‘That’s how we do it’ – Breeder back to business after unlikely Oaks win
Strictly Business’ breeder and co-owner Martin Falvey was straight back to work on Friday, leaving VRC Oaks celebrations for another day as he and his fellow Irish expats savour a Classic Group 1 win.
VRC Oaks winner Strictly Business is well named.
For owner-breeder Martin Falvey, there was little time to celebrate a Flemington victory for the ages as he immediately got back on the tools building roads near Geelong on Friday.
Likewise for Strictly Business’ unheralded Ballarat trainer Thomas Carberry whose new life as a Group 1 winner was given a decent dose of reality when floating seven-year-old mare Radstar to Hamilton in western Victoria.
Radstar has won just one race in 27 starts, having finished third in the 0-56 Highweight Handicap over 2200m.
But for a cohort of expatriate Irishmen, which includes jockey Johnny Allen, the Classic win of the Grunt filly was vindication for sticking with an audacious plan that required some rejigging before it’d even really begun.
“She was to run at Geelong but she ended up getting some kind of cough,” Falvey tells The Straight from his work site.
“So, we just had to ease back on her and try to get her to come good again. It ended up hanging on her for about maybe a week to 10 days and that really set us back.
“So, we kind of thought, we thought we’d missed our chance really, to be honest. But the right race came up in Ballarat and, then, well, this is what’s happened.”
And for Falvey, the story goes back even further, with the Irishman twice buying Strictly Business’s dam Tivoli Lass for a paltry $600 and sticking solidly with the mare.
The first time was in 2020 and the second time was in August of 2023, with both sales facilitated via Inglis Digital.
”We’d had a mareshare with Leneva Park and I wasn’t the one that wanted to sell, but we put her up on the sale and nobody came for her and I had the ($600) bid and nobody else came against me, so, I ended up getting her handy,” the 45-year-old breeder recalled.
“(The second time) there were a few boys who wanted out (and I bought her back again).”
That 2023 sale was only a couple of months after Strictly Business, the second foal out of Tivoli Lass, was withdrawn from the Inglis Great Southern Sale because “we felt we wouldn’t get what we valued her at”.
Luck of the Irish, they say.
And the Irish connection doesn’t end there, either, with another expat, Erinvale Thoroughbreds’ John Kenneally foaling Strictly Business for Falvey.
While it may seem that the Irish all tend to know each other in racing circles, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that Falvey met Carberry, with the pair introduced to one another by another Irishman, jumps jockey Tommy Ryan, who is also closely aligned with Lindsay Park.
Carberry’s horsemanship and ability to have a filly race three times inside a fortnight and peak in the VRC Oaks prompted Allen to suggest: “I think you’d be talking about this for years if it was Chris Waller or Ciaron Maher or someone else who has done it.”
That natural horsemanship shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider Carberry’s Irish lineage.
Carberry’s father Tommy was a champion jumps jockey in Britain and Ireland, winning the Grand National on L’Escargot, while his brother Paul also excelled as a jumps jockey.
And it doesn’t end there, with sister Nina, now a member of the European parliament, also riding the winner of an Irish Grand National as did another sibling, Phillip.
“(Tommy’s) got a few … I think he’s got about six or seven of our horses in work for me now,” the owner-breeder said.
One of those is Refuse To Curtsy, a Royal Meeting two-year-old half-sister to Strictly Business, while their dam Tivoli Lass, a daughter of Uncle Mo, is on her way back to Falvey’s Geelong farm with her foal by Churchill.
She is in foal to Shinzo on a foal share arrangement with Coolmore. Again, it’s the Irish helping each other out.
“That’s how we do it,” Falvey jokes of the Irish sticking together.
That said, he does have mares in foal to stallions at Rosemont Stud and Widden.
“We’ve been open for a few years now. So, people are getting to know us and we’ve had a little bit of success with a couple of good sales.
“Coolmore has taken a pop at us this year. They’ve given us a foal share.”
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