I love it when a plan comes together – Easter filly set to complete incredible odyssey
It’s taken 21,450 kilometres across seven legs, and more than the usual leaps of faith required to buy a horse with no brand, but the first foal from what’s understood to be the only Venezuelan mare ever imported to Australia finally goes on sale this week.
Lot 347 at the Inglis Easter sale – a Medaglia D’Oro filly from the Edinburgh Park Stud draft – is an impressive enough yearling to look at.
But when you know her backstory, her status assumes extraordinary proportions.
Edinburgh Park’s Ian Smith liked the family, one which has produced such outstanding gallopers as the Greg Hickman-trained Eleven Eleven and Peter Moody’s Glenfiddich, both sons of Fastnet Rock. And just as other lines are linked with studs, Smith wanted this one to become known as his family.
It started when the Manning Valley breeder bought the Canadian mare Gainesville in the 1990s. She produced two stakes winners in the mare Mica’s Pride (Bite The Bullet) who won a 1200-metre Sydney Group 3 in 2002, and the gelding Amah Rock (Fastnet Rock), who took a Melbourne Listed. Mica’s Pride went on to throw quadruple Group 1 winner Criterion (Sebring) and Doomben Cup winner Comin’ Through (Fastnet Rock) among four stakes winners.
Smith in time sold Gainesville but kept her Bite The Bullet filly Rose Of Cimarron, who won two races in Sydney and threw a colt first foal by Fastnet Rock who was the 2012 Magic Millions sale-topper for Smith at $960,000. He became Bull Point, a Group 3 winner now standing at Kingstar Farm.
Smith received a substantial offer for Rose Of Cimmaron, from Edmund Bateman, and took it. Her third foal fetched $1.2 million at Easter, 2016, and became the stakes-winning Siege Of Quebec. Meanwhile, Smith used his windfall to buy other members of the family.
“I just went exploring,” he tells ANZ Bloodstock News. “Gainesville had a stakes-winning half-sister called Darling Alice, and I went looking for daughters out of her, and was fortunate enough to secure three of them, and granddaughters of her as well, so it’s been ongoing.”
He bought a first daughter in Alice’s Smart (Smart Strike), from the US, in 2012. He followed the next year by importing a second in Smokin’ Alice (Smoke Glacken), who’d later throw Eleven Eleven. Another year later he built his family further by bringing over Nothin But A Dream (First Defence), the later dam of Glenfiddich.
Then in 2018 bloodstock agent Seamus Mills, with whom Smith had worked previously, sniffed out another prospect. She was a granddaughter of Darling Alice, out of Quiet Alice (Quiet American). Her name was Piacenza (League Of Nations), and she’d won two stakes races, amid seven victories from nine starts. Only slight hitch was, they’d all come in her country of birth – Venezuela.
Piacenza! It’s a city near the one for which Venezuela was named – Venice – and its name translates from Italian as “pleasant abode”. For this mare to reach her own, on the banks of the Manning River, a great amount of work would clearly be required.
No matter. Mills is a resourceful man. He’d bought Smokin’ Alice out of a claiming race at Gulfstream Park, USA, and sold her on to Smith. That’s another story in itself, and involves Mills wiring money to unknown friends of friends of friends in the States, watching the $16,000 claimer in bed, bleary-eyed, at 3am his time, then opening those eyes further as his “marble” went into a cup with that of a rival claimer, and thankfully came out first.
Still, this mission would take all of Mills’ wits, a lot of blind hope, and probably a little bit of prayer.
“I wasn’t sure how to approach Venezuela. I wasn’t even sure it was an officially recognised racing jurisdiction by the stud book,” said Mills. He confirmed that it was, in a somewhat similar way to Singapore in that its Group races are put down elsewhere as Listed, but he still needed a lot of help.
In 2009, he’d engaged an agent in Argentina to buy a horse for John O’Shea called Snapy Halo, who placed in a Listed race, ran sixth in the 2010 Doncaster, and stood a season at stud here before standing in the US.
“I thought if anybody can help me out here, it’ll be that agent,” Mills said. “Luckily, I tracked him down, he was still in the game, he tracked the owners down and went to Venezuela to see this mare, Piacenza.”
An offer was accepted, and all looked set for Smith to welcome the latest member of his family from this exotic far-off land.
And then, that exotic far-off land lost its rider.
The presidential crisis over disputed election results – which led the country to the brink of civil war and which still continues – sent the nation into meltdown. And, without wanting to trivialise bigger issues, caught up in the middle somewhere was this five-year-old mare.
“We were pretty unsure what would happen,” Smith recalls.
“They had no electricity (in Caracas) for a few weeks,” Mills says, “so we couldn’t get X-rays on the horse for a long time.”
“We were thinking – ‘How’s this going to play out in terms of the systems in that country?’ There were big questions over movements of exports in and out, who was controlling those things and who might need to get paid.”
Horse transporters IRT couldn’t offer any guarantees the mare would be successfully plucked out of the country.
“And understandably so,” Mills said. “They didn’t know what sort of freedom of movement they would have in the country, what they could guarantee in terms of microchipping, and no brands.”
Oh yeah. They also don’t brand their horses in Venezuela – for reasons not entirely fathomed.
Still, these bold antipodean pioneers – not Burke and Wills but Smith and Mills – ploughed on.
IRT worked with the local stud book to identify Piacenza by her markings – a chestnut with a white star and stripe. Money was sent, the Venezuelan banking sector held up well enough for it all to fall into the right hands, however miraculously.
“Each time each step went past – X-rays, report, photos, videos – it was very much tenterhooks, thinking ‘When’s something going to go wrong here?’” Mills says.
And then, in a shock twist, all went remarkably smoothly.
“Everyone else was very dubious about our chances, but in the end, the worst-case-scenarios we were scared of, didn’t happen,” said Mills, who still let out a whoop of joy on seeing photos of the mare being loaded onto a plane.
With a quarantine-order of six months in the US, she went to Miami, then Kentucky, where she was covered to southern time by Medaglia D’Oro, the American-based sire Smith says “would be well understood by Australians”.
She headed to Chicago, then Auckland, Sydney, and onto Edinburgh Park – where she finally acquired Smith’s brand (his initials IKS), which followed the DNA testing that confirmed she was indeed the right horse. The Australian Stud Book also confirms no other instance of a horse being imported here from Venezuela.
Piacenza’s filly foal came a couple of weeks early, on July 26, 2020, and has now completed the final 315 kilometres of this odyssey, and will appear in the ring tomorrow.
So will two other members of Smith’s second family, among Edinburgh Park’s impressive seven-horse draft. Lot 322 is a filly by Exceed And Excel from Nothin But A Dream, and Lot 430 a Trapeze Artist colt out of that claimed mare, Smokin’ Alice.
“I always thought If I found a family that works then we would like to be known as the farm with the family,” says Smith, who in 2017 also imported a half-sister to Piacenza called Quiet Kitten (Kitten’s Joy), who’s Exceed And Excel colt was bought by Glenfiddich’s Moody last year for $450,000.
“And this family just keeps producing these quality animals. I want to keep on building that.
“This filly out of Piacenza, it’s been a long road for sure, but she certainly deserves to be here at Easter. She was born in July, she stands over ground, she’s tough, she’s strong, and I’m excited about where she’ll end up.”