Aardvark
Some breeders rely heavily on type and, to varying extents, don’t pay too much mind to pedigrees.
Highgrove Stud’s Ron Gilbert is the other way. It’s all about the two pedigrees involved, and which names bob up where, something he learned from another Queensland bushie.
“Rob Atkinson was a big cattle breeder in north-west Queensland and bred a few horses as well, and he was huge into studying horse pedigrees,” Gilbert tells It’s In The Blood. “He was an old guy who stayed at home, and he would’ve looked up 40,000 pedigrees a year.
“He looked up the pedigrees of every winner, every day in Australia. Didn’t matter where it was. Could’ve even been Flinton. He showed me a lot of things about pedigrees, which I’ve been applying from day one.”
Almost 20 years ago, Gilbert had a mare named Fragmentation (Snippets) who was tremendous. Not so much in terms of ability, though she did win a Flemington Listed – but in size. She weighed 650 kilograms.
For her second mating, Gilbert’s pedigree research led him to one of the larger stallions around, first–season sire Fastnet Rock (Danehill). The risk was that he’d breed an elephant, or something similarly slow.
“Peter O’Brien was at Coolmore then,” Gilbert recalls, “and he rang me and said, ‘Are you sure you want to put this mare to this stallion? It’ll have a head like a donkey’.”
Gilbert insisted, and a year later Fragmentation bore Wanted, winner of two stakes races including Flemington’s Newmarket Handicap (Gr 1, 1200m), and later a Group 1-winning sire.
More recently, Gilbert stuck fast to a mating he believed in despite some evidence to the contrary, and now he’s bred an aardvark. Not literally that slow, ant-eating mammal – which happens to be a member of the wider elephant family but has no donkey links – but a two-year-old colt going by that name who’s already won a stakes race as well.
Aardvark the horse, a son of surging sire Capitalist (Written Tycoon), came out at his second start last Saturday and impressively won the Talindert Stakes (Listed, 1100m) at Flemington, first up from a spell. A member of the wider James Harron family, which has several exciting two-year-old colts this season, Aardvark’s win followed a third in Caulfield’s Debutant Stakes (Listed, 1000m) and had bookmakers shortening his odds for this Saturday’s big one, the Blue Diamond Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m).
Harron and trainers Leon and Troy Corstens have, however, erred on the side of caution in not putting Aardvark to the quick back-up. Instead, he’ll keep for later targets, with Harron’s colt syndicates to be represented in the Blue Diamond by Bodyguard (I Am Invincible), the current $6 second-favourite, and his Team Snowden-trained stablemate Fearless (Pierata), who was co-bred by Gilbert, at $26.
Unlike that pair – for whom Harron paid $1.6 million and $220,000 respectively – Aardvark was purchased by Baystone Farm’s Dean Harvey at Magic Millions Gold Coast for $240,000, with Harron later acquiring him before his first start, following impressive trial form for the Corstens.
Ron and Debbie Gilbert bought back into the colt for a ten per cent share.
“I decided long ago I’d never stay in any of the yearlings we sell,” he says. “But we’d certainly buy back into colts if they’re showing something. So when James bought the horse and rang me when he was putting his syndicate together, James believed in the horse, I believed in the horse, so it was a no brainer. It doesn’t hurt to buy in with someone as astute as James.”
For Gilbert, any success coming Aardvark’s way would, aside from some income, bring vindication for his pedigree research.
He bred his dam Hollywood Mistress (All American), who had something of a chequered start. She was withdrawn from the Magic Millions National Yearling Sale of 2014 and instead went to Inglis Easter, where an x-ray issue contributed to her being passed in $40,000 short of her $200,000 reserve.
Gilbert raced her himself, but after she won Team Hawkes a Hawkesbury maiden amid six starts, she was retired. Gilbert entered her for a broodmare sale but changed his mind, and put her to Star Witness (Starcraft) to produce Pentangili. That filly went to Team Hawkes as well, but was retired after three unplaced runs.
The mating Gilbert especially believed in for Hollywood Mistress was her second one – to Newgate’s Golden Slipper winner Capitalist.
In 2018 that produced a colt who matched his half-sister Pentangili’s sale price of $180,000, bought at the Magic Millions Gold Coast by MiRunners. Named Outback Playboy, he’s been not much good.
After his first six starts with Robert Heathcote around Brisbane, he’s ended up in surrounds more commensurate with his name. Last year, Outback Playboy won a maiden at Bell, north of Dalby, and – continuing today’s geography lesson – he then picked up a Benchmark 45 at Flinton, that aforementioned dot near St George that Gilbert himself only became aware of yesterday. (Further illustrating where some high hopes end up, he beat a Snitzel gelding formerly trained by Team Snowden, and a son of Not A Single Doubt who’d started with Joe Pride).
It’s a long, long way, physically and metaphorically, from the dusty red dirt of Flinton to the mega-bucks scene of million–dollar colts at Caulfield, but the contrasting fortunes of Outback Playboy and his younger brother Aardvark – the dam’s next live foal three years later – show a couple of things: when you believe in a mating, stick to it more than once and; it’s this maddeningly glorious uncertainty that keeps people getting up each morning.
“I don’t look at physicals so much. I look at the pedigrees, and I do the mating regardless of what the physiques look like,” Gilbert says.
“It’s not so much about duplications and in-breeding et cetera. I like to look at combinations of horses in a pedigree, and in what positions they are. I’ve been doing that from day one and I believe in it, and I believed that Capitalist over Hollywood Mistress was one of the really good matings we could do.”
What partly started the line to Aardvark was the importation of British mare Subterfuge (Machiavellian) in 1997, in-foal on southern time to American-bred dual Breeders’ Cup Mile winner Lure (Danzig).
The result was Sequin, who Gilbert bought at Inglis Easter for $100,000. She also had mixed beginnings, and certainly had her issues, and after ten starts for three placings, Gilbert was happy to retire her.
“If they’re not going to win a stakes race, I’d rather retire them to breed from them,” he says.
“I’d love for all my mares to be stakes winners, but it’s not that bad if they’re not. If you’ve got one that wasn’t that good a racehorse but has good blood, you can still breed good horses. I’ve had a few mares like that – not great racehorses, but they did the job at stud.”
Sequin went to Highgrove and – despite some problems Gilbert had to solve – soon started to shine as a broodmare.
“She was a box walker, and then a fence walker, just going up and down the fence all day,” he says. “When she had her first foal, we had to stop her or the foal was going to burn out trying to keep up with her. It was pretty simple in the end – we just attached a belt to her fetlock with a little length of chain attached to it. It did the trick, not because of the weight of it or anything like that, it just took her mind off it.”
Well reared by a more stationary mum, that first filly foal was Get To Work (Snippets), who sold for just $65,000 but won an Adelaide Listed race and was thrice stakes-placed.
Second foal Sequential (Lion Hunter) was unraced but threw a Flemington Listed winner bred by Gilbert in Excitable Boy (More Than Ready).
Meanwhile, things were happening elsewhere. That taproot mare Subterfuge had thrown, as her fourth Australian foal, the outstanding Shania Dane (Danehill). Her four Group wins in 2005 helped Sequin’s third foal Firm Seal (Falbrav) fetch her breeder $375,000, and her fourth one – a colt later named Sikka (Redoute’s Choice) – sell for $1.1 million at Easter 2008, in just one bid to Bob Ingham.
While neither achieved any fame, Sequin would go on to throw her second and third stakes winners in Order Of The Sun (Encosta De Lago), who won the Listed VRC St Leger in 2014 before taking a Singapore Listed race, and Beauty (Smart Missile), a Listed winner at Moonee Valley.
Sequin’s fifth foal, after brother Sikka, had been Sponsored (Redoute’s Choice). She was passed in at Easter, and Gilbert sent her to Leon Corstens, who thus became acquainted with Aardvark’s family. Sponsored won a 1000-metre Seymour maiden on debut before four unplaced runs and a Gilbert-style early retirement to the breeding barn, where her first foal was Hollywood Mistress.
And so, there is much black type on Aardvark’s page, and as a Harron colt he’ll be given as great a chance as possible to be turned into a sire, most hopefully at this stage through that great stallion-maker, the Coolmore Stud Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m) at Flemington on Derby Day.
In the meantime, Gilbert is “very excited” by Aardvark’s six-month old half-sister by Bivouac (Exceed And Excel), while their dam is now out to repeat the success of the Capitalist mating that produced Aardvark by being in-foal to another son of Written Tycoon, Ole Kirk.
While they may not be uppermost in Gilbert’s grand plan, Aardvark does boast some eye-catching duplications in his pedigree.
He has the great American blue hen Best In Show in key places on both sides in the seventh generation: along the top as the second dam of Try My Best (Northern Dancer), Capitalist’s fourth sire, and as the fourth dam of Redoute’s Choice, Hollywood Mistress’s damsire.
Another great blue hen, Natalma (Native Dancer) makes ten appearances, while Danehill (Danzig) is duplicated in the preferred gender-balanced way – through a daughter in Compulsion – Capitalist’s granddam – and a son in Redoute’s Choice.
And Aardvark may also have drawn some strengthening from a 7m x 7f, 7m triplication of American Reine-de-Course mare Flower Bowl (Alibhai), the dam of Danehill’s damsire, who also flows into All American’s damsire, the outstanding Strawberry Road (Whiskey Road).
“Aardvark was a lovely colt, a very muscular chestnut, and much more robust than his full brother [Outback Playboy],” Gilbert says. “I do believe that if you believe in a mating you should give it a few tries, and hopefully you’ll see it work. You can’t say you’re going to breed a stakes winner of course, but you can generally take the slowness out of them.
“I was reasonably confident we’d get a decent horse.”