While Northern Meteor’s journey to champion sire status was cut short by a fatal bout of colic, 12 years later, almost to the day, Widden will feel some degree of atonement when his first-crop son Zoustar is crowned Australia's champion sire of 2024/25.
The night of July 30, 2013, will live in the mind of Widden's Antony Thompson forever.
“Probably because he’d been sick for so long,” says the Widden studmaster. “We’d spent so much time with him, and he was so patient and understanding of everything, so when we finally lost him, personally I found it very hard.”
Northern Meteor was not even eight years old, had only four stud seasons behind him and was two days away from champion first-season sire honours. It was the greatest tale of what might have been.
“He was not just an amazing horse,” Thompson says. “He was an amazing person, too. All of us on the farm felt it very badly when he was gone.”
That Northern Meteor was champion sire material, Thompson is in no doubt, suggested by the horse’s early two-year-old numbers. When his first crop hit racetracks in the 2012/13 racing season, the stallion wasn’t just a first-season sensation. He posted the highest number of Australian two-year-old winners behind only Choisir.
From just four crops numbering 443 foals, Northern Meteor produced 24 stakes winners, of which six were Group 1 winners including Zoustar, Shooting To Win and Speak Fondly. Among his total Group winners were another future star of the breeding barn, Deep Field.
This was a rare stallion, and Thompson knew it.
“I do look back with enormous sadness at his loss and think what he might have become, because from four crops he has left a huge impact on the industry,” he says.
The biggest impact of that is Zoustar. The first-crop son of Northern Meteor will be 15 on August 1, the first sire in 130 years to top the table as a third-generation Australian-bred stallion. The last horse was Grand Flaneur in 1894/95.
Also, for the first time in a long time, the sire table has welcomed a changing of the guard with previous champions Snitzel, I Am Invincible and Written Tycoon trailing him in, along with third-placed Pride Of Dubai. It paves the way for a youthful Zoustar to dominate for many seasons.
“Vinnie and Written Tycoon were doing it late in their careers, so to see Zoustar doing it a bit earlier is encouraging,” Thompson says. “There’s certainly an opportunity for him to dominate for several years, and the fact that he’s done it this year without an Everest or Melbourne Cup winner, or a winner of one of those big outlier races, shows you he’s pretty solid.”
A quick review of the records shows that Zoustar is tracking well against the likes of Snitzel, who was also 14 years old when he won the first of his four general sires’ titles. By comparison, I Am Invincible was 17 and Written Tycoon 18.
Going back further, Danehill was just eight when he won the first of his nine titles, and if Thompson casts his mind back to Widden’s previous champion sires, Zoustar is on trend. Marscay won his first general sires’ title when he was 13, the same age as Vain, while Bletchingly was nine years old.
Comparing eras isn’t always useful when the modern stallion landscape is so different. However, for Widden Stud, which stood its last champion sire, Marscay, in the 1992/93 season, it’s been a while between drinks.
Zoustar is Australia's newest champion sire. (Photos: Bronwen Healy - The Image Is Everything)
“Personally, Zoustar is a huge satisfaction,” Thompson says. “The history of Widden means that generations of Thompsons have stood champion sires of the Australian turf, and, growing up as a kid, we had a dream run thanks mostly to what my father had put in place with Vain, Bletchingly and Marscay.
“I see my position as a bit of a caretaker of the farm. I really wanted to put my stamp on it and improve things where I could, like the broodmare band and the facilities. But, more importantly, to have a champion sire is really the engine of the farm.”
Champion stallions are not made on their own. Thompson acknowledges the entire Zoustar journey for Widden, which began when they secured the horse and includes the shareholders, farm staff, breeders and yearling buyers.
However, the real story of Zoustar began much earlier than that for bloodstock agent Suman Hedge. In fact, it began with a Toyota Camry and a Gold Coast speeding ticket.
Hedge tells The Straight: “The year that Zoustar was at Magic Millions (2012) he was in the Kulani Park draft, and I was there buying a few yearlings for Sheriff Iskander. I had about $300,000 in the budget and I was really nervous because it was the first time I’d been given that opportunity.
“There were a couple in the Kulani draft that I really liked and one was the Northern Meteor colt from Zouzou. As we were getting through the week. I kept coming back to look at him, but I was told by Rhys Smith (of Kulani Park) that he was probably going to make a bit too much for me.”
When Zoustar was passed in, Hedge didn’t even notice. He had refocused on other yearlings.
“I was checking the results the next morning from the hotel and I noticed Rhys had essentially bought him back. I rang Sheriff straight away and told him this was the best horse I’d ever seen, that he had to buy this horse.”
With Iskander’s blessing, Hedge slid into his shoes, slid into his rented Camry and hauled ass, a little too quickly, from Surfers Paradise to Bundall. In the two kilometres between the two places, he was pulled over by Queensland police and issued a speeding ticket.
No one will tell him it wasn’t worth it because Hedge bought Zoustar on behalf of Iskander Racing for $140,000, the horse won two Group 1ne races and nine of his six race starts, and is this week champion sire of Australia.
“I’ll never condone speeding,” Hedge says. “I normally never speed,” and he stops short at saying he would do it all again in a heartbeat.
Few realise that Hedge had been made redundant by Iskander only months before Zoustar’s sale. Though it felt like he had been fired, albeit amicably (Iskander got Hedge a job at Eliza Park), he had been asked to stay on by Iskander until January to buy yearlings at Magic Millions.
“I remember feeling really perplexed by it,” Hedge says. “I was losing my job but Sheriff still wanted me to buy yearlings for him. He told me to go to the Gold Coast, buy something good and it will turn things around for me. And, of course, it did.”
Racing is full of sliding doors stories like this, but Zoustar’s is better than most. An embattled bloodstock agent got lucky; a passed-in yearling that might have been the best in the sale; a now champion sire from a line of champion sires.
“The best analogy I can give you about Zoustar being champion sire is like watching your child on graduation day,” Hedge says. “It feels a bit like that because we’ve been with him for so long and he has gone through so many things and achieved so much.
“But this is his crowning achievement, winning the general sires. It’s the hardest thing to do, and it’s a lot harder these days with all the pop-up races convoluting the prizemoney table.”
Zoustar won his championship over $3.5 million clear of I Am Invincible in progeny prizemoney. He posted 17 stakes winners in the 2024/25 season, headed by the Group 1-winning pair of Joliestar and Schwarz. His highest earner was Growing Empire, who pocketed $2.83 million with prolific placings that included a third in The Everest. Both Schwarz and Growing Empire enter their own stud careers in 2025.
Of Zoustar’s 10 seasonal Group winners, they were in races like the Newmarket, Kingsford Smith Cup, William Reid and Gilgai Stakes, among others. In other words, Zoustar did it the hard way.
“He’s done it on his own merits, and I think last year was the same when he was pretty close to I Am Invincible,” Hedge says. “He has won it with a good margin and, with his age profile, I think he’s going to be pretty strong for the next two or three years at least, and until the likes of Farnan and Ole Kirk start to take up the running.”
