David Ord was our man at the track at Royal Ascot and the rise and rise of Wathnan Racing was one of his takeouts from the week.
Go on admit it, there are certain jobs in racing you look at and think, yep I’d have a bit of that.
And Racing manager to the free-spending new kids on the block Wathnan Racing would be high on the wish-list. Put together your own bespoke stable for a meeting like Royal Ascot, sit back and watch the rockets fly home then take a few plaudits from grateful owners and members of the media who you are only too happy to talk to.
But in Richard Brown it looks like the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, has found the perfect man for the role. The rest of us will have to wait our turn.
It was fascinating to hear him speak during the week about the painstaking presentation he’d put together to sell project Wathnan to James Doyle. Ambition and money are two things, but big jockeys want big horses on big days. Not a stone was left unturned.
And just look at the sure touch he’s shown through the spring so far. The breeze-up sales were a new playground for the team, and they bought 12 six-figure lots.
Of that dozen seven made Royal Ascot and they came back with two winners in Leovanni (Queen Mary) and Shareholder (Norfolk) while Electrolyte and Columnist finished second and third, beaten a few whiskers between them, in the Coventry Stakes.
Another decision Brown and the team got right was sending those breeze-up purchases to yards that excel with such projects. The autumn yearlings headed to the sort of homes you associate with star turns at Tattersalls Book One, but the policy with the ready-made products was to house them with teams who would find out what they had – and where to point them – in time for this week.
Karl Burke was the hero of the hour with the two winners, Archie Watson and Richard Fahey hitting the crossbar. It’s refreshing that the operation has spread its net so wide at such an early stage. And given the success of breeze-up project 2024, Brown can be expected to raise his catalogue a few more times when the spring sales roll around again.
And proven horses, bought in anticipation of big runs at meetings like this, stayed where they were too including Jersey Stakes hero Haatem and English Oak who won the Buckingham Palace for Ed Walker.
However, despite what it might look like from the outside, it isn’t a bottomless pit of money Brown is playing with. Every horse is assessed and valued. And that figure is the top limit of what they’ll spend.
In the fantastic Horsetrader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings, Patrick and Nick Robinson chart Sangster and the Coolmore team’s skirmishes and subsequent all-out wars with the Maktoum family and the rest of the world in the sales rings of Europe and America.
Figures changed hands that still set the records to this very day as valuations went out the window as ego and a sheer will-to-win kicked in. But we saw only this week that when the stars collide, game-changing figures can still be reached in the great game.
The Goffs London Sale is specifically designed to allow the mega-rich to top up their Ascot teams with a last minute, off-the-peg, purchase. Sparkling Plenty was different. She’d won the Prix de Diane a mere 26 hours earlier and wasn’t even bound for the Royal Meeting after her brief appearance in the sales ring.
But what an appearance it was, the hammer coming down at £8,100,000 after a three-way battle that didn’t involve Wathnan. In the end a deal was struck in which the filly’s original owners, who bought her back, sold 50% to Al Shaqab Racing for £5million.
Speaking on Luck On Sunday Brown made it clear such bouts will only attract his operation if the price is within their valuation.
“I have to report to Olly Tait, Olly Tait has to report to Qatar, Olly lives in Australia so we’re not on the phone at the auctions,” he said.
“We value the horse, put a strict budget on it and I have a last bid and that’s it, there is no give. We’ve missed out on some by one bid and we’ve bought some just on the edge of our budget so it’s very strict, there’s no leeway in it. For example we went to Arqana and had nine on the list and bought four of them. We are very disciplined in our budget.”
And that’s the same when it comes to buying horses in training, such as Saturday’s Jersey Stakes hero Haatem.
“If you come into market place and just buy everything, you ruin it for yourself,” Brown continued. “So you have to go in, value the horse and if you’re lucky enough to value the horse correctly you buy it, if you don’t you walk away because there’s always another one. I have a very good team which I head up, you can’t do this on your own. I have Tom Goff who I work very closely with, Stu Bowman who I’m working particularly closely with. What I’ve said to them on this project is the white noise outside, you have to get rid of that. What we’ve got to do is analyse it, we’ve got to decide whether we’re putting a horse forward or not.
“I’m the gung-ho one and and I’m often being reigned in by the others in certain circumstances. You learn who to listen to in certain situations and who to listen to in others. It’s all very new to us to be operating at this level, it would be new to anybody, and as with everything the more experience you get the better you get at it but discipline is the one word we’re trying to use.
“There were a couple of examples of horses at Ascot who we tried to buy who did very well. I’m not going to name them but one won and the other didn’t but obviously there are lots of horses there who we made enquiries about, a number who we tried to buy but for budget reasons we didn’t.”
So how did what would have been a fifth Ascot winner of the week slip through the net?
“Budget. The horse that won we were very keen on but we decided against it. They probably would sell but we decided what might have got that deal done was going to be too much. Most of the best horses around run at that meeting and we’ve been following them through so it’s then interesting to see how they do,” Brown added.
One question yet to be answered is whether the next phase of the Wathnan project is to develop a breeding operation. Queen Mary heroine Leovanni, for example, is now a very valuable broodmare prospect in her own right.
But what will really force them to decide is if a stallion or three emerge from the burgeoning ranks of older horses, three-year-olds and current juvenile team. There must be a good chance too. Then to sell or stand will be the decision faced. I know which way I’d bet.
In a week when Godolpnin drew a second successive blank, Wathnan Racing finished second to Coolmore in the leading owners’ table at Royal Ascot. Last year we were interested observers as the new start-up saw Courage Mon Ami carry their colours to victory in the Gold Cup and Gregory the Queen’s Vase.
This time around the questions aren’t about how serious they are about emerging as a major force in the sport, but just what are the limits to their ambitions?
