🔒 🔒 Ciaron, the King, the Cup and the kicker

Will Bourne takes no credit for selecting Melbourne Cup winner Point Of Law, but some at least for negotiating a tricky purchase process with King Charles’ racing team.

Bourne, Ciaron Maher’s long-time head of bloodstock, says any Australian buyer scanning Europe for a stayer would have picked out the prodigiously talented son of Frankel as a potential purchase.

“I mean, he was very obvious, like very obvious,” Bourne said. “You’re not being creative by buying him.”

Point Of Law ran fourth in the Queen’s Vase at Royal Ascot before winning the Bahrain Trophy, and both races have been reliable sources for Australian stables.

“The Bahrain Trophy and the Queen’s Vase at Royal Ascot, they’re two races that are throwing up very good horses, like Circle of Fire came out of the Queen’s Vase, so did Birdman,” Bourne said.

“Royal Supremacy raced in the Bahrain Trophy 12 months before Point of Law, so they’re common form lines for Australia.”

Circle Of Fire, also bought from the royal operation, won the 2024 Sydney Cup for Maher while Birdman won this year’s Doomben Cup for Chris Waller, and Royal Supremacy has won The Metropolitan and Q22 since coming out of the 2024 Bahrain Trophy.

“We weren’t geniuses finding them,” Bourne said. “It’s just having the owners to support you to buy them. You’ve got to have the belief to go, this is a horse everybody’s going to come after.”

The deal took two attempts. Maher said his stable made an offer after Royal Ascot.

“We made the offer, nothing really happened. And then he ran again. We upped the offer and they accepted it,” the trainer said.

That second run was the Bahrain Trophy win on July 9. The sale was announced on August 13 without a price. Bourne was pressed on Tuesday but said non-disclosure agreements prevent him from even giving a range.

Outsiders estimated the deal for the colt was worth at least $4 million.

Bourne is unmoved by the royal mystique and said the deal, which involved the King’s racing manager John Warren, was like any other.

“Everyone’s made a big deal out of buying off the King,” he said. 

He noted that others, including Gai Waterhouse, had bought Group 1 winners from the same source.

“They try to be commercial,” he said. “No matter how rich you are, they try and, you know, get some money back in.”

So commercial, in fact, that King Charles will see some financial benefit from the Cup winner. The sale contract, it seems, had a kicker, similar to those in colts syndicates in Australia.

Exactly how much, again, is not revealed, but it may be some sort of compensation for the loss of a Cup winner, a feeling Bourne and Maher know too well, having let future Cup winner Half Yours slip through their hands a couple of years ago and end up with Tony and Calvin McEvoy.

The money for Point Of Law came from a regular group of owners. Bourne named Damien Degenhardt, Peter Butts, John O’Neill and Peter Cook among them.

“They are as loyal as they come,” he said.

Point Of Law raced in Butts’ colours, and the Cup was his second Group 1 win. “He is a beautiful man,” Bourne said. “He’s a good mate and a great owner.”

Bourne says spending at that level weighs more heavily on the person facilitating the purchase than on the owners.

“You do get the murmurs of being called stupid a bit by paying that much for the horse, and that rings in your mind a bit,” he said.

“It’s not like excitement when winning, it’s more relief when you pay that much for them, because it’s that expensive, and you’re spending other people’s money. You’d rather lose your own money than lose someone else’s money.

“I thought this was a big deal to buy a horse of that calibre, with that, you know, low miles on the clock, and there wasn’t much talk about him.”

Point Of Law’s limited race experience was also the main risk. In August, Bourne said the colt’s single preparation was “probably the one question mark heading into the immediate spring”. 

After the Cup, he said that view had not changed.

“He had the class in the field, had the stamina, he was the best horse in the race, it was going to be the inexperience that was going to get him beat,” he said.

Maher was less concerned about the potential negatives. 

“I’ve never heard Ciaron so confident about a horse, and I was trying to talk him out of it,” Bourne said. 

“He told me a week out he would win the Melbourne Cup.”

Point Of Law missed a Caulfield Cup start as an emergency. He then won the Geelong Cup on his Australian debut and was penalised 2kg to 53kg.

At his sixth career start, he won the Melbourne Cup by three lengths and three-quarters under Ethan Brown, leading home stablemates Zahrann and Juja Kibo for the first trainer’s trifecta in the race’s history.

Maher’s connection with the royal stable goes beyond business. He already trained the royal-owned Gilded Water when his mother, Eileen, wrote to the King and Queen.

“She just said what it meant to her, her community, and thanked them for obviously giving me the opportunity to train a horse for them,” Maher said.

“And she just wrote it in her own words. It pulled on a few heart strings with them, I think, and they really enjoyed it.”

The royal invitation to go racing was initially for Maher and his partner Alice, who was pregnant and decided not to travel.

Maher and his mother were royal guests at Royal Ascot in June instead, the meeting where Point Of Law ran fourth.

“When I said I was going to be travelling with my mother, they said, ‘we would love to have her there’,” Maher said. 

“Mum’s first time overseas and there she is sitting up next to King Charles for lunch at Windsor Castle.”