European agents paying close attention to 2022 Melbourne Cup
McKeever, Brummitt hoping to have role in winning Australia’s biggest race
It’s not just the European horses who are dominating arguably Australia’s greatest race, the Melbourne Cup (Gr 1, 3200m), so too are the northern hemisphere agents sourcing the horses for the race that stops the nation.
Johnny McKeever, a regular Down Under on the yearling sales circuit, has had a hand in purchasing three Cup runners who are set to line up in this year’s staying test while Jeremy Brummitt, a less familiar name in Australia but one who is also building up a respectable record, has one horse in the race.
Brummitt bought as a foal the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace-trained Grand Promenade (Champs Elysees), who runs in the cup for a second time, while agent McKeever has the imported trio Knights Order (So You Think), Hoo Ya Mal (Territories) and Camorra (Zoffany) lining up for a share of the $7.75 million purse.
Irishman McKeever, who calls Newmarket in England home, went desperately close to winning a Melbourne Cup courtesy of Heartbreak City (Lando), an imported horse he purchased with Australian agent Chris Blomeley for Darren Dance’s Australian Thoroughbred Bloodstock, when he finished runner-up to Almandin (Monsun) in 2016.
Knights Order, a 250,000gns purchase at the 2018 Tattersalls Horses In Training Sale, has already provided trainers Gai Waterhouse and Adrian Bott and connections with some huge thrills, winning the Sydney Cup (Gr 1, 3200m) in April before returning to take out the Chelmsford Stakes (Gr 2, 1600m) first-up at Randwick.
“He has been an amazing horse. He was a handicapper when he first came over from England and when Gai first got him she wondered why we’d bought such a lowly rated horse. He’s taken his time but he’s developed into a quintessential cup horse for Australia,” said McKeever, who has flown in from England to attend the four days of the Flemington carnival.
“The way we think about things in Europe, it’s very hard to imagine a horse who would be running for the Ascot Gold Cup winning over a mile, Group 2 [first-up], but they obviously do things differently here. It was a good win and I thought his third in the Caulfield Cup was really good because he fought back again when he was headed by some horses. He is a tough old boy.”
Fortuitously, McKeever and Claudia Miller, Waterhouse and Bott’s bloodstock manager, were able to buy Knights Order from the Tatts sale four years ago.
“It wasn’t a particularly strong catalogue for stayers that year and it’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes,” McKeever recalled.
“I think we identified about six horses and we bid on the first five and didn’t get them and this horse was selling on day three. That’s the weird thing about sales, if we’d bought one on day one, would we have bought this one on day three?
“I think he was the only one on day three that we’d selected who had passed the vet and everything.”
He added: “Winning the Sydney Cup was the last day I went to the races [in Australia this year] before I flew home, having done the sales stint. We had a great party in Sydney that night. It was one of my highlights of my year, to be honest.”
Waterhouse and Bott also train Hoo Ya Mal, the high-profile Epsom Derby (Gr 1, 1m 4f) runner-up who McKeever purchased on behalf of the trainers for 1.2 million guineas at the Goffs London Sale on the eve of Royal Ascot in June.
McKeever had already had a seven-figure offer rejected by the owners of Hoo Ya Mal after his Derby placing.
“Rob Waterhouse had asked me if there was anything we should be looking at and I said this horse, funnily enough he’s running in the Derby, so we can have a look at him because Gai and Rob were over in England on a working holiday during the summer,” the agent said.
“I met them at the Derby and we were … on the balcony outside, and I said, ‘Oh god, he’ll be so expensive to buy now’. Gai just said, ‘bid them a million [pounds], Johnny’, so I rang up and bid them a million and they said they’d think about it.
“Then said they’d put him in the sale and that he was going to stay in the sale, so in fairness to Gai and Rob, they said open the bidding at a million, just to show them that we haven’t been fooling around, so we did. Someone bid 1.1 and we went 1.2, so it was quite daunting.”
A northern hemisphere three-year-old, as is Cup favourite Deauville Legend (Sea The Stars), Hoo Ya Mal could be a Cox Plate (Gr 1, 2040m) contender next year, according to McKeever.
“He ran at Goodwood in a prep race and Ryan Moore dropped his whip, which he said was the first time he’s dropped his whip in five years, which meant he finished third to [runner-up] Deauville Legend in that race,” McKeever said.
“Then he won very well in a substandard Group 3 the next time [at Goodwood on August 27]. He did disappoint in the [English] St Leger [when finishing eighth of nine] and no one can quite work out why he did, so he comes with that question mark, but I think Gai’s been really happy with him.
“I saw him [on Sunday] at Werribee, he looks extremely well. But he does look like a three-year-old. I was looking at the older horses, Camorra as well, who is a five-year-old by Zoffany. One looks like a big, strong man, as Knight’s Order does, and then you look at Deauville Legend and Hoo Ya Mal and they are much more babyish looking horses.”
McKeever helped negotiate to buy the Ger Lyons-trained Camorra on behalf of Best Bloodstock’s Jarred Magnabosco, a Gold Coast-based syndicator.
The Curragh Cup (Gr 2, 1m 6f) winner has been transferred to the Lindsay Park stable of Ben and JD Hayes and McKeeever believes the horse “looks fantastic”.
“The way the weather has gone, these horses who have come from Europe have come into a ‘mushy’ spring which is like autumn weather over there,” he said.
“It hasn’t been hot, it’s been wet and I think in this particular year these European runners have come in and haven’t been inconvenienced or won’t feel the weather too badly because it’s roughly the same as what they’d experienced in Europe.”
Fellow northern hemisphere agent Brummitt, best-known in Australia for purchasing the Danny O’Brien-trained Group 1 winner Russian Camelot (Camelot) as a yearling, will be paying close attention to Grand Promenade in today’s Cup.
Grand Promenade, who finished sixth in last year’s race, ran fourth in the Moonee Valley Cup (Gr 2, 2500m) on October 22 as his final lead-up run to the 2022 edition.
Brummitt purchased Grand Promenade as a weanling for 38,000gns before on-selling him at the 2017 Tattersalls October Yearling Sale to renowned Australian agent John Foote, who outlaid 65,000gns on behalf of his clients led by Gerry Ryan.
Foote retains a share in the gelding, a winner of $1.2 million in prize-money from 24 race starts.
“As usual, [the sale of Grand Promenade] was three or four years ahead of the wave. Everyone wants to try and do it now, but at the time, the majority of the domestic buyers weren’t interested in horses that required patience to mature, over any distance to be honest, and obviously my interest is more the Classic distance horses, so I was very grateful Mr Foote turned up,” Brummitt said.
“Personally, I would like to highlight the date when he made his debut [November 2019]. Not only do I think it indicates a late start is not injurious to the horse’s whole career, it rather suggests the opposite is true.
“A lot of people are prepared to be patient when they know what they’re dealing with, but a lot of people want to scratch the paint and see what is underneath before they start. So, I emphasise the patience [connections have] shown with Grand Promenade [is paying off].”