bid was only $10,000 short of the all-time Keeneland record and Robert, not absolutely certain how they were going to raise the $500,000 at this point, sat and waited for the shock waves to subside. He watched the auctioneer demanding a higher bid and was stunned when suddenly he got it. Jim Scully, bidding for the Japanese syndicate headed by Zenya Yoshida, replied with a devastating bid of $600,000. Vincent moved over towards Robert and John Magnier and urged them to try one more. ‘Jesus,’ said Vincent, ‘he’s the most beautiful colt. Let’s go higher.’ But Robert was very, very nervous. He sat with his head well down, saying nothing, refusing even to look up, as Scully landed the fine bay son of Bold Ruler for the greatest amount of money ever bid at Keeneland.
Secretly he was extremely relieved, but Vincent O’Brien was disappointed. John Magnier was very much within himself, turning the problems over in his mind. Late that evening he told Robert, ‘This sale is running thirty-three per cent up on last year. Secretariat has driven everyone mad. You can already see that Nijinsky was syndicated cheaply at $5.5 million. Personally, I think the Bold Ruler was cheap. Look, bull markets tend to run for quite a while. Here we had two of the best judges of a racehorse in the world Vincent and Tom Cooper telling us to buy. When we come here again, we have to be much more serious, much more organized. We have to come with several million raised from a syndicate so that nothing frightens us off. We must be in a position to back our judgment.’
Robert too was thoughtful. He resolved to look carefully into the fates of the big-priced Kentucky yearlings, to see what they were really worth at the end of their careers, and how many people actually made money from them. In his heart he believed in the philosophy of John Magnier – that you have to back the judgment of your team. Otherwise, why bother to come? And in the next twenty-four months he would have much time to ruminate upon the night they failed to buy the Bold Ruler yearling. The Japanese named him Wajima, and he won nine races, beating the Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure twice. Once he beat the immortal Forego, in a head-and-head stretch-battle for the Marlboro Cup at Belmont Park. Wajima won nearly $600,000 in prize money alone. He was syndicated as a stallion in 1975 for $7.2 million.
Back in England, Robert was delighted to hear that Cellini was in great form at home. In the next few weeks he won his first two races in Ireland. In Vincent’s view he was one of the two best colts in the country – and that judgment was proved to be sound when Cellini came out and won the 1973 Dewhurst Stakes at Newmarket, England’s premier two-year-old championship, in October. Whether or not he ever won another race, this tough son of Round Table had to be worth $1 million as a sire back in Kentucky. Whichever way you looked at it, Vincent had been right to pay $240,000 for him. And John Magnier’s advice to Robert had been correct: with his first major share in a top-class expensive American yearling, Robert had quadrupled his money.
The following eighteen months was a period of consolidation, during which time Vincent O’Brien, John Magnier and Robert Sangster formulated a serious game plan. It was John Magnier’s opinion that top American-bred stallions were already beyond their reach. He pointed out over and over again, ‘You cannot buy such a horse after his career in the States because they all go to Kentucky for huge amounts of money which we could never pay. And if they race here in Europe and win at the highest class, the Americans quite simply buy them back. They can always pay more, because their stallion fees are so much higher. Any well-bred yearling in America is worth more than his counterpart here because he can win so much money in the States. We do not have the prize-money structure to copy them. They will always have too much cash.’
As the 1974 season wore on, a mood of resignation was beginning to set in. John Magnier and Vincent were deeply unimpressed with the current crop of horses running in Europe, with the possible exception of Dahlia, the brilliant French filly who was superior to all other horses of both sexes, but was unlikely to make much of a stallion. John Magnier also liked the tenaciously tough Ascot Gold Cup winner Sagaro, who he thought one day would sire some good national hunt horses. Basically, he thought the entire answer to the breeding of fast horses over the next two decades rested very firmly in America. The problem was, how to get his hands on them.
Robert Sangster recalls with total clarity the moment Magnier solved the puzzle. He and John were having a quiet drink at Goodwood, right after a tough-looking American-bred colt by Vaguely Noble named Ace of Aces, owned by Nelson Bunker Hunt, had humbled the best milers in England to win the Sussex Stakes.
‘Look at that,’ said Magnier. ‘You could have bought him as a yearling for $30,000. Now he’ll probably be syndicated for upwards of $2 million to go back to Kentucky. I’m wondering if that might not be the answer: to raid the sales in the United States for yearlings, which cost one-twentieth of the price of stallions and hope to get it right once every four or five times. That way we’d own the stallions before they retired – and no one could get them away from us.’
He may have said something like it before, and he certainly refined the raw intellect of the thought many times again, but Robert Sangster says that was the moment, the moment when both he and John Magnier knew that at last they had a strategy to take the world of thoroughbred breeding by its neck and shake loose the key of gold. Robert recalls vividly the warm glow he felt as he pondered John’s words, the warm glow every businessman knows when he has been presented with a winning idea.
‘I poured myself a generous glass of Roederer Cristal,’ says Robert, ‘and I inhaled it as if it was draft lager, and I kept on saying over and over, “I like it, John, I like it, I really like it.”’
‘Baby stallions, Robert,’ said Magnier. ‘That’s what we’re after. The trick is to be absolutely professional about it. And remember, professionalism is about the total elimination of mistakes. It has nothing to do with money.’
Robert did venture the opinion that it would not be much fun if none of them could run. ‘We’ll have good times, and we’ll have a few bad times,’ replied John memorably. ‘But the good times will finance the bad. The trick is really very simple. We gut the catalogues from Keeneland and Saratoga as if they were fresh haddock. We’ll fillet out only those yearlings whose pedigrees are those of a stallion. There will be good racehorses out there in which we have no interest. We will not even bother to look at yearlings which do not have an unmistakable stallions’ pedigree. With Vincent, we have not only the finest classic trainer in the world, we also have the finest selector of a yearling, the man who bought Nijinsky among others. We also have the best possible advisors, Irishmen of the blood, who will spot faults, help Vincent, rally round to help us get it done. And when we go in to buy, we buy, never mind Yoshida, Scully or anyone else.’
Robert felt all of the old sense of adventure and gamble welling inside him. This was going to be nearly as good as Chalk Stream winning the Liverpool Autumn Handicap. He returned to Liverpool, to the office and to his breeding books. All through the winter of 1974–75 he studied the fates of the ten highest-priced yearlings of the past ten years, one hundred in all. He studied their racing careers and their stud values, and he reviewed some truly spectacular disasters, yearlings which had cost fortunes and could not run a yard. There were many which were not quite good enough but did not lose money, but there were also some spectacular successes.
His chart was huge and the permutations many. But however often Robert returned to the drawing board, there was one single conclusion which could not be diminished: the only man who could have made real money from buying such yearlings would have been the man who had bought them all.
The fields around it stand soft, silent and green in their innocence. They are
