmania each year are foaled. There are few better places to raise a horse in Australia.
It is also where the Tasmanian Yearling Sale is held each February.
Two weeks ago, Quercus Park was the centre of Tasmania’s biggest music festival, Party In The Paddock, while in a couple of months’ time, it will host 50,000 people for Agfest, an agricultural show/field day of such scale it attracts one in 10 of the state’s population.
The humble yearling sale, which relocated from Launceston four years ago, has no chance of matching such revelry, but for a couple of years there, in the aftermath of Mystic Journey and Still a Star, and in the middle of post-pandemic bloodstock bubble, things were looking bright for the hard-working folk of the Tasmanian thoroughbred industry.
But the tide has turned and the numbers don’t lie about the trajectory.
In the space of three years, the Tasmanian Yearling Sale went from a gross of $4.2 million to less than $2 million. Put simply, the 2025 harvest that netted the breeders less than half of what it did three years ago.
The wave of genuine optimism has disappeared and been replaced by a stoicism, the sense that the events of Monday’s sale were something to be withstood, rather than celebrated. To the local vendors’ credit, they passed in fewer horses than last year, with a lot of deals getting done after horses had initially gone through the ring unsold.
Magic Millions conducts the sale, but it does not set the market. For managing director Barry Bowditch, the expectations weren’t high, but he saw a lack of buyer confidence in what was on offer.
“I think there was a craving for the right product, but how do we give these guys (breeders) confidence to either go and improve their broodmare bands, potentially buy a stallion that can set up the state again, or support this sale with a better product?” he said.
“These are the three questions, whether it be Tasbreeders, TasRacing, or Magic Millions, need to be asking of each other and working together to give confidence to this marketplace.”
The lack of new commercial stallion options for Tasmania has been a problem for some time. While there have been additions to the stallion market, and 13 sires standing in total in the state in 2024, none have been of the level to lift the profile of the local Stud Book.
Given there is a ceiling of around $12,000 for a service fee, it means the most you could possibly consider paying for a stallion would be $800,000. That won’t get you the first bid when it comes to most stallion prospects in Australia.
Without a viable commercial stallion offering, there is not the incentive to re-invest in broodmares. Of the 126 catalogued lots this week, 21, or 16.6 per cent, of them were out of mares that also had yearlings in the 2022 edition.
Noted syndicator Joe O’Neill of Prime Thoroughbreds has been coming to Tassie to buy yearlings for over 20 years and purchased one of the top lots on Monday, a Needs Further filly for $80,000. He sees the lack of re-investment in new families as one of the keys to the decline.
“I think the biggest issue they have got here is if they don’t get a big enough earn out of the sale, then they can’t go and buy the quality of mares they need to buy,” he said.
“If you look through the book, most of the yearlings are from older mares and from older families. They are not putting new blood into the stud and into the sale.”
It has also become a legitimate business practice for the best Tassie-bred yearlings to be offered at mainland sales. Armidale Stud and Grenville Stud, the two biggest, sold 14 yearlings outside of Tasmania in 2024.
But there are other trends at play here.
On a macro level, trainers and syndicators aren’t willing to take on horses they are worried they can’t sell. Marketability is key while anything less than a perfect product on x-rays or scope will be knocked back.
That impacts yearlings at the lower end of the market more than others. That trend is particularly acute for mainland buyers. In 2022 they spent $3 million in Tasmania, this year just over $1 million.
The local buyers’ market has simply not stepped up, purchasing 41 horses this week compared to 51 in 2022. With the exception of three to four trainers, locals just don’t have the ownership bases or the risk appetite to buy on spec.
Bren O’Brien
This figure wasn’t helped by one notable local buyer boycotting the sale because of a disagreement with Tasracing.
Discontent from the training ranks over integrity issues has rumbled on for several years, although a change in structure came into place from February 1. Breeders are hoping this will improve confidence in the local racing product.
But there is also uncertainty about the future funding landscape of racing in the state. The government funding deed, which delivered around $34 million, nearly half of Tasracing’s revenue, last financial year, is set to expire in 2029.
“I think there was a craving for the right product, but how do we give these guys (breeders) confidence to either go and improve their broodmare bands, potentially buy a stallion that can set up the state again, or support this sale with a better product?" - Magic Millions managing director Barry Bowditch
While the state government and Tasracing say they are working towards a new agreement, there is no detail as yet what that may look like.
When you consider breeders are making decisions this year which will impact what horses they will bring to the yearling market in 2028, then the importance of long term certainty becomes clear.
Another major issue for the local breeders is the volume of horses bought by Tasmanian trainers through online sales. Those horses are traditionally easier to sell shares in and get to the racetrack a lot quicker.
“It's a short-term option, isn't it?” Bowditch said.
“One thing I'll say is when you look at the better horses in this state when they're two and three years old, they're coming out of this yearling sale. So, if they actually want to run in the right races and win the good races, they need to be coming to yearling sales and buying horses.”
Breeders have been telling Tasracing for several years that the class race system in Tasmania is too slanted towards benchmark racing. Changes have been made this season to better reward those who buy horses locally rather than online from the mainland, but it is a slow dial to turn.
O’Neill said he has also felt that the profile of who owns horses that race in Tasmania has changed significantly.
Bren O’Brien
“When I had 12 horses down here with Charlie Goggin, 70 per cent of the horses were owned by mainland owners, 30 per cent by Tasmanians, but now it's gone the other way around,” he said.
“The mainlanders that are here are only owning 10 per cent of the horses they have because they see it more attractive to race there, particularly in Victoria.”
Anecdotally, the Tasmanian foal crop of around 300 will decline significantly in 2025, with breeders already making decisions to rationalise their approach. They knew Monday’s difficult yearling result had been coming for at least the past six months.
With fewer horses being bred, questions over the quality of those on offer and whether mainland buyers have the same engagement as they once did, there are questions over how long Tassie can sustain a yearling sale.
Bowditch says Magic Millions, which is contracted until 2027, isn’t going anywhere, and there is a determination from all parties to get things back on track.
“I think it's important for us to do our best to have a yearling sale here in Tasmania. It's important to the ecosystem, it's important to Tasmania, it's important to the breeders,” he said.
“This is an event where plenty of people turn up and play a part. Magic Millions are in it with the breeders and Tasracing to do our best for them.”
For those who did buy this week, there was a sense that they had bought at considerable value. The story of Mystic Journey, the $11,000 yearling who earned over $4 million and was then purchased to breed in Japan, is still that light that carries the sale.
“I think the biggest issue they have got here is if they don’t get a big enough earn out of the sale, then they can’t go and buy the quality of mares they need to buy” - syndicator Joe O'Neill
There have been several Tassie sales in recent years where if you had bought the entire catalogue, you would have easily recouped your investment in prize money alone.
But while it is important to recognise the value of history, it doesn’t guarantee a future. The challenge is now back onto Tasracing, Magic Millions and the local breeders to make that happen.
