O’President
You take a Group 1-winning mare, out of a Blue Hen of a mother, and put her with a sire renowned in two hemispheres for leaving top-notch offspring.
Et voilà – you make a Golden Slipper contender, this one known as O’President.
Pretty straightforward, really. If breeding is this easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?
Well, not so fast.
Because that was the exact problem – being not so fast – with the first result of this Kia Ora-stud mating, the first foal from O’Reilly mare O’Marilyn – winner of the 2014 Manawatu Sires’ Produce Stakes – and the great Fastnet Rock.
This is one of those times you remember Dame Nellie Melba’s infamous sister couldn’t sing, and for O’President’s sake that’s a good thing.
That first colt went to the 2018 Inglis Easter Yearling Sale five months before O’President was born. Given his impressive breeding and stature, he was in strong demand and, in fact, fetched the second-highest price of the auction, with George Moore Bloodstock knocking out Coolmore with a bid of $1.8 million.
However, like many a nosebleed-inducing buy before him, he’s gone on to prove very costly indeed. Gelded for a career in Hong Kong and named Circuit Five, he had four barrier trials there in which he failed to give a hint of his blue blood. The nerves among his owners will have been understandably high, but still they will have hoped for a different horse to turn up on raceday. Finally, Circuit Five was saddled up – at 70-1 – for his first start in December 2019. He ran 12th, out of 12, beaten 17 lengths and, following another poor trial two weeks later, the pricey galloper is now a retired four-year-old.
Thankfully for Kia Ora and others, there’s been better news.
A second try at the Fastnet Rock-O’Marilyn match produced a filly who – eight months before her big brother’s ignominious debut – fetched $600,000 at the Easter sale when sold to Japanese racing and breeding titan Katsumi Yoshida.
She’s now the three-year-old Fifteen Aria and shows promise, having won a Warwick Farm maiden for Chris Waller on debut in December.
But the mating now appears to have struck gold with her little brother and stablemate O’President, who sold for $520,000 in last year’s online Inglis Easter sale (to the same Coolmore-led syndicate that cheered $875,000 yearling Home Affairs’ Silver Slipper win a week earlier).
O’President wasn’t supposed to be this good. Not at this stage anyway. Expectations were he’d grow into his skin more as a three-year-old. But, after strolling in with a Canterbury maiden on a heavy 8 track at his second start in late January, at his next outing he soared into Slipper calculations with an imperious length-and-a-quarter win in the Skyline Stakes at Randwick last Saturday.
He’s now providing plenty of potential to justify Kia Ora’s faith and persistence with a mating which did look very good on paper.
For starters, he’s by one of Coolmore’s all-time greats in Fastnet Rock, the dual Group 1 winner who’s produced 40 more of them worldwide, and who at 19 currently sits third on the Australian two-year-old sires table and fifth on the broodmare sires’ list.
O’Marilyn, bought privately by Kia Ora after a track career which saw her win four from eight starts. The start before her Manawatu Sires triumph she’d finished a narrow second in her first try at Group 1 level in the Diamond Stakes at Ellerslie.
And her dam was Monroe Magic, who’s as qualified for the coveted title of Blue Hen as any broodmare. Though ordinary on the track for trainer Bill Mitchell, retiring with just the one win from 12 starts, at stud the daughter of Zabeel’s record has been magnificent.
Her third named foal was Headturner, by Anabaa, who claimed the 2006 AJC Derby for John Hawkes and was third in the VRC version.
A few years later came full brother Anacheeva, winner of the 2010 Caulfield Guineas for Peter Moody, plus two other stakes races.
O’Marilyn made it Group 1 winner number three for Monroe Magic, while also in the mix was Kroner, a Group 2 and dual Listed winner in Sydney, all in 2009, for Bart Cummings.
“It really is an absolutely incredible family,” Kia Ora’s bloodstock and breeding manager Shane Wright tells It’s In The Blood. “To get a Group 1 winner from the first dam is great, but to get three of them is nearly unheard of.
“Monroe Magic was really was a Blue Hen that way and now with O’Marilyn … it looks like a very good one she’s produced in O’President.”
Matching Fastnet Rock with a daughter of O’Reilly figures well down the list of that sire’s best nicks, though the numbers themselves aren’t bad. Of the eight horses thus-born, six are winners, with O’President the first at stakes level. But Kia Ora saw some sound reasoning.
“Putting Fastnet Rock over an O’Reilly mare – it worked out pretty well on paper,” says Wright. “We thought it’d be a good outcross for the sire, and putting Fastnet Rock with those slightly stouter Kiwi mares, on physicals it was a great combination. O’Marilyn is a normal-sized mare but she’s quite neat and with a lot of quality, so the mating just made itself really.
“Fifteen Aria is taking a little bit of time but Chris Waller does think quite highly of her.
“O’President was always a good sort. One of these nice colts with a lot of quality about him. He’s a very correct horse and his attitude and his temperament were great – which is a lot of the game when you’re trying to make good two-year-olds.
“In fact he’s probably a little sharper than we all expected. He’s already shown huge ability at two and there are big hopes for him as a juvenile, but Chris really thinks he’ll develop into a top class three-year-old.”
As for that black sheep of the family in Circuit Five? In a game that keeps everyone on their toes, there are no ground-breaking theories on why the same mating which appears to have worked spectacularly in one attempt failed so abjectly in another, with Wright opting for a variation on the Nellie Melba theory.
“How fast were Cathy Freeman’s brothers?” he says.
“I guess this is the million dollar question. If we knew the answer this business would be easy. Rome wasn’t built in a day but, when you’re getting quality types, sooner or later you hit the jackpot. Let’s hope O’President is that.”
Repeating the dose, O’Marilyn now has what Wright calls another “very nice” Fastnet Rock colt at foot. But, mixing things up, there’s an I Am Invincible filly bound for this year’s Inglis Easter Yearling Sale.
Further back in O’President’s pedigree, Monroe Magic’s dam, My Marilyn, by Bakharoff, was a stakes-placed winner of three races. O’President has a chance to emulate one ancestor in the Golden Slipper in O’Reilly’s dam Courtza, winner of the 1986 Slipper (and Blue Diamond), while Courtza’s dam Hunza is the dam of five stakes winners, also including dual Adelaide Cup victor Our Pompeii.
“O’Marilyn is a nice young mare from a great family that’s moving in the right direction, so we’re looking forward to Easter,” Wright says.
“Fastnet Rock is just a top class stallion and every year he gets Group 1 horse after Group 1 horse. Hopefully we can provide him with another one this year in O’President.”