History-maker Better Than Ready breaking new ground for Queensland

Cover image courtesy of Magic Millions

A bit like last year, the Queensland sires Better Than Ready and Spirit Of Boom are arguing over this year’s Queensland sire title. It’s a battle that has been on repeat-play for some time, with hardly anything separating the black horse at Lyndhurst Stud from the bay one at Eureka Stud.

It’s not even a battle that we, watching on, can get frothy about; the two horses share some of the same shareholders, and the two studs enjoy a decent friendship. Nevertheless, it’s been good theatre, and it looks like doing the same these last few weeks of the racing season.

At 130 winners this year so far, Better Than Ready sits fifth on the Australian General Sires’ table by winners. Ahead of him is big cheese… I Am Invincible, Zoustar, Written Tycoon and Snitzel. At 125 winners, Spirit Of Boom is only six winners in arrears.

Gallery: Stallions competing for the 2022/23 Queensland Stallion of the Year title

Both horses are a long way clear of the next best-performing (and living) Queensland sire in this category, that being Divine Prophet, who has relocated from Aquis Farm, Queensland to Highview Stud in New Zealand this year and who is 72nd on the list with 41 winners. Ahead of him, the late Spill The Beans has posted 79 seasonal winners.

However, when the Australian General Sires’ table is broken down by earnings, things get interesting between Better Than Ready and Spirit Of Boom.

Right now, the former sits on progeny earnings of $10,169,847, a good $2 million clear of Spirit Of Boom. This figure for Better Than Ready is already well-clear of what he achieved last year when he posted progeny earnings of $7,038,809, and that figure slides every year you go back through the archives, all the way to his debut crop in 2018/19.

Is it a meteoric rise? Lyndhurst studmaster Jeff Kruger wouldn’t call it that. He said prizemoney is a difficult gauge on brilliance because, in Australia at least, it's so high.

Better Than Ready can thank his smart filly Skirt The Law for a chunk of his winnings this season ($1.64 million), delivered with her victory in the R. Listed Magic Millions 2YO Classic. However, Skirt The Law represents less than 20 per cent of Better Than Ready’s earnings, meaning he is far from a one-trick pony.

Added to this, last weekend Better Than Ready made history, becoming the first Queensland-based stallion to crack the $10 million earnings-mark in any racing season. It takes a good horse to achieve this off humble beginnings and away from the epicentres of Australian breeding.

“He’s had a lot of winners, no doubt about that,” Kruger said, speaking to TDN AusNZ. “It was helped along by him having two Magic Millions winners in January, but I was doing my own homework only recently, and Racing Queensland has paid out QTIS first prize on 80 individual winners for Better Than Ready, and that’s still with two months of the season to go.

“I don’t know how that stacks up with other Queensland stallions, but I would suggest that Spirit Of Boom is hot on his tail because he has similar numbers and similar prizemoney. But all I know is that we’re ahead.”

Kruger puts in a small chuckle when he mentions that his horse is ahead of Spirit Of Boom, but it’s a friendly rivalry.

“Lyndhurst and myself are shareholders in Spirit Of Boom, so I wish the horse every success,” he said. “And you’d have to say that, jokes aside, this pair of horses has gone a long way to revitalising breeding in Queensland.”

It isn’t that Queensland breeding has been stuck in the dark ages. Far from, in fact. The state has posted some amazing stallions throughout its history, including the Champion sire The Buzzard (GB), who was twice leading sire in Australia during the 1940s, and then imports like Semipalatinsk (USA).

Lyndhurst, alone, has contributed heavily to local breeding in the shape of its past greats, namely Grand Chaudiere (Can) by Northern Dancer (Can), and Celestial Dancer (Ire) by Godswalk (USA). Kruger said that Better Than Ready is at least as good as all of them.

“At Lyndhurst, we’ve stood at least three other stallions that, if they were in this era now, they’d be doing the same as Better Than Ready,” he said. “Sequalo and Celestial Dancer, certainly, and there are others going too far back to mention. So it’s a very worthy achievement, what Better Than Ready has done.”

Without Fear of success

Better Than Ready was announced last month at $27,500 (inc GST) for the spring upcoming. For a Champion First Season Sire, it’s a pretty good price.

In that first crop of 138 mares, which delivered 106 live foals at a fee of $9900 (inc GST), the horse demonstrated quickly that he was a force to be reckoned with when delivering 23 individual winners from 47 runners.

They were numbers fairly close to what the dazzling Without Fear (Fr) posted in the 1975/76 Australian season, when that horse’s first crop, numbering just 40, got him 30 individual winners. That record still stands today.

“Right from the very first crop, his story was beginning,” Kruger said. “Better Than Ready got 23 individual 2-year-old winners in his first crop from, fair to say, C-grade mares. If you look at today’s stats, the leading 2-year-old sire might have eight or nine 2-year-old winners, and last year it might have been 14 or 15.

“So there’s no other stallion, bar Deep Field in the same year (with 21 winners), that got anywhere near those numbers. He’s a dead-set sire of early runners, and they train on at three and four. Those 80 individual QTIS winners this year just backs up that early runner theory, and he’s doing it every year.”

Better Than Ready, when reaching his 23 individual first-crop winners, was second only to Without Fear in history. In 2020/21, Capitalist reached 20 winners, and Russian Revolution sat on 15 last year. This year, Brave Smash (Jpn) is showing the way on nine winners.

“Without Fear was a lifetime ago,” Kruger said. “So this horse is really a marvel.”

At $27,500, Better Than Ready is still good value at Lyndhurst Stud. He could probably have stood for more this upcoming breeding season, but the factor of his geography was a large consideration.

“We could have stood him for more, but in my opinion, he and Spirit Of Boom have priced the Queensland breeder out,” Kruger said. “Queensland breeders that can afford to go to him are the same breeders that can afford to go to the Hunter, and we’re well aware of that. So the biggest challenge for Lyndhurst is to have our shareholders upgrade their mares, Lyndhurst included.”

Upgrading the class of mares that visit Better Than Ready is something the stud is working on. It won’t help the stallion in the long term if the bulk of his stock is heading to a QTIS sale. Kruger needs them to go to January, for instance.

This spring, mares from the Hunter Valley are booked to Better Than Ready and, for the first time, from New Zealand. But it is a priority that shareholder mares, who make up a large circle of the stallion’s annual book, are as good as they can be.

“I’ve got shareholders who bought into the stallion for as little as $25,000 in year one who are still sending the same mares they sent seven and eight years ago,” Kruger said. “The onus is on them and us to upgrade, and if they do, they’ll find themselves in a better sale catalogue.”

Not for sale

Much like Spirit Of Boom did with his first crop, Better Than Ready has attracted significant attention around Australia. Regardless of where a horse stands, if he’s posting these sorts of results on limited opportunities, someone is watching.

Kruger told us that he’s had two offers in recent years to relocate the horse to the Hunter Valley, and they’d be significant offers. On both occasions, the studmaster has turned them down.

“It was very hard to entertain accepting them because it might be a lifetime before any stallion comes along like this for us,” Kruger said. “We might try another 10 or 12 stallions before we get one every bit as good as Better Than Ready, so we’re making the most of what we’ve got and hoping he’s around for a good while yet.”

In the 2017/18 season, Spirit Of Boom won the First Season Sire classification in Australia by winners, outstripping Zoustar’s 10 with his own 18. By earnings, the result was reversed. Zoustar was Champion First Season Sire, and Spirit Of Boom, with a vastly inferior demographic of mares, was second.

The McAlpine family at Eureka Stud was swamped with offers for Spirit Of Boom, which history tells us were all refused. But the money was big enough that Scott McAlpine lost a degree of sleep over whether he had done the right thing.

Kruger remembers it all too well, albeit the circumstances are a little different with his own black horse.

“Better Than Ready is 14 years old now, so if these offers had come along a little earlier, we may have considered whereby he went south, came home, went south and came home,” he said. “That might have been a scenario to consider, but now that he’s 14, I think we’ve probably missed that opportunity.

“It wasn’t a hard decision, to be honest. He’s good for Lyndhurst and he’s good for the family. We’re a family-run operation and this horse is improving the farm all by himself.”

The race to the 2-year-old Champion Sire title is hot again this year, and by winners, Better Than Ready is on top. However, he is hotly chased by Russian Revolution and Spirit Of Boom on 13 apiece, with Snitzel and Dundeel (NZ) on 12.

He won’t win the race on earnings, but by winners, Better Than Ready could prove a back-to-back title winner on July 31.