Summerhill Stud pioneered the concept of the Ready to Run race in the entire Southern Hemisphere, over twenty-five tears ago. The concept has proved to a runaway success and Summerhill continues to lead the sale with record-breaking high-quality lots as witnessed by last year's Emperors Palace Ready To Run Sale, when their superbly bred Trippi colt Hurricane Harry (Lot 85) was sold for over R500 000. It was knocked down to prominent owner Nick Jonsson
The Impact speaks to 2018 KZN Breeders’ Lifetime Achievement Award winner and owner of the iconic Summerhill Stud, Mick Goss, about their high-quality draft for the 2019 BSA Ready To Race Sale:
Q: Please tell us about your highlight lots from your draft?
A: You enquired about the highlight lots in our draft; that’s like asking a father to choose between his children! Rather than do that, let me mention that Summerhill pioneered the concept of the Ready To Run sales more than thirty years ago, making us the first country in the southern hemisphere to embrace the concept. In that time, we have produced many national champions, international competitors etc and it wouldn’t have been fair on some of those great horses if we had selected against them when they were yearlings or two-year-olds falling outside the ambit of our favourites! That said, this year’s draft is a deep one, including siblings to three Group One winners of the recent past, and somewhere in the vicinity of 30 big race performers.
From a highlight point of view, we have the first crops of two exceptional racehorses, the one you are most likely to relate to immediately being Dubawi’s fastest son on earth, Willow Magic. I’ve asked Megan to send you our latest stallion e-brochure so that you can look these horses up, together with their respective credentials, which should be helpful to you in investigating them. The other first-crop sire is Act Of War, considered by several leading judges as being one of the outstanding racehorses of the past decade, so we’re on the cusp, we hope, of big things with these two horses. At the same time, Capetown Noir’s first three-year-olds include among their number three colts with Gr1 aspirations, two Black type fillies and another unbeaten colt in Kenya. Considering he was a late two-year-old himself, it’s fair to expect that they will keep improving through their three-year-old careers, and hit some big targets later in the year.
Besides the credentials advertised in the brochure of each of these horses, we witnessed some exceptional gallops last
Friday here on the farm, and we would expect these horses to at least match last year’s draft for their performances
on the track, which is saying something, given the depth and quality of the 2018 consignment. See attached marketing
release from earlier this week.
Q: Please tell us about the most expensive horse you have ever sold?
A: We actually sold the most expensive horse in last year’s sale, Hurricane Harry, who was a half-brother to the top-rated two-year-old of his year, Rabada, (the only colt of his generation to win Group Ones at 2 and 3 and now a resident stallion here) and to the Group One-performing Glider Pilot. While Hurricane Harry was a little immature at the time, he was a fine stamp of a thoroughbred, a lovely, scopey colt who has already broken his maiden and is also likely to be targeting the Cape Of Good Hope Guineas Gr1, followed by the Investec Cape Of Good Hope Derby Gr1.
He made R2.3 million to the bid of an old friend and client of the farm, Nicholas Jonsson, whose grandfather once owned Hartford as well (Hartford is a subsidiary farm of Summerhill, and is, in fact, the neighbouring property). We bred the horse ourselves and the mating was influenced by the suitability of his sire, Trippi, with the mare Jordie, both on pedigree and on their physical attributes. The underbidders were people from England, Michael and Sarah Spencer (he was once Treasurer to the Conservative Party in the UK). They have a ranch in Kenya, and as they’ve done with horses from our Ready To Run sale previously, they were trying to find the next Kenyan Derby winner as well as a future Horse Of The Year.
Q: How do you plan matings? How many horses do you foal in a year on your farm?
A: We foal around 120 horses a year on this farm (when I was younger, we used to have twice that number!), and being predominantly stockmen, most of our mating plans are guided by intuition. We’ve been working with some of our families for as many as four decades now, and we know fairly well what to expect from them in the type of progeny they produce, their physical attributes, their mental strength and likely distance aptitudes. This simplifies our task fairly substantially, so that’s where we start, by trying to breed the physical model of an athlete. We have an intimate knowledge of our families from both the physical perspective as well as the bloodlines they represent, so unless there is a contest in the choice of stallions, we usually go with our instincts. We do make use of the technological models you find on computers as well, but they’re not the cardinal factor; no computer ever bred champions consistently, so while they have their use, they cannot substitute the eyes and the intuitions of stockmen, in our view.
Q: Can you please tell us about the stallions you stand?
A: all our stallions, five of whom are Group One winners of the highest class.
Q: How did you get into the industry? Please tell us a bit more about Summerhill Stud's history and how you plan to develop the farm over the next decade?
A: While there was no inheritance here, I was born into the horse business, the Gosses having been on horseback alongside the Maguires as long ago as the Battle of the Boyne in 1600s Ireland, and as far as we know, there’s been no break in the chain since then. In other words, we inherited the “disease”, and besides growing up with horses, I’ve been involved in the ownership of Summerhill since 1979 (forty years).
To understand the position, Hartford and Summerhill are now part and parcel of the same farm, but there was a time when Hartford belonged to the family of the last Prime Minister of the Colony of Natal, Sir Frederick Moor, while Summerhill belonged to Col. George Richards, the colonial secretary in the old Natal government (in other words, the colony of Natal was pretty much governed from these two farms in the final years before the Union of South Africa was formed). Summerhill has since won ten breeders championships in the most the competitive era of our history, a modern-day record since the Second World War.
From a Dubai perspective and of interest to you and your readers, will be the fact that in 1990, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al Maktoum pioneered the sending of their first stallions to Summerhill, headed up by Sadlers Wells’ Gr1 winning son, Braashee, and there’ve has since been a succession of leading stallions from that source including Rambo Dancer, Kahal and Muhtafal, all of whom were regular features among the top sires in South Africa.
We have a magnificent School of Equine Management Excellence on the property named after His Highness (the Al Maktoum School of Management Excellence), details of which you can research on our website if you wish. It is one of the finest facilities of its kind in the world.
Also of interest to Dubai are the performances of Imbongi (Gr.2 Zabeel Mile) and Paris Perfect (3rd Gr.1 Dubai World Cup, both products of the farm).
Q: How did you get into the industry? How long have you been involved with Summer hills? What is the history of Summerhill? And how is Summerhill planning to develop in the next decade?
A: As for the future, in order to accommodate advancing age and the need that for the next generation, we leave a farm which is manageable from the perspective of its size, (as it includes other disciplines such as a feed mill, a horse insurance division as well as one of the leading boutique hotels in South Africa) we have downsized the horse population to an appropriate level for this purpose. The arrival of six young stallions on the roster though is an indication of our planning, and in anticipation of our export protocols being normalized in the near future, we’ve been buying in numbers of quality mares
Published In The Impact 21 Issue, 2 Vol
Click To view the complete The Impact Library - http://theimpact.secretariatsworld.com/