In this week's Rowe on Monday, Tim Rowe checks out the future plans for Yarradale Stud in Western Australia, taps into the Upper Bloodstock business model and recalls the moment Yulong paid $1.4 million for Blue Diamond winner Devil Night.
WA's Yarradale Stud prepares blueprint for future operations
A new stallion is part of the plan for leading West Australian stud Yarradale, but for now owner Lyn Sayers is happy to let the state’s premier sire Playing God help pay for the farm’s upkeep.
Since the death of mining magnate and passionate racing identity Ron Sayers in 2022, Yarradale Stud’s focus has been on sustainability and quality over quantity, with a concerted effort made last year to reinvest in new mares.
The late Ron Sayer’s wife Lyn has taken charge of Yarradale, a pristine property 40km northeast of Perth, and with expatriate Irishman Davy Hanratty as stud manager, they are the guiding influence on the farm’s future direction.
Owned by the Sayers’ since 1997, Yarradale stands Gingerbread Man, a son of Shamardal who has been on the roster since 2013, covering 62 mares last year at a fee of $5,500.
Another Yarradale stalwart, former Danzig shuttler War Chant, died last year.
But it’s Playing God, who stands at Clive and Brent Atwell’s Darling View Thoroughbreds, that is helping Yarradale map out its next five to 10 years.
Sayers owns a quarter share in Playing God, who stood for a state-record $49,500 last year. The sire’s influence on WA racing was once again demonstrated at last week’s Magic Millions Perth Yearling Sale, with his progeny accounting for $3.8 million or 21 per cent of sale’s gross of $18.536 million.
“Lyn's been chucked in at the deep end, whether she liked it or not unfortunately, but I'm very proud of how she grabbed the bull by both horns,” Hanratty tells this column of the two years since Ron’s death.
“We decided last year that we’d make a good stab at it and we went out and bought four new mares.
“Some of our mares are getting a bit long in the tooth, so we'll just start to change the herd and get some young mares and send some of these good young mares to Playing God, who's a sensation as we know.”
There’s arguably two ways to play the breeding game, on scale or a focus on smaller numbers and reducing overheads.
Hanratty says the vision for Yarradale is to focus on the latter.
“For us, it's all about quality over quantity and reducing the numbers,” he says.
“We may buy a stallion down the track and hopefully get a few farms on board. Obviously, you have to wait for the right one to appear. We're in no panic to do that.
“There's no point in just getting one for the sake of it. There's a lot of money in West Australia if you've got the right type of animal.”
Yarradale sold five yearlings in the Book 1 Perth sale, highlighted by a $400,000 colt by Playing God.
“We're very good at what we do, selling yearlings, so we're going to choose our mares very carefully and if we get a couple of young mares, even by I AmInvincible or a sire like that, I think we can look forward to the future,” Hanratty says.
On the track, it looks bright for Yarradale, too, with three-year-old Written Tycoon filly Ron’s Finalflutter three times stakes-placed this season.
“Lyn loves racing and it's more enjoyable when can go and watch horses like Ron's Finalflutter running around. She’s a special horse as she’s got a great name, obviously,” the stud manager says.
“We have probably about four or five good fillies at home to go into training and keep everybody interested.”
Hard work pays off for Upper Bloodstock
The old adage, the harder you work, the luckier you get can certainly hold true in the case of Upper Bloodstock’s Andy Lau and Ross Lao.
Last week, the pair, along with fellow Hong Konger Gregory Ho, sold Australian Guineas favourite Angel Capital to Yulong for a figure we believe to be north of $4 million.
No stranger to selling horses - it’s the whole premise of the Upper Bloodstock business model - Lau and Lao’s trading is largely focused on Hong Kong, with barely a week going by where a graduate isn’t winning at Sha Tin or Happy Valley.
But the pair has the work ethic to ensure they give themselves and their clients the best chance of success.
They are hard to miss when they are filming their horses of interest during inspections at the sales, something they’ll diligently be at again this week ahead of the Inglis Premier Yearling Sale in Melbourne.
“You look at a horse for just a minute or two (at the complex) because we have so many to go through every sale. We look at 100-plus horses every day,” Lao says.
“You can miss something in that short period of time, so we go back to our shortlisted horses on the video, have a look at them again to see if we've missed anything.
“We can spend five, 10 minutes on each horse on the video at night.”
Lao says even though the yearling market has come back a cog, for the style of horses Upper Bloodstock buys, prices have been stable.
“And that’s because the right horses still have the right people there,” he says.
“I know that people are more selective. They were buying 10 before, but now they're probably buying four or five. But the right horses still get the right money.”
Clean X-rays and scopes have a lot to do with that segment of the market.
It was evident at the recent Inglis Classic Yearling Sale in Sydney, where multiple traders told this column that there was intense competition for horses which met the stringent veterinary criteria.
While Upper Bloodstock may be ambivalent about certain horses, given they buy to sell, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some agonising about whether to sell Angel Capital.
“There were a few sleepless nights (debating whether to sell him),” Lao says of the Clinton McDonald-trained three-year-old son of Harry Angel.
“Obviously, we thought about (keeping him), but I suppose we've got to leave some meat on the bone for someone else to buy him.”
Devil Night to ‘move needle’ for Yulong
There’s a lot of hyperbole spoken at the sales, but when it comes to Blue Diamond winner Devil Night, Yulong’s Vin Cox got it right.
Zhang Yuesheng had to go to $1.4 million to buy the Kingstar Farm-bred colt, so Cox wasn’t alone with his high opinion of the son of Extreme Choice, who is now assured of being a prized sire on the Victorian farm’s roster, possibly in 2026.
“If we can hit on the right colt by the right stallion it moves the needle from a business perspective,” Cox said at the Magic Millions 13 months ago after signing the digital docket for Devil Night.
“He was a much talked (about) horse that we identified fairly early. We saw him in December when we went through the Hunter Valley looking at yearlings and it is great to come away with him.”
