Last-minute Snitzel proves irresistible for Carey
Iskander-bred colt sets new record at Great Southern Sale after selling for $575,000
A decision to sell a prized Snitzel (Redoute’s Choice) colt considered the best of the year just days out from the Inglis Great Southern Sale has paid a massive financial dividend for his breeder Sheriff Iskander.
The half-brother to Sir Owen Glenn’s Group 2-winning mare Pure Elation (I Am Invincible) was bought by Newgate Farm stud manager Jim Carey for $575,000, a record price for a colt sold at Inglis’s Melbourne weanling sale.
A Rosemont Stud-bred filly by Frankel (Galileo) sold to New Zealand owner Gary Harding for $525,000 on Thursday to be the second highest-priced lot of the 2024 Oaklands Junction foal sale.
With Carey on his way to Europe, it was left to agent James Mitchell to bid on the sale-topping colt on behalf of the buyer and his syndicate.
“I thought he was the best colt that we’d seen at the weanling sales all year. The Snitzel colts are few and far between and he was the one we wanted to buy for the entire sales season and it took until the very end of the [sales] year to get to the best colt of the year,” Carey said on the phone.
“We’ve had a lot of luck through our pinhooking system with Stay Inside and Elliptical and hopefully this colt can be the next Group 1 performer raised on the big hill at Newgate.”
Bred by Iskander, who enjoyed elite level success when Socks Nation (Sioux Nation) won the Queensland Oaks (Gr 1, 2200m) on Saturday, the Snitzel colt is the seventh foal out of Listed winner Members Joy (Hussonet).
Members Joy is the dam of Group 2 winner Pure Elation (I Am Invincible), herself the dam of Woodlands Stakes (Listed, 1100m) winner Hip Hip Hurrah (Snitzel), and four other winners from as many foals to race.
Iskander’s retained agent Suman Hedge purchased Members Joy for $550,000 at the 2022 Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale. Her sixth foal is an unraced two-year-old filly, the $1.1 million Magic Millions graduate Crime Of Passion (Zoustar), who is in training with Mick Price and Michael Kent Jnr.
The Snitzel colt, who was born and raised at Bell River Thoroughbreds, was consigned by Fergusons on Iskander’s behalf.
The fact the colt only entered his sales “preparation” last week didn’t hold him back with multiple pinhookers attempting to buy the colt, but it was the Carey-led syndicate which won the bidding duel.
“He is a naturally very well built horse. They get a great start to life at Bell River and that gave us confidence [to bid strongly]. He was bred by Sheriff Iskander who is also a great supporter of the farm,” said Carey, who also paid $145,000 for a Satono Aladdin (Deep Impact) filly on day one.
“He’s a half-brother to a very fast mare in Pure Elation and Peter Snowden thought she was up there with the best fillies he’s ever trained, so when you get a Snitzel colt that looks like him, we had to get him for our pinhooking partnership.”
The colt will be reoffered at either next year’s Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale in January or the Inglis Australian Easter Yearling Sale in April 2025.
Hedge was full of praise for the Fergusons for the way they were able to prepare the colt at such short notice and as soon as the horse arrived at Oaklands Junction the agent was confident they’d made the right decision to offer him to the market.
“Expectations based on inspections were really high because he’d been really popular, he’d been out the whole time and the calibre of the people who were interested and asking questions about the horse are at the top of the market,” Hedge said.
As to why he was sold now rather than as a yearling, Hedge answered: “I’ve been asked that question a lot this week, there’s a lot of paranoid people out there, but the owner wanted to bring the cash in this year.
“He’s spent a lot of money on his [bloodstock] programme, buying mares and service fees and all the rest of it, so he just needed to get some more cash in and it’s worked out really well.”
Members Joy is in-foal to Zoustar (Northern Meteor) with Hedge and Iskander still debating which stallion to send the mare to this year, although a return to Snitzel is high in the pecking order.
There were 33 six-figure weanlings sold across the two days of the Great Southern Sale while Inglis’s two weanling sales, Melbourne and Sydney’s Australian Weanling Sale, saw a company record of $28.186 million spent on foals.
This week’s Great Southern saw $11.96 million turned over, the second highest-grossing Melbourne sale, bettered only by the 2022 edition. This year’s average of $46,508 and median of $22,250 were both up year-on-year.
“I think it’s fair to say that the points of the market that we expected to be strong were far stronger than what we expected,” Hutch told ANZ Bloodstock News.
“There was a degree of concern noting the nature of the expenditure prior to now that maybe people operating in the higher parts of the market would start to run out of gas. “As it turned out, again we ended up in a situation where we had a fairly significant number of people looking to buy good weanlings going home without having bought the volume they wanted.
“It’s one of those things, we just keep working on trying to put together a sale of more good weanlings in it.”
Hutch, however, reiterated that it was the bottom third of the market which has borne the brunt of the decline in demand for horses.
He says this year’s weanling sales, as it was at the yearling sales, may force some breeders to reassess how they structure their bloodstock operations.
“There have been instances over the last two days where people have presented foals in the expectation of achieving a certain price and they’ve gone into the ring and made three, four, five and six times that, so I understand it’s difficult to get a mark and to get it right, but obviously too often there were situations where horses were going into the ring and not making the required level,” Hutch said.
“In some cases, that’s because people are basing their reserves on costs, which is always a difficult thing to do, and they’re just not prepared to meet the market at a level where the market is prepared to participate.
“It’s going to be a challenge for some of those breeders to try and take the requisite steps to address their breeding portfolio and make themselves relevant to the market again.
“At the end of the day, I am pleased with the market we’ve facilitated for this sale because people with nice horses were generally well paid.”
Meanwhile, stakes placegetter Naiconi (Nicconi), a rising five-year-old mare who won three of her nine starts for trainers Tony and Calvin McEvoy was the highest-priced mare in the 72-lot broodmare session, selling to Mitchell Bloodstock for $160,000.