New Zealand Bloodstock identity Mike Kneebone has a live Blue Diamond contender with Field Of Play while Tim Rowe also speaks to American owner John Stewart about buying into Australian software company Pedigrees360.
By rights, Field Of Play should have been in Hong Kong preparing for the later season griffin races.
Instead, the Hunter Valley-bred, twice-sold two-year-old is heading towards the Blue Diamond for Trent Busuttin and Natalie Young as the Cranbourne trainers chase their second juvenile Group 1 victory in five years. They won the Blue Diamond five years ago with Tagaloa.
And Hong Kong is off the agenda - at least for now.
Field Of Play was bought by Hong Kong trainer Jamie Richards and bloodstock agent Andrew Williams at the 2024 New Zealand Bloodstock yearling sale for $500,000, providing pinhookers Nick and Nicky White of Kaha Nui Farm with a nice return on the $255,000 they paid for the son of Deep Field as a weanling.
That’s when Mike Kneebone enters the story of FIeld Of Play, acting under his Patella Bloodstock banner.
The NZB business development manager and auctioneer was asked to manage the equine interests of Field Of Play’s owners after they called off their immediate plans for Hong Kong.
“Andy Williams and Jamie Richards are both obviously very, very good judges and buy some beautiful horses,” Kneebone revealed.
“They selected him at Karaka and the idea was for him to go up to Hong Kong on a PPG (private purchase griffin permit).
“Then the owners had a change of heart and decided that they would like to race a few in Australia, mainly around (waiting until they) gained permits and things in Hong Kong.
“So, they thought that they'd take a step back and race a few in Australia and they asked me to come on board and manage their horses and that's how it came about.”
The owners, who Kneebone met through clients in Singapore, also have horses with Bjorn Baker at Warwick Farm and John O’Shea and Tom Charlton at Randwick while some horses are being trained in New Zealand.
A Lib Petanga-bred Zoustar colt out of the Listed-winning and Group 1-placed mare Evalina, who sold for $725,000 at Karaka to Richards and Williams, is also part of the Patella Express Racing portfolio as is a $700,000 Super Seth half-brother to the stakes winners Zourion and Pearl Of Alsace.
Field Of Play wasn’t nominated for the Karaka Millions series, which rules the gelding out of a return to Zealand and to Ellerslie for the rich sales-restricted two-year-old race.
“I was going to say it’s unfortunate, but we knew a long time ago that it was the case,” Kneebone said.
“Once we'd taken over the management of the horses, they hadn’t been nominated - this horse and a couple of others - for Karaka Millions or any of the series in New Zealand because they were destined to go to Hong Kong.
“At that stage no one was none the wiser really.”
Field Of Play was heavily backed, firming from $3.8 to $2.70 in the last half an hour of betting at Moonee Valley, living up to his impressive jumpout performances, three of them last preparation and two leading into last Saturday’s 1200m juvenile race.
“To tell you the honest truth, I got on him at $8 early, but I put $50 a win on him, so it doesn't make any difference to me,” Kneebone said.
“I'm not a punter unfortunately, but hopefully somebody with a bit more betting smarts than me might have got a fair bit out of him.”
Being a son of Deep Field, one of the most popular sires in Hong Kong in recent years, offers for Field Of Play wouldn’t be unexpected.
“The owners are certainly open to sales, but also it's not easy to get a good horse, especially an early two-year-old that's got a bit of potential,” Kneebone said.
“So, we'll just weigh things up as we go along. Nothing's off the table as far as that's concerned.”
Kneebone won’t be at the Gold Coast for the Magic Millions. He will be observing the season-opening sale from Hong Kong where he will be canvassing owners and trainers ahead of late January’s NZB Karaka sale.
Stewart takes a 360 view on racing
US racehorse owner John Stewart has made his fortune by astutely investing in businesses.
The MiddleGround Capital founder’s wealth has allowed him to indulge in the racing industry, and in a big way, but it’s not just stud farms and horses he has been investing in.
Stewart recently took control of the Australian company Pedigrees360.com, a company which promises “a fresh approach to pedigree analysis that harnesses the power of machine learning”.
Pedigrees360 was established in 2022 by Peter Stewart, Graham Watson and pedigree expert Leo Tsatsaronis.
Stewart first met with Tsatsaronis, who was one of the founders of another pedigree mating tool G1 Goldmine, and the fellow co-founders of Pedigrees360 when he was in Sydney to watch Storm Boy contest the Golden Slipper.
Negotiations gathered pace in September with a deal recently completed for Stewart to acquire 100 per cent of the company.
“I think it's a really good business that has really good technology behind it and technology is something that we need to be relying on more in the industry,” Stewart said.
The entrepreneur is confident that Pedigrees360 will find favour with leading breeders internationally and he has plans to expand on its capabilities to include elements such as owner communication and race planning.
Stewart, who is on his way to Australia for next week’s Magic Millions, has horses in training in the US, Europe and Australia and he believes the industry in the northern hemisphere can learn a lot from how trainers Down Under conduct their communication with their clients.
“We actually have an app that we use and our trainers use, so we get videos of their workouts and breezes, and we get all of that kind of information, but we don’t receive the personalised commentary we get from Ciaron (Maher) or one of the guys who have our horses down there,” he said.
“What working on a global basis helps me to do is to see the way that different things are handled in these different countries and then I can aggregate the best of all the worlds together.”
At the time of launching the Pedigrees360 business in May 2022, Tsatsaronis said the software was a powerful tool that helped predict the likely outcome of a mating.
“Using AI and machine learning, the program has shown a very high degree of accuracy in predicting which pedigree combinations will produce the champions and which will produce the perennial maidens,” Tsatsaronis said.
“It is obviously vitally important to be able to identify both, fast and slow. This is particularly the case when many of the slow ones may be superficially well bred. The program can provide an extremely powerful tool to assist buyers in avoiding such yearlings and assist breeders in not breeding slow ones in the first place."
