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Bart Cummings finds his horse and we're racing for $50,000
Bart's beauty ... Bart Cummings' new horse. Picture: Cameron Richardson Source: The Daily Telegraph
IT IS to be hoped that Bart Cummings, with $50,000 slow-burning his pocket, is at least half as wise as his owlish eyebrows suggest.
The grand old man was there at the Easter yearling sales at Randwick yesterday, exactly as he was the day before and the one before that, peering out from under those grand old eyebrows at some of the finest horse flesh a lot of money can buy.
The whole time the message was simple; it is serious business this buying of racehorses.
Alongside Cummings were many of the biggest names in racing.
John Hawkes, discussing yearlings with his sons, Wayne and Michael. Gai Waterhouse talking away, stopping only long enough to stick her hand up and buy another horse for a lazy six figures before she was back schmoozing owners.
There was David Hayes, John O'Shea, Graeme Rogerson and Mark Kavanagh, the current Melbourne Cup champion who paid $1.2 million on Tuesday for the filly out of Makybe Diva.
Half the Freedman clan were there too, although which ones, exactly, remains unclear. Lee was definitely one, but the Freedman brothers are a bit like the Baldwins. You know who they are, if not who's who.
The trainers played the perfect middlemen between the breeders, who are trying to sell their horses for as much as possible, and the owners, who are trying to buy them as cheaply as possible, and the games that get played in between.
This week, once again, was a world of phantom bids and whispers. It all depended on who you listened to, and who you believed.
The beautiful thing is that the game remains because every year rich owners wander in to the sales as innocent as a day-old-babe and their egos insist that they must own the next champion.
And so thank heavens for Bart Cummings, 82, and with the grandfatherly looks. If you can't trust Bart, who can you trust?
Cummings has been entrusted with $50,000 on behalf of The Daily Telegraph to invest in a share of a horse, of which everybody who attended last week's Golden Slipper and this Saturday's Derby has a chance to win.
Cummings will train it. We were offered the chance to pretend to be like an owner for a day and go to the sales and, as Cummings scoped the horses, find out what he likes in a horse.
That was how it went in theory, anyway. I wasn't allowed to sit near Cummings, lest other trainers noticed and thought he was up to something.
I could watch him, but was told I wouldn't be able to tell if he was buying horses or shooing flies.
"We've had owners sit with us during the auctions and not know that we've just bought them a horse," said bloodstock agent Duncan Ramage, Cummings' right-hand man.
Ramage is a buyer in his own right.
"We have a process that we have adopted and followed for many, many years," he said.
"We take this very, very seriously." To discover what Cummings wants in a yearling is akin to asking the Colonel what, exactly, are his 11 secret herbs and spices?
After So You Think won the Cox Plate last year, for example, Cummings was asked what he saw that made him buy.
"Anyone that was at the sales would have seen it," Bart said.
"But what drew you to him?" the reporter asked. "You couldn't help but like him."
"But what was it exactly?"
"He looked good."
It could have gone on like this for hours - Bart was feeling playful - but instead the reporter limped away, beaten, to go put his head in an oven.
Cummings spent three days personally inspecting all 614 yearlings listed for sale.
Any of them stand out? "We'll find the best horse we can," he said.
"Seen any you like?"
"I've seen a lot of them."
"What'll make you put your hand up to buy them?"
"Value."
Cummings knows exactly what he looks for in a horse.
"Conformation and pedigree," he said. Truly, he did.
It sounded profound, but every horse is valued according to its pedigree and conformation and, if the bidding is under Cummings' own valuation, he puts his hand up.
If it's over his value, he doesn't.
No horse is perfect so, as an evaluator, Cummings decides if he can live with the faults against what he gets elsewhere.
After three days he finally saw it on Thursday in Lot 429, a brown colt by Nadeem out of Fly By Night.
He paid $220,000 for him.
Asked what he saw in him, naturally he said: "You study the catalogue and come up with all the good ideas." Finally he relented.
"He's a big colt. Steps over well. Walks like an athlete.
"His hind quarters wobble like Marilyn Monroe when she walked."
With that done there was nothing left to do but walk towards the gate and trust in Bart - like we always have. |
