Independent bloodstock agents Rob Roulston and Mark Player may seem like an odd couple trekking around the yearling sales together, but their business alliance just seems to work.
Racing industry allrounders, together they are PR Thoroughbreds, using their collective knowledge developed over decades in an attempt to crack code that is the colts fund market.
Roulston and Player may not have yet hit the jackpot - a stallion-making Group 1 win by one of their horses at two or three - but from small numbers their strike-rate of finding a quality horse is worthy of mention and they just could be on the verge of unearthing their flag-bearing horse.
Acting for a small band of wealthy clients, including Gerry Ryan, Neil Werrett and Colin Madden, for the past four years “PR” has been playing under the radar, purchasing no more than five yearlings each sales season in their quest to land that $20 million colt.
The pair are well connected. Roulston is a former Racing Victoria chairman, while Player is on the current RV board.
Player and Roulston’s clients know what it’s like to own a good horse. Importantly, they are accustomed to the volatility of owning horses and they also have the patience required to ride out racing’s highs and lows.
🌟 VINNIE: New Stakes winner 🌟
— Yarraman Park Stud (@yarramanpark) November 30, 2024
GARZA BLANCA defies unsuitable conditions @MelbRacingClub to take the Listed Doveton Stakes.
▫️Congrats @cmaherracing who trained a Vinnie 🥇 & 🥉 (I Am Unstoppable), both are @mmsnippets Gold Coast yearlings! pic.twitter.com/JwJGTS4C2p
Ryan, of course, co-owned Americain, the 2010 Melbourne Cup winner, among a host of others. Werrett and Madden famously raced Black Caviar together and they have enjoyed success with countless other stakes-winning horses including with Ole Kirk, who was purchased through Player.
They aren’t getting ahead of themselves - far from it - but one of PR Thoroughbreds’ “class of 2023”, the Lindsay Park-trained Imaginate, will have his first start in Saturday’s $500,000 Inglis Nursery at Randwick.
He shows undeniable talent.
More will be gleaned on Saturday as to how he stacks up against his 2022-born peers, with the result to help shape Imaginate’s short-term targets.
In its 15-year history, the sales-restricted Inglis Nursery has compiled an impressive honour roll.
Golden Slipper winners Mossfun (2013) and She Will Reign (2016) have won the race as have Newgate Farm-based sires Extreme Choice (2015) and Wild Ruler (2019).
Coolmore’s Acrobat, whose career was cut short by injury as he was preparing for a Slipper campaign, won the Nursery in 2020 in what would turn out to be his one and only race start.
PR Thoroughbreds’ Imaginate, a Yulong-bred and sold son of champion sire Written Tycoon, won a Traralgon barrier trial on December 5 where he put four lengths on runner-up Seychelles, the $1.6 million sister to Group 1-winning Proisir filly Prowess.
The Hayes brothers of Ben, JD and Will had already mapped out plans for the Nursery with Imaginate, but his official trial was enough to convince them to put the two-year-old on the truck to Sydney from Lindsay Park’s Pakenham base.
“It's going to be an interesting experiment, really, sending him up there, because the field looks pretty smart,” Roulston says of the chances of Imaginate, a $12 chance in early betting for the Nursery.
“There's four or five chances, a couple that have already been winners and a couple of others that have won trials, but he won his trial nicely, and he trialled OK in a couple of unofficial jump-outs before that as well.
“He's got good ability, but Saturday will answer a few questions for us, whether he's up to that good level or not.”
Team PR’s colts fund cuts a lower profile than many of the others, and that accounts for average spend as well as the types of horses Player and Roulston target.
If the syndicate does land an elusive Group 1-winning colt, it’s more likely to be in a Golden Rose or Caulfield Guineas as a three-year-old than in a Golden Slipper.
“We try to buy five colts for a maximum of about $2.5 million each year. You always hope that you get the Group 1, but … our guys love racing good horses, if the horse is no good, obviously we sell it straight away,” Roulston said.
“But if it's OK, we can maybe trade it to Hong Kong. If the trainer says, ‘look, it's a good class horse, you can race it in Group company’, we can keep them and race them if they’re capable of paying their way.”
Fitting that mould has been Group 3 winner Run Harry Run, the lightly raced Yorkshire, five-time winner Bel Air, the Group 2-placed Foujita San and last-start Listed winner Garza Blanca, all horses raced by the PR syndicate in their blue, red and white colours during its short existence.
"You always hope that you get the Group 1, but … our guys love racing good horses, if the horse is no good, obviously we sell it straight away" - Rob Roulston
Offers from Hong Kong were made for the majority of the aforementioned horses, but they were knocked back by the owners who preferred to experience the enjoyment of racing metropolitan class horses.
“We don't typically buy those ones that look very precocious,” Roulston said.
“As you probably know, the big guys get on them and they're going for a million dollars, which makes them hard to buy.
“So, the ones we buy usually aren't quite as precocious. I have to say, Imaginate’s done a good job to get this far for us because he didn't look like a really early two-year-old.”
Those assumptions made at yearling sales time are just that, nothing can be said with absolute certainty.
However, Team PR is hoping to have an extra spring in their step courtesy of the Yulong-bred Inglis Easter graduate Imaginate when the pair turns up on the Gold Coast in about three weeks’ time for the Magic Millions sale to reload.
“It's going quite well and the guys are happy, so we're probably giving it the same crack again in 2025 using the same sort of formula,” Roulston says.
