Jacquinot in line with history ahead of the Coolmore

Cover image courtesy of Sportpix

It’s a long way back in the archives, but in 159 years of the Coolmore Stud S. (in all its varieties), the first truly commercial sire to emerge from the race was Newminster in 1876.

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As a stallion, that horse sired two Melbourne Cup winners, an Oaks, St Leger and Caulfield Cup winner, and all in an era when commercial stallions received little more than 20 to 30 mares in a season.

These days, the commercial stallion game is very different, as is the time-honoured Coolmore Stud S. When Newminster won it in 1876, it was the Ascot Vale S. for 2-year-olds over Flemington’s straight six. Today, and since 2007, it is the Coolmore Stud S. over the same course and distance.

Unchanged, perhaps, is the race’s ability to mine some of the best stallion talent from the sport. Alongside the Golden Rose, Blue Diamond and Golden Slipper, it’s one of the preeminent stallion-making races of the year.

Think Home Affairs, Exceedance, Merchant Navy and Flying Artie, as well as Brazen Beau, Zoustar, Sepoy, Star Witness and Northern Meteor. All nine of these horses won the Coolmore in the last 14 years, littering Australia’s sire ranks with, in some cases, breed-shaping success.

This weekend, the Coolmore won’t upstage the Derby as a time-honoured Classic, but it will knock the pants off that race when it comes to exposing future Australian bloodlines.

There are four fillies and 13 colts set to contest the race, and one of the headline acts is the 3-year-old colt Jacquinot, a son of Rubick already destined for stallion duties at Widden Stud.

A Zoustar profile

Jacquinot was fifth in The Everest a fortnight ago, which on paper doesn’t read as well as the fact that only 1.55l separated him from that race’s winner, Giga Kick (Scissor Kick).

It was a smart effort from the 3-year-old colt, who now sits on $1.8 million in prizemoney and a three-race win tally from seven starts.

Jacquinot was third to Daumier (Epaulette) in the Blue Diamond, won the G3 McNeil S. at Caulfield and then the G1 Golden Rose in late September. On the eve of The Everest, Widden announced it had bought into the colt and that Jacquinot would join the Widden roster at an undetermined time.

“It was lovely that Antony Thompson and Widden were able to say that the horse would possibly race on as a 4-year-old,” said Lindsay Maxsted, Jacquinot’s breeder and co-owner. Speaking to TDN AusNZ this week, the Coolmore Stud chairman and businessman reflected on Jacquinot’s future as a confirmed stallion for the Widden operation.

“We’ll be very much part of his breeding career, but we also very much want to see him race. It’s a long time before he turns four, so lots of good things, and perhaps other things, can happen in the meanwhile.”

Jacquinot’s profile sits similar to that of Zoustar at this point in his life. Both are winners of the Golden Rose by sons of Encosta De Lago, and both have a Redoute’s Choice damline. Even if Jacquinot isn’t successful this weekend in the Coolmore, Widden has left the door ajar for 4-year-old targets, including the 2023 Golden Eagle.

For Maxsted, the entry of Widden into the foray was an ideal and obvious development in Jacquinot’s future. It will be a good home for the colt, as good a home as a young sire could want in the Australian marketplace.

“But he still feels very much like our horse,” Maxsted said. “And that’s not disrespecting that Widden is now involved, but we’ve kept about 25 per cent of the horse, which is really nice for us, and we don’t feel any less enthused because we’ve sold a majority interest. Far from it, actually.”

All of the original owners in Jacquinot sold part of their shares to Widden, and the colt now boasts some hefty names in the racebook. There’s Widden, Qatar Bloodstock, Trilogy and Harbour Bloodstock, as well as Laurel Oak, GPI Racing and Glenlogan Park, among others.

In the Coolmore, Jacquinot will race for the first time in Qatar silks and he’ll be pitching to become Mick Price’s first horse since Flying Artie, and the second of his horses this century, to win the prestigious event.

The rise of Rubick

For Maxsted and the original Jacquinot owners, the phone started ringing after the Golden Rose last month.

“It won’t surprise anyone that the calls started coming immediately after the Golden Rose in terms of whether we were interested in selling the horse or not,” Maxsted said. “We had a chat about it and we said we’d at least look at the market and see what the level of interest was, and it’s been well-reported that James Harron did that for us.

“I know James well, so we pulled in James rather than me do it or one of the other owners. We just felt it was important to have someone independent do it, and Widden was successful, in the end.”

Jacquinot, be it this season or next, will be the first of the Rubick line to stand at Widden. But the Encosta De Lago line is far from new to the operation with the likes of Northern Meteor and Zoustar.

For Maxsted, the emergence of Rubick as a sire of sons has both surprised him and not surprised him at all.

“It hasn’t really surprised me this year in the sense that he had wonderful books of mares this year, in terms of Jacquinot being a two- and 3-year-old,” Maxsted said. “They were large books of good-quality mares, but equally it’s not a secret that he was out of favour when we took Jacquinot to the yearling sales.

“The fact that Rubick has come back is just wonderful. It’s wonderful for Coolmore and it’s wonderful for Adam (Sangster) at Swettenham.”

Rubick relocated to Swettenham Stud in April last year. It was a homecoming of sorts for Adam Sangster because his father, the imposing and brilliantly minded Robert Sangster, had raced the dam of Encosta De Lago and sold her, carrying the stallion, to Coolmore’s Demi O’Byrne in 1998.

The rest was history, of course, with Encosta De Lago installing himself as a breed-shaping Australian sire, and now Rubick, with all his success of late, has climbed into the picture as a sire of sires himself.

“Rubick has already thrown Yes Yes Yes and there’s Jacquinot now,” Maxsted said. “There’ll be others to build on that, and it’s great for Rubick.”

A comeback?

Making stallions is a difficult game with a small window, and the stories of Rubick and Rebel Dane in the last handful of years are evidence of that.

Getting the right mares is tricky, predicting the market is near impossible, and when Rubick was installed in the pressure cooker of commercial breeding, he had a lot of top competition in the Hunter Valley.

He debuted in 2015 at $17,600 (inc GST), and Coolmore kept him at that fee for four seasons, after which he spiked to $38,500 (inc GST) and then $33,000 (inc GST). Swettenham Stud debuted him last season at $27,500 (inc GST), and this spring he’s at $22,000 (Inc GST).

In 2022 alone, Rubick has had the stakes winners Jacquinot, Bound For Home, Rubiquitous and Shades Of Rose. Likely, these winners were off the back of Rubick’s increased service fee, which attracted the better mares to his book.

For David Raphael, one of Rubick’s original owners and a long-time cheerleader for the stallion, the story couldn’t be going much better.

“I never gave up belief in him,” Raphael said, speaking to TDN AusNZ this week. “For me, and without being disrespectful to breeders in that first season, he didn’t get the royal family of breeding stock, and I wonder if people just thought he was a speed horse. Yes, he was very fast, but it was more that Rubick was so precocious early that people labelled him like that.”

Raphael expects that Rubick will breed as Encosta De Lago did, that he will tidy up foals and that the stock will be best left to mature.

“Don’t be prepping them to be Breeders’ Plate horses,” he said. “If the trainers are preparing them to be precocious, that’s fine, but let them mature to be late 2-year-olds. That’s what I’ve always said and I think the facts have proved that correct.”

Rubick’s first crop hit racetracks in 2018/19. It produced 15 winners in Australia, and the following season that figure rose to 43. The year after that it was 71 until last year, it stood at 81. This season alone, without even half the calendar gone, he has sired more stakes winners (three) than each of the previous four seasons.

“They’re saying it’s an unbelievable comeback,” Raphael said, “but I say people have worked out what to do with him now.”

Blue-blooded family

When Lindsay Maxsted brought Jacquinot to the yearling sale market, it was January 2021 and the colt was part of the Coolmore draft at the Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale. There were 21 youngsters in the catalogue by Rubick and, as Lot 652, Jacquinot was passed in at $90,000, some way off his reserve of $120,000.

The best-selling of the Rubick progeny at that sale was a colt from Empress Matilda (Charge Forward) that sold for $140,000, but it’s fair to say that Jacquinot’s passing-in worked out pretty well in the end for Maxsted and his co-owners.

“He (Jacquinot) was on our list at the Gold Coast last year and our vet said no,” Raphael said. “We loved him, so there’s a part of you that watches his success wishing it was your own, but I’ve been riding his tale like he was our own all the way through.

“The conversation about Rubick’s sire sons now, for me, supports the fact of the stallion’s pedigree. He is from one of the best families on the planet, so it’s not surprising that he’s got a couple of viable stallions at or going to stud.

“Whether the pedigrees on the female side are as strong as his, that’s the decision that breeders are going to have to make.”

Up at Coolmore, both Jacquinot’s dam, the Pierro mare Ponterro, and his grandam, Pontiana by Redoute’s Choice, are alive and well. Ponterro is just eight years old and is due to foal to Wootton Bassett (GB) shortly. If there’s time, she’ll visit Yes Yes Yes this season, which Maxsted said is the obvious choice.

Pontiana, meanwhile, is 15 years old and the dam of Group 1 winner Inference, now a stallion at Cornwall Park Stud. She is also the dam of the dual Group 2 winner Dragon Leap (Pierro) and the dual Listed winner Illation.

Maxsted bought Pontiana, herself a full sister to the stakes winner Grand Jardin (Redoute’s Choice), via Hawkes Racing, the latter paying $215,000 for her from the Coolmore draft at the 2009 Inglis Sydney Easter Sale. Pontiana was bred by John Camilleri and she’s given Maxsted enormous joy.

Her latest foal was an I Am Invincible filly in 2020, which was withdrawn from the Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale this year, and Pontiana visited So You Think (NZ) this spring, “in search of the next Inference or Illation”, according to Maxsted.