In Zhang Yuesheng’s fast-paced Yulong world, things get done quickly.
Patience isn’t in the Chinese billionaire’s vernacular, so it will be of little surprise that negotiations to buy three-year-old colt Angel Capital, the $4 favourite for Saturday week’s Group 1 Australian Guineas, took no more than a week.
The sale of the lightly raced Group 2 winner, a transaction believed to be worth more than $4 million, was confirmed by Yulong on Tuesday via its social media channels.
Talks between the Yulong hierarchy and Angel Capital’s owners Upper Bloodstock and Gregory Ho started at the Inglis Classic Yearling Sale earlier this month and rapidly progressed to a multimillion dollar deal being signed, sealed and delivered soon after.
“It happens here at Yulong,” general manager Vin Cox tells The Straight soon after the new ownership of Angel Capital was announced.
Trained by Clinton McDonald, Angel Capital burst onto the scene with a last-to-first victory at Cranbourne in April and, after an all-too-short Brisbane winter campaign, he returned as a three-year-old to win the Listed McKenzie Stakes and the Group 3 Caulfield Guineas Prelude.
Yulong’s interest in Angel Capital was raised after the horse’s first-up Group 2 Autumn Stakes at Caulfield on February 8, the eve of the opening day of the Classic sale in Sydney.
“We've got ambitions that he will be on the roster … and he looks like a very exciting horse,” Cox says.
“I think the stallion himself, Harry Angel, was very popular right from the outset when he came to Darley back in my days there.
“He gets a good looking horse. Angel Capital was a very popular horse in the sale ring, and he's then gone on and done it on the racetrack.”
Upper Bloodstock’s Andy Lau and Ross Lao are known as traders and that motto was front of mind when they were approached about selling Angel Capital.
“We were informed that they (Yulong) were interested in the horse through someone else. They asked if he would be for sale and so we started thinking, ‘is it the right time to move him on?’,” Lao said.
“In the end we came up with the idea that we should move him on now (rather than waiting until after the Australian Guineas). We also want to have an image that we don't keep the good ones and just sell the bad ones. We sell everything.
“That's our business model to keep the company going and keep it successful.”
Under the terms of the sale of Angel Capital, Upper Bloodstock will retain breeding rights in the colt when he retires to stud.
A $400,000 Inglis Premier purchase by Upper Bloodstock from Mill Park Stud. Angel Capital is the equal second highest-priced southern hemisphere-bred yearling by Harry Angel. He is a half-brother to Hong Kong Group winner Senor Toba, a Queensland Derby runner-up before being exported to Asia, and the Dan O’Sullivan-trained Group 2 winner Berkeley Square.
Darley shuttler Harry Angel is also the sire of boom second crop three-year-old Private Harry and Stretan Angel, runner-up in last Saturday’s Group 1 Black Caviar Lightning at Flemington.
Trainer Nathan Doyle’s unbeaten colt Private Harry warmed up for his biggest test to date, the Group 1 The Galaxy at Rosehill next month, with an emphatic course proper barrier trial performance at the Sydney racecourse on Tuesday.
In doing so, Private Harry defeated multiple Group 1 winner Sunshine In Paris in the 1000m trial and if the last-start Sunlight winner does continue his winning ways stallion farms will be calling, if they haven’t been already.
As it is, such is the dominance of the big stud farms and colts syndicates, the number of colts on the open market are few and far between.
“That’s the thing, by the time you get away from Coolmore, China Horse Club, those astute names, us, well, there's not many scraps to fight over,” Cox says of the fiercely competitive colts market.
Underscoring Cox’s point is Saturday’s Blue Diamond Stakes, the first two-year-old Group 1 race of the Australian season, where three of the five colts - Tycoon Star, Devil Night and Tentyris - in the $2 million are owned by Yulong and Godolphin respectively.
Spirit Of Boom colt Extractor and Farnan’s first-crop son Olatunde are the only colts in the Blue Diamond not affiliated with a stallion farm.
