Hindaam
In racing and breeding, sometimes champagne and caviar can come disguised as flat beer and sardines, with one person’s poison morphing into another person’s meat.
In 2013, Gai Waterhouse and James Harron Bloodstock shelled out half a million dollars for a well-bred yearling – by Fastnet Rock out of Legally Bay.
She was a bay, and she raced as Bayrock, and at her second start she gave promise of bigger things to come when second, beaten a neck, as the only filly in a two-year-old race at Randwick.
But she didn’t place again in five more tries, and was quickly packed off to the 2015 Inglis Australian Broodmare Sale, where she was bought by New Zealand’s Windsor Park Stud for $140,000. Factoring in her career earnings of $19,175, connections were down $340,825, plus training costs and all other begrudgingly-paid fees.
In November, 2017, a colt with the same parents won a race at Flemington. Not just a race, but the coveted Coolmore Stud Stakes.
Three months later, with the buzz around England-bound Merchant Navy growing by the day, his big sister Bayrock’s first foal – a filly by Invincible Spirit stallion Charm Spirit – reaped Windsor Park $300,000 at the Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale.
A year after that, with Merchant Navy having won Royal Ascot’s 2018 Diamond Jubilee Stakes in the interim, her second foal – a Savabeel filly also offered at the Gold Coast – fetched $825,000. Another year on, that filly’s full brother sold for $875,000 at Karaka.
The Savabeel filly would be called Hindaam, and last Saturday the Dabernig-Hayes trained three-year-old became a black type winner, overcoming the highly-rated La Mexicana by half a length in the Twilight Glow Stakes (Listed, 1400m) at Sandown. It was her third win from five career starts.
The colt, staying in New Zealand to be trained by Jamie Richards, is still an unraced two-year-old, expected to blossom at three. Subscribing to a well-known motto – “If you’re on a good thing, stick to it” – Windsor Park’s Rodney and Gina Schick now have another Savabeel-Bayrock filly on the ground, with a fourth full-sibling due next spring.
Though next to useless on the track, Bayrock is proving priceless in the breeding barn for the Cambridge stud, which stands Charm Spirit, Mongolian Khan, Vanbrugh and others, and owns a share of the redoubtable Savabeel.
Bayrock was selected from the catalogue at that 2015 broodmare sale by Rodney’s father Nelson, Windsor Park’s founder and co-owner, and a pillar of the New Zealand breeding industry, lending expertise for which his son is extremely grateful.
“My parents started this stud and dad’s still involved in helping us select mares. You can’t beat that sort of intellectual property, mate,” Rodney Schick tells ANZ Bloodstock News.
“Bayrock obviously wasn’t much chop on the track, but dad had always loved that family and he picked her out of the catalogue. We had a lot of horses selected and that was the one he really wanted.
“She’s from one of the very best families in the Australian Stud Book. Legally Bay’s from a great family and Bayrock is by a champion sire. Fastnet Rock as a broodmare sire – I can’t get enough of them really.
“So Bayrock was a good type, from a good family and by a champion sire. Had she won a stakes race she’d have cost about $800,000. But at her level, she was a very viable purchase, and as things are going, these are very exciting times with her.
“It’s not always the champion racehorse who makes a good broodmare.”
After the ultimately ill-fated union with Charm Spirit – the Ciaron Maher-trained filly broke a leg in training – mating Bayrock with Savabeel seemed a good fit, primarily to provide “a good outcross” from the Danzig line (Danehill-Fastnet Rock-Bayrock).
“She’s a good type and so is Savabeel,” Schick says. “She’s a very good looking mare – good and strong and a decent size at 16.1 hands or so. Savabeel leaves cracking types, so we thought it’d be a good mating and it turns out it was. Hindaam is a beautiful looking filly, and very correct, and we’ve been happy to go back to Savabeel four times now.”
The taproot for this female line goes back to a byword of the Australian breeding game, Lloyd Foyster. In the late 1960s he imported the Mossborough mare Gypsy Moss, and put her to the superb Planet Kingdom (Ming Dynasty, Mighty Kingdom, Our Planet, etc etc), to produce black type-winning mare Pirouette. She produced two stakes-winners as well as Class, a 1987 drop by Twig Moss who threw Classy Fella – a shock winner of the 1995 Gloaming Stakes at Rosehill. Class also threw the Last Tycoon mare Decidity.
Another who was no earth-shaker on the track, with two wins from 21 attempts in the 1990s, Decidity proved her worth in retirement. She had 10 named foals, highlighted by her eighth foal, the 2014 Myer Classic winner Bonaria (by Redoute’s Choice). As a first effort, she had left the stakes-winning Time Out (Rory’s Jester). And her second foal, born in 2000, was a chestnut Snippets mare called Legally Bay.
Trained by John Hawkes, Legally Bay won the Sweet Embrace Stakes in 2003 before a sound fifth in Polar Success’ Golden Slipper. She was third at Group 1 level in the Australia Stakes and Oakleigh Plate, and a nose second in the 2004 TJ Smith (when still a Group 2), before motherhood called.
Fastnet Rock proved an ideal match, with five foals. The first was Jolie Bay, a 2009 filly who won the Roman Consul Stakes at Randwick before a three-quarter-length second in Nechita’s Coolmore Stud Stakes of 2012. Next came Bayrock, then another filly in the stakes-placed Zara Bay. Then along came a colt who breathtakingly went one better than his eldest sister in the Coolmore – Merchant Navy.
Merchant Navy’s full brother then became the second-highest lot at last year’s Inglis Easter sale, fetching $2.3 million. However, racing as Setanta, his form so far suggests he may provide yet more proof of racing’s vicissitudes, having last been seen running fifth in a June maiden at Hawkesbury at his third start.
Born when Legally Bay was 17, Setanta was her last foal, with his exceptional dam having died a month after that Inglis sale.
But while Legally Bay may no longer be with us, through Bayrock and the exciting Hindaam – and with Merchant Navy beginning his stud career – her legacy looks set to continue.