“The Ace in the Pack” …. But with More to Come, Hopefully. The Change of Plan Pays Off with Acey Milan

As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I’ve been astounded by the huge increases in bloodstock prices for National Hunt horses in recent years. Horses that used to be selling for £30-40k are now going for £60-100k, and there is no shortage of very rich owners who are prepared to pay considerable multiples on top of that. The average hammer price now for a three-year-old store horse at the top sales in Ireland is €50k, so with sales commissions on top, and then maybe a year’s training before you get the horse to the track, you’re knocking on the door of £70k or more on average and, unfortunately, paying that amount of money most definitely doesn’t guarantee you a nice horse. In fact increasingly it looks as though the good horses are being taken out of the equine supply chain very early in their life, and there is no shortage of trainers and agents scouring England, Ireland, France and Germany looking for them.

So, back at the end of 2014, in Owners for Owners we decided to change tack and adopt the policy of “if you can’t beat them, join them”. Rather than buying the majority of our horses as ready-to-go point-to-pointers with some form on the page, we created a new buying plan in conjunction with trainers and agents. The focus shifted to foals, yearlings and the occasional unraced 3yo store so that we had more confidence that we were dealing with a “blank canvas” and not buying into someone else’s problem. Fortunately we found quite a few owners who shared a very similar philosophy and had come to the same conclusions. They all wanted to enjoy the development journey of watching a youngster grow up into a racehorse, and were prepared to fund that for three years or more. Patience became the key virtue, with absolutely no pressure whatsoever to kick on with the youngsters too soon.

In 2014 / 15, we bought the first three foals, all by proven or up-and-coming sires: Milan, Sholokhov and Oscar. We also bought a beautiful year-older Getaway at the same time, and since then two more foals, one by Beat Hollow and one by Mahler, as well as a 3yo by Presenting. Quite an investment in seven youngsters, and inevitably with horses there will be one or two disappointments. However we felt that if we managed to achieve better results than we had been doing with the ready-to-go horses, it would be a vindication of the policy.

I’m not in any way crowing about this because, alas, we did have a tragedy with one of them, which hit all his owners extremely hard. But with one of them, Acey Milan with Anthony Honeyball, we appear to have a seriously smart animal on our hands who won the Listed bumper at Cheltenham and then, last Saturday, following up in the top bumper of the season so far, at Newbury. He annihilated the field, going away to win by 11 lengths, in the process probably establishing himself as the best bumper horse in England and entering the betting as 4th favourite for the Champion Bumper at the Festival. He’s the only four-year-old of the first 20 horses. The last 4yo to win this bumper was Cue Card!! Whether or not we go there will very much depend on whether the horse is in the same form by mid-March, and if he starts to train off in any way after four bumper runs, we’ll put him away and look forward to staying novice hurdles in the autumn. He is running over two miles on heavy ground at the moment but there is a view that he might be better over 2½ miles plus on better ground.

It was obviously amazingly exciting to win the two Listed bumpers as well as one at Wincanton in November, but the real source of pleasure has come from watching Acey Milan develop. When we bought him from Bryan Murphy’s stud near the Dunraven Arms in Co. Limerick, he was pretty small and quite sickly. Anthony and Rachael Honeyball came over to Ireland with us, and when we were shown him we were all very impressed by his beautiful long stride. The deal was done on the basis of that. Nothing in the meantime has changed our view of his conformation and action, and it is a noticeable feature when he’s racing. As you can see in the three photos below, he has developed considerably since, although he is still not a big horse – just a very fluent athlete. We used to joke when he was still a little tiddler that he was saying to us, “Don’t worry – when I grow up I’m going to be a racehorse”. None of us lost the faith, and it is tremendously satisfying to be where we now are. Special mention has to go to his groom all the way through, Chloe Emsley, who as you can see on one of the pictures to the right absolutely adores him. There was a day up on the gallops with Anthony back in the early autumn when Acey Milan was doing a breeze with Regal Encore. Chloe gave him a bit of rein and he shot past his older companion. Anthony just looked at me and said, “Hello …..” We haven’t really looked back since.

We’re just about to start partnering out a couple of new babies and store horses, and if you’d like to get involved in a similar journey, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Here’s hoping we have lots more Aces in the pack.

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Aintree, The Appeal of Festival Racing and British Racing’s Strategic Goal of Increasing Racecourse Attendance

Most of my friends and co-owners felt that this year’s Grand National meeting at Aintree was the best ever. The facilities at the racecourse are simply superb now, and the population of Liverpool embraces the meeting wholeheartedly as one long party, both on and off the track. And as for the quality of racing, with Willie Mullins bringing over so many of his hot-pots, it was outstanding. Personally the stand-outs were Cue Card’s win in the Betfred Bowl and the redemption of Paddy Brennan – and wouldn’t it be absolutely fantastic if Cue Card does go to Punchestown to take on Don Cossack; Apple’s Jade’s extraordinary performance in the 4yo Juvenile; Annie Power’s flawless jumping and Thistlecrack’s extremely impressive win in the Stayers’ Hurdle. Mouse Morris’s emotional win with Rule The World was spectacular and pub quiz bores were quick to tell you that the last maiden to win the National was at the end of the 19th Century. It is always interesting to note a horse for next year’s race and mine would be Vieux Lion Rouge, not least because a couple of years ago when one of our former horses, Lady Charisma, raced against him at Wincanton he impressed as a brave, tough stayer.

Throughout the meeting the head-on competition between Mullins and Nicholls for the Championship was a talking point and, as usual, there were a number of issues that pundits flagged up: should the Aintree meeting be extended to four days; is the Mullins dominance good or bad for racing; is it constraining betting as well as disillusioning grass-roots owners; should he even be eligible for the British trainer championship, and would it be better if that was settled on total wins rather than total prize-money; why are so many of the big bookmakers miserly in their pay-outs on the Grand National – surely in a field of 39 runners they should be paying at least down to 5th place; is the price of NH bloodstock now in bubble territory, judging by the extraordinary prices paid at the first Aintree Goffs sale, or is it just that there is now a platinum tier of mega-rich NH owners who will pay whatever it takes to buy a potential Cheltenham or Aintree Winner; and why is it that Liverpool women on Ladies’ Day seem to be totally impervious to the cold?

In many ways the Aintree meeting also highlights some of the relevant features that are central to British Racing’s strategic goal of increasing racecourse attendance from 6 million to 7 million by 2020. This goal was emphasised by Rod Street at the Newbury presentation that I attended a month or so ago. I thought his presentation was excellent, not least because it was backed by customer insight data obtained through the Racecourse Association’s study of attendance data 2011-15:

• Only 6% of racegoers ever go to more than one racecourse, which is usually their local one. In effect therefore racecourses are not in competition, so there is considerable scope for racecourse collaboration.
• There is positive awareness of racing on the part of 34 million people, even though they never attend. A marketing goal has been set to target 5 million of that group and to convert them into one million tickets. There will be a national “Come Racing” campaign.
• Ten million people go racing once, but then not again for several years.
• There is considerable churn in racecourse attendance: 27% of racegoers come back year on year, whereas 73% don’t. Over the next five years the goal is to improve the retention figure from 27% to 33%.
• Two-thirds of all racecourse attendance is driven by the social side. Racing has a huge social audience, and therefore promotion and marketing messages to do with that social context are critical. A huge plus point of this is that the social aspects of racing make the sport more resilient than other sports, and also racing appears to be very attractive to both sexes and all demographics.
• Yet, racing suffers from very low advance booking compared to other sports.

Aintree seems to be a case study of how to build and maximise brand and social loyalty: its positioning as a Liverpool festival has made it a “go-to event” on Merseyside; highly targeted marketing both retains the regular attendees and persuades the “one-off” customers to come back; it is a very attractive and safe event for groups of women to attend; and a lot of effort is put into advance booking (indeed I have already received details for 2017).

Increasingly I feel that racecourses need to collaborate together in well-defined regional groupings where they retain their individual strengths and characteristics while actively marketing the (social) advantages of going racing more regularly within that region. Yorkshire already does this, and I’m sure it needs to receive much greater marketing energy and endeavour. Linking together Aintree, Haydock and Chester as socially aspirational meetings could clearly be one example of this. It is a classic case of collaborating to grow the overall size of the pie rather than just dividing it up.

All in all it was hard to leave Aintree without being very positive for our sport, and really enthusiastic about a number of the initiatives being pursued by racecourses particularly those under the Jockey Club Racecourses banner. I really hope that the 7 million attendance target is not just attained but exceeded by 2020.

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.