Cosmo Centaurus
Sometimes you can get stuck behind others in running and it ends up being OK.
Mark Egge, a mixed businessman from Newcastle who dabbled with a mare or two, went online with his son and hobby breeding partner Lucas in 2020 to try to buy a Redoute’s Choice mare they had in mind. They got stuck behind some other bidders with bigger wallets and missed out.
“I rang my wife Jo and she said, ‘Why didn’t you bid more?’,” Mark says. “I said, ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate it’.”
Lucas then sang out to his dad that he’d found another Redoute’s mare who was on the runway. They stuck in one bid, and next thing they knew she was theirs – and for just the size of a half-decent quaddie, at $3,000.
She had the clever name for a female horse – bestowed after a British town with a weird three-barrelled one – of Weston Super Mare.
Among all the quintessentially British strange town names – and we’re looking at you Shitterton, Upper Slaughter and Great Snoring to name but three – Weston Super Mare is a cracker. Or Weston-super-Mare as it’s written, just to make a weird thing weirder.
Most notable because it gains a mention every election night as a key constituency in the west country in Somerset, the town’s name derives from west-tun (town), and then the Latin for “above the sea” – super mare.
Alas for this mare, super never sprang to mind when she was racing.
A daughter of New Zealand Group 3 winner Molly Dot Come (Slavic), she’d had ten starts for Lindsay Park in 2018-19 and retired a maiden. She did at least manage six placings at provincial and country level.
She also had one run in which, Egge likes to point out, she raced in the same field as multiple stakes winner Greysful Glamour (Stratum), when she won at Flemington one day. You wouldn’t say she rubbed shoulders with her though, since she finished 13 lengths behind her.
Still, there was enough in her record to satisfy the Egges.
“We were just looking to buy a Redoute’s mare that we could breed with,” Mark says. “I just love Redoute’s mares, but they’re pretty hard to buy now normally.”
The Egges took Weston Super Mare up the road to Newgate Farm. On the steer mostly of the third part of this breeding triumvirate – Jo Egge – they’d circled Cosmic Force (Deep Field), Brutal (O’Reilly) and Winning Rupert (Written Tycoon), all in the sub-$30,000 bracket.
Winning Rupert got the nod, but the Egges soon found themselves stuck behind unforeseeable circumstances. On top of her modest racing record, Weston Super Mare was also no oil painting. It also turned out Winning Rupert was picky (which might also help explain why he was on his way out of Newgate not long after that).
“We were waiting for the news and we were told Winning Rupert just didn’t accept her,” Mark says.
The trio had to make a second choice, and while Mark would have preferred Brutal, he deferred to Jo, who also has show horses, and who picked Cosmic Force.
“Jo wanted to put Deep Field across our mare. She’d come up with a bit of a system and Cosmic Force fitted into that, plus the physicals were a good match,” Egge said of the speedy stallion who’d won the Pago Pago Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) – by 7.3 lengths – plus the Roman Consul Stakes (Gr 2, 1200m) in his 11-start career.
“Turns out we had a bit of luck.”
The result was a colt, who at birth gave a few scares to do with the lungs, needed veterinary care, but was soon OK.
The Egges sold him at Inglis’s Sydney Weanling Sale for $30,000, to Randwick Bloodstock’s Brett Howard. Cosmic Force’s $16,500 service fee plus the mare’s sale price meant they were almost $10,000 in front, after expenses.
“Well, you’re never happy with a sale price, to be honest, but he was a first foal, and a little bit small I suppose. We decided to let him go and Brett bought him,” Egge says of the colt. The following year he was onsold at Inglis Classic for $140,000. The Egges had no regrets at this flipping.
“I wished he’d have sold for half a million. Would’ve put some more interest in our mare,” Egge says.
The buyers were Robert Heathcote and bloodstock agent Paul Willetts, who’d part-owned the Brisbane trainer’s star sprinter, Buffering (Mossman). They named the colt Cosmo Centaurus.
Last November, he went into a Doomben barrier trial and got stuck behind a couple of others. The next day, Egge received a phone call asking if he’d be interested in selling Weston Super Mare, which he wasn’t. He figured the first two in that trial must have been good, which they were.
Kahlisee (Dracarys) had just won a decent Eagle Farm two-year-old race on debut. Second home was El Morzillo (Star Witness), who would soon run second in Listed class at Eagle Farm, win at the Sunshine Coast, and run fourth in Randwick’s Percy Sykes Stakes (Gr 2, 1200m).
With those two out of the way, Cosmo Centaurus won his next trial after a spell by three lengths. After another break he again won in his next two, before finally debuting last Saturday over 1000 metres at the Sunshine Coast as a three-year-old.
Heathcote said he’d been waiting for that race, which carried a $100,000 Inglis maidens bonus, and Cosmo Centaurus rewarded him, winning by 0.8 lengths at a price commensurate with his burgeoning reputation – $2.10.
After that, Heathcote declared him the best young horse he’d had since Rothfire (Rothsay), who won seven of his first eight, including the JJ Atkins (Gr 1, 1600m).
By that reckoning, a major career lies in prospect. That isn’t bad from a $3,000 mare, who’d quickly earned a special place in the Egges’ hearts.
Weston Super Mare finally got to Mark’s choice of Brutal in 2021, and bore a strapping colt who – after early reports on his brother from Heathcote – they decided to keep and race with friends. The mare then went to Darley’s Astern (Medaglia D’Oro), for another colt.
“He’s a cracker – probably the best of the three at this stage,” Egge says. “I’m not sure which sale he’ll go to, but he might be in demand after last Saturday.
Sadly, just as her first-born was impressing in trials, the plain but productive Weston Super Mare was lost four months ago, due to worsening feet problems which meant no quality of life.
“The tears flowed, I can tell you. She was the kindest, loveliest mare. She was like a family horse, even though we’d only had her for a few years,” says Egge, who buried her in her favourite paddock on their property outside Newcastle.
“She used to stand in that paddock all day, looking over the animals on the neighbouring farm. She was pretty special to us, and we miss her dearly. But hopefully we can have a bit of luck with her Brutal colt, and we’ll certainly be following Cosmo Centaurus.”
There’s not a lot of obvious alchemy in Cosmo Centaurus’s pedigree. In fact, aside from a pair of usual suspects – Northern Dancer and Danzig – there’s only one other name appearing in both sides. That’s their grandson and son Danehill, and even then he appears in the less-fancied Danehill way, via two sons: Cosmic Force’s damsire Commands, and Redoute’s Choice, at 4s x 3s.
“Well, he could be the exception that proves the rule,” Egge says. “We’ve had a bit of the luck of the draw along the way with Cosmo.”
Standing this year at $11,000, Cosmic Force now has ten winners from 22 runners, after coming a fair tenth on the first-season sires’ table, and eighth by winners.
Jerome Hunter’s Wonder Boy – who scored on debut at Flemington in June – could give the stallion a first black–type winner in Saturday’s Vain Stakes (Gr 3, 1100m) at Caulfield. Another leading light is Phillip Stokes’s Stay Focused, who’s Group 3-placed and ran fifth in the Blue Diamond Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m).
“Cosmic Force is doing a big job, and doing it off a low base fee,” says Newgate Farm’s director of bloodstock Bruce Slade of the eight-year-old, whose second book of 167 mares was 21 more than his first.
“Generally there’s a bit of a fall off in their second season, but he was the other way round, off the same fee, and that was on the back of the good types he leaves.
“It was a really competitive crop of first–season sires last year, and he’s holding his own nicely.
“The market’s pretty savvy. They look at a horse like Cosmic Force and they want to see some boxes ticked: Has he had winners? Yes. Does he get them in town? Yes. Is he producing horses with big aspirations down the track? Yes.”
Slade also noted Cosmic Force was “a pretty easy horse to mate”, since he brings his own double cross of the influential British-bred, New Zealand-based mare Eight Carat (Pieces Of Eight).
“If you can get another cross of Eight Carat, the more the merrier with that great mare,” he says.
“He’s a very high quality horse himself, and leaves quality. So he’s building well.”