– ‘Bloody ignorant, since you mention it!’ – and he was uncertain of his credentials.
‘How could I, for instance, telephone some Greek shipping billionaire and suggest he throws in a couple of million dollars and buys into half a dozen yearlings with us? Who am I? Robert Sangster, football pools operator, won a few handicaps at Haydock and Ayr … flattened Tiny Davies! Ask yourself, John, who am I? I mean, Vincent could call them and everyone would know he was the greatest horse trainer in the world. But I am nothing like qualified. I lack horse credentials. They would not even bother to talk to me.’
Magnier pondered the problem. Robert, he thought, had a point. His Liverpool-based friend had big money, tons of charm, a gambler’s instinct and a top-class business brain. He also had considerable experience now in the racehorse business. But he was not a born and bred racing man. And it might show. ‘Perhaps’, he suggested, ‘Vincent could get you elected Honorary President of Ireland or something. You need to be at least that important!’
For a few weeks in the latter half of 1972 they shelved their plans for an international syndicate, while they concentrated on the racing. Their attention was caught for the time being by a potential stallion for which John Magnier had an obdurate, unreasonable obsession. The word ‘interest’ could not even remotely convey his passion for the slightly disappointing chestnut sprinter Deep Diver, owned, like Green God, by David Robinson. A brilliant two-year-old winner at Royal Ascot, Deep Diver had run well a few times, but had not hit the jackpot at three. John Magnier was sure he would improve and he tried to get in and buy him before anyone agreed with him about the horse’s potential. He approached David Robinson who would not sell yet. Nor would he utter anything other than vague telephone numbers about price. Then Deep Diver came out and won the Nunthorpe Stakes at York, by two lengths from the brilliant filly Stilvi. He ran the feet off a top-class field and smashed the track record while he was about it.
John Magnier did not know whether to say: ‘Wonderful. I knew he was that good’ or, alternatively, ‘Damn it. That’ll put the price up to £250,000.’ Robert says he settled for the latter. Again John Magnier enquired about buying the horse, but David Robinson would not deal until after the running of the Prix de l’Abbaye, the top sprint race in France run at Longchamp in Paris in early October. There Deep Diver would face the reigning European sprint champion Home Guard on ground perhaps faster and drier than he really enjoyed. But the race turned out to be literally ‘no contest’. Deep Diver burst out of the starting stalls like a howitzer and opened up such a massive early lead nothing ever got near him. Home Guard was four lengths away at the finish.
Now John Magnier went into serious negotiation. He was determined to buy Deep Diver and determined to raise the money. He called Robert again, told him they may have to go to £400,000, but it was still cheap. ‘This is the fastest horse in Europe,’ he said. ‘And he’s the fastest by a very long way. His sire Gulf Pearl was fast, and tough enough to win the Chester Vase. Deep Diver himself ran eleven times as a two-year-old. No one can say if a horse will make a stallion, but at £400,000 we will either make serious money or at worse get out with a small profit. I’ll fill him at £3500 a cover.’
Robert knew how to do the sums now. With forty-five mares to the horse in each of his first three seasons at £3500, there would be a grand total of £472,500. That would more than cover purchase price, keep and insurance. There would be a few bonus breeding rights for the main shareholders, perhaps five a year, and, if the stallion hit with a couple of fast horses in his first ‘crop’, the shareholders would all be on the gravy train. If none of Deep Diver’s offspring could run by the end of year five, well, he would be sold to Japan for a song. But for a profitable song.
Robert laid out a business plan and went to his father. Vernon grasped the facts extremely swiftly and agreed on the strategy. Robert could put up the original money and, as the paymaster, have a strong say in the sale of both shares and one-time breeding seasons. Two weeks later John Magnier agreed terms with David Robinson. Deep Diver, purchased for £400,000, would never run again. He would report for duty at Castle Hyde Stud in County Cork. Robert Sangster’s money and John Magnier’s vision had combined for the first time.
Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic a further phenomenon was in the process of breaking out. It came in shades of bright, burnished copper, and it went by the name of Secretariat, a colt already considered by all of the top judges to be the fastest two-year-old seen in the United States since Native Dancer twenty years before. By the time John Magnier had bought Deep Diver, Secretariat had won seven races in four months, including three at Saratoga, and two more Stakes at Belmont Park. He was already the hottest favourite for the 1973 American Triple Crown in living memory.
In the November of the year, John Magnier told Robert Sangster on the telephone from Ireland that if Secretariat should triumph in all three American classics next summer, the US public would go berserk over the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948. ‘There will’, he said, ‘be a massive upsurge in interest in horseracing.’ They both knew that seven weeks after the final leg of the Triple Crown – the Belmont Stakes in New York – the first yearlings by the English Triple Crown winner Nijinsky would come under the hammer at Keeneland. ‘I am telling you’, said John, with some alarm, ‘that prices will go higher and higher. Christ! I’ve just paid a one hundred per cent premium for Deep Diver against what I paid for Green God one year ago. Do you have any idea what could happen in this industry in the next few years?’
Robert did not. But he caught the drift. He was becoming aware of the great fear of John Magnier: that in five years’ time it will be impossible either to buy, or even retain for breeding, a top-class American-bred stallion in southern Ireland, or even England.
‘They’ll freeze us out,’ said John. ‘The sheer weight of their dollars will dominate the industry. Big prices for yearlings always mean big prices for stallions. Over here we will find ourselves looking at second-line stallions, and they in turn will produce second-line racers, which will in turn make third-line stallions. In this business you have to get the best, and breed the best to the best. There is no other way. And I am afraid the Americans could cause us to become strictly a third-rate power in the bloodstock business.’
Once more Robert and John reconvened in southern Ireland. They spent time going to visit Deep Diver and Green God at Castle Hyde, and they went over the list of shareholders. The entire business was sound, and again they talked long into the night, once more agreeing that the answer was to form powerful syndicates that could take on the Americans financially at the breeding end of the industry. But like all major business reviews, they were apt to simplify what was already easy, and complicate what was already confusing. The issue was the same. Robert remained the obvious man to head up the sales operation to the big potential investors. But he needed credentials. Four weeks later, from a rather unexpected quarter, he got them.
At the conclusion of their meeting in Portman Square on II December 1972, the Jockey Club announced the election of three new members. The first was the tall Old Etonian Champion Amateur Steeplechase rider Christopher Collins, heir to the Goya perfume business; the second was David Alan Bethell, the fifth Baron Westbury MC (confidant of the Royal Family, former Captain in the Scots Guards, twice wounded, North African campaign); the third was the Cheshire Regiment’s former private soldier and scourge of the rails bookmakers, Robert E. Sangster KO (Heavyweight Campaign, Berlin). Proposed by the local Liverpool peer, the Earl of Derby, and seconded by the third Viscount Leverhulme, a near-neighbour from the Wirral, Robert was elected, unopposed, for basically the same reasons as Chris Collins. After the nasty scare the Members had received over Christopher Soames’s blackballing five years previously, the Club had agreed to bring in new blood, young men of vision, who were important investors in bloodstock and seemed likely to show an interest in the administration of racing in Great Britain in the coming years. Under this new post-Soames regime, the Jockey Club had recruited several racehorse owners and breeders who had demonstrated outstanding abilities beyond the paddocks: Sir Robert McAlpine of the giant construction
