'It's been a hell of a hard road so it's nice to get a good one' – the Irish-bred sire springing a surprise in Australia

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On this occasion, Martin Stevens speaks to Grant Dwyer who stands Irish-bred stallion St Jean, sire of last weekend's Caulfield Cup winner Half Yours – subscribers can get more great insight every Monday to Friday.

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As soon as Half Yours crossed the line in front in the Caulfield Cup on Saturday I resolved to write about him in Good Morning Bloodstock this week, as he combines two of my favourite things in this job: first, an obscure, scarcely used sire hitting the big time, and second, the chance to speak to an Australian stud owner, as they are generally far more open and indiscreet than their European counterparts, and always good for a pithy quote or two.

Half Yours’ sire St Jean is especially intriguing as he was bred by Hadi Al Tajir in Ireland by sending the Group 2-winning Marju mare Oriental Fashion to Teofilo and was trained by Kevin Prendergast for the breeder to win a Tramore maiden by 16 lengths in 2013.

St Jean, whose third dam is outstanding matriarch Height Of Fashion, was sold to Highflyer Bloodstock for 65,000gns at the Tattersalls Autumn Horses-in-Training Sale towards the end of 2013 and transferred to Australasia, where he won five more races and eventually wound up in a minor stallion role at Grant and Joanne Dwyer’s Brackley Park in Victoria.

Half Yours, a five-year-old gelding sent out by Tony and Calvin McEvoy to win the Group 3 Naturalism Stakes at Caulfield last month and to finish fourth in the Group 1 Turnbull Stakes a fortnight ago before his decisive Caulfield Cup success, is one of just 13 foals in St Jean’s third crop. The sire’s first, second and fourth generations numbered 17, 11 and ten.

Grant Dwyer, who doesn’t let me down as a typically plain-speaking Australian horseman, takes up the tale of ‘Saint Gene’, as he calls the sire, rather than ‘San Zhon’, as his name was presumably supposed to be pronounced, as the French for St John.

“People have difficulty finding the stallion on the internet so I call him ‘Saint Gene’ and then they know how to spell it and can find him and my phone number online,” he explains.

Getting back to the story, he says: “Brackley Park was originally owned by the Freedman family and in the 1980s and 1990s their horses, including all those Group 1 winners like Mahogany and Schillaci, were pre-trained here by Anthony and Lee and then sent to Richard who put the finishing touches on them at Flemington.

“The property came onto the market in 1999 and my wife and I purchased it from the Freedmans. We had a few broodmares and moved them here, and after a few years I started standing stallions at the bottom end of the market. 

“We’ve stood about six or seven horses for A$2,000 or A$3,000 a cover (£950 to £1,500), and St Jean is the first one who can throw a decent horse. It’s been a hell of a hard road with the stallions, so it’s nice to finally get a good one.

“You’ve got to keep going, though, as you can’t expect to find a top-class sire with only one or two rolls of the dice. Only two things can happen, you either get one eventually or you go broke.”

Half Yours winning the Caulfield Cup

Asked if he was ever close to giving up due to money running out, he replies with a laugh: “Ah, I used to be a stockbroker so I’m travelling alright, because the gold prices are doing very well and I’ve been a big punter in gold stock.”

There’s an honest appraisal of personal finances that has been given by a British or Irish bloodstock figure in an interview on no occasion, in any circumstances, ever. I think I might emigrate.

Describing how St Jean arrived at Brackley Park, Dwyer adds: “St Jean was imported to Australia by the Warrnambool trainer Aaron Purcell for a group of his clients and he did quite well for him. He won four of his first eight starts here, including at Warrnambool, which was important for his connections as they’re all Warrnambool people who love their racing.

“But then he bowed his tendon and, unfortunately, at that point the best bloke to look after tendon injuries was treating them with ibuprofen, which stayed in the horses’ systems for a long time after the treatment stopped. Some of the favourites for the cup races who’d had ibuprofen started testing positive, and Racing Victoria banned them all from racing.

“St Jean consequently lost two years of his racing career, but Aaron’s father James, a local independent politician in the Victorian government who was in the horse, rang the stewards in New Zealand and explained the situation, and asked whether the horse could run there. They said yes, but they'd test the horse after the race, and if he was positive no prize-money would be paid out. The Purcells thought that was fair enough and they sent him across the Tasman.

“He was trained by Donna Logan in New Zealand and was sent out by her to win the City of Auckland Cup at Ellerslie. He was caught four horses wide for most of the way but took off 800 metres from home and outstayed everything.”

In the meantime the Mornington trainer Rob Blacker, a good friend of Aaron Purcell’s, got in touch with Dwyer to ask if he’d stand St Jean on behalf of the horse's ownership syndicate. 

“I said ‘yeah no worries I’ll have a look’, just to humour him really, but when I did look him up and saw his pedigree I thought ‘wow’,” recalls the stallion master. “If he’d managed to win a Group 1 race he’d have gone to a major stud. I’m only a small operation, so I grabbed hold of the opportunity with both hands when it was offered to me.”

Calvin McEvoy, Jamie Melham and Tony McEvoy celebrate winning the Caulfield CupCredit: Racing Photos

In a turn of events that will be recognised by purveyors of budget sires not just in Australia but the world over, Dwyer’s enthusiasm wasn’t shared by all, and trying to launch the well-bred youngster was like pushing water uphill.

“St Jean has had very limited opportunities,” he says. “A stallion usually needs volume and quality to make it, and he’s had neither. He’s beaten the odds by doing it the hard way.

“The thing is, at this lower end of the market you’re dealing with people who have a passion for racing, but often not much money and only an ordinary mare. They’ll breed a foal and then it'll sit out in the paddock, and not all the farms in this part of the world are that well appointed, so you lose a fair few foals through paddock injuries. Either that or the breeder runs out of money, and can’t afford to have the horse broken in. 

“Whereas if you breed a horse to a A$50,000 or A$100,000 stallion, the foal will be reared in the best possible environment and go to the yearling sales, where the top trainers will buy them. They have a way better chance of getting to the races, let alone winning.”

St Jean is no one-trick-pony, either. Half Yours is his only stakes performer, but that is easily excused considering the quantity of his output, and he has 12 winners and three other place-getters altogether from a grand total of 22 runners.

Dwyer thinks that this is yet another case of ‘blood will out’, and that St Jean’s unlikely success as a sire is down to his exceptional pedigree, and in particular his blue-hen ancestress – not that she is necessarily appreciated by other breeders in Australia.

“Ah, no-one’s heard of Height Of Fashion down here,” exclaims Dwyer in exasperation. “I tell people she’s his third dam and they look at me like I’ve got two heads. I say ‘well, the Queen owned her and she won a stakes race at Ascot’ and their faces are still blank. I carry on and explain that she was the dam of Nashwan, Unfuwain and Nayef, and there’s still no reaction.

“But most Australian breeders want to produce a two-year-old and three-year-old sprinter, and this horse doesn’t throw that, he throws a three-year-old and four-year-old stayer. In fact, he’s never had a two-year-old runner. They take a while to mature.”

Drilling down further into St Jean’s breeding appeal, he continues: “There isn’t all that much evidence to go on at the moment, but if you look at the pedigrees of his foals who have run and won, versus the ones who haven’t made the track, you’ll see that he goes well when he sees the female family of Sadler’s Wells, he goes well if there’s Halo somewhere in the mare’s pedigree, and he goes well if Mill Reef is somewhere in the mix. 

“He obviously also goes well with Desert King [the damsire of Half Yours]. It puts a double dose of Danehill into the foal, but I don’t actually think that’s the reason for it working. I reckon you have to look further back at the duplications of Bustino and Special.”

Half Yours was bred by Janice Thomson, the wife of the late meat processing billionaire and prominent Warrnambool racing figure Colin McKenna, who was one of the shareholders in St Jean. The newly minted Group 1 winner is from a family that meant a lot to the owners, as his placed dam La Gazelle is a half-sister to Flemington Group 3 winner Moudre, one of the first good horses trained by Ciaron Maher for them – the team later tasting big-race glory with superstars such as Jameka, Merchant Navy and Duke De Sessa.

“I’d never spoken to Colin McKenna in my life but he supported St Jean by sending him two mares in his first season and another two mares in his second season,” says Dwyer. “One was actually Regina Coeli, who was raced in partnership with Ciaron Maher and won the Grand Annual Steeplechase at Warrnambool twice. 

“One day during St Jean’s third season at stud I got a call from Blue Gum Farm, another stud just up the road, and they said they had two of Ciaron Maher’s mares here who would be going to St Jean, with Colin McKenna providing the service for free.

“I said no worries, send them down. There was nothing in it for me and I had to pay someone to come out and hold the mares while I jumped the stallion on her, so I asked if they could pay a couple of hundred bucks as a walk-in fee, and Ciaron agreed to that. He didn’t have to, but he’s a decent fella.”

One of those mares was La Gazelle, and the result was Half Yours. Maher owned half of the chestnut gelding with Colin McKenna, hence the name, and saddled him to win two races at Geelong and Cranbourne, but when McKenna died last October the horse was sold in an an Inglis Online auction, with the McEvoys giving A$305,000 (£148,000 or €170,000) for him, leaving Maher as the frustrated underbidder.

“No-one could believe that a horse conceived at a fee of A$3,000 could make that much money,” says Dwyer. “It generated a lot of good publicity for St Jean.”

He insists that he doesn’t mind that he received only a small ex-gratia payment from Maher for the breeding of Half Yours, when the horse was the subject of a six-figure takeover bid and has now earned more than A$3.8 million (£1.86m or €2.14m) in prize-money.

“Are you kidding? I’m rapt,” he beams. “It’s changing my life. I’m hoping Half Yours goes for a spell now and doesn’t go for the Melbourne Cup, as a lot of horses run in that and then it’s all over for them. I’d like him to win something in the autumn like the Australian Cup, and then he’ll have won two Group 1s and I can put St Jean’s fee up to A$20,000 next year.”

Many would dispute that Half Yours shouldn’t line up for the race that stops a nation at Flemington in a fortnight, as St Jean’s sire Teofilo has provided three of the last seven winners, in Cross Counter, Twilight Payment and Without A Fight.

By the by, isn’t Teofilo one of the most underrated influences in breeding? The source of 24 Group/Grade 1 winners has sprouted a flourishing sire line in Europe through son Havana Gold and grandson Havana Grey, and he is the damsire of numerous stars, including Anisette, Cachet, Coroebus, Dreamloper, Ezeliya, Inisherin and Mac Swiney.

He arguably deserves as much, if not more, credit for the rise of St Jean than the indisputably wonderful Height Of Fashion.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand, Dwyer continues: “St Jean only covered six mares last year, and I jacked his fee up to A$10,000 prior to the Caulfield Cup, but the trouble is Half Yours started winning when the Australian covering season was already well underway, and most mares were already booked into stallions and a lot had already been covered.

“Up to Saturday he had 15 mares booked in this season, but the phone’s red hot so he might cover a few more, though not loads because it’s so late in the season. Realistically he won’t benefit this time but hopefully he will next year. 

“The important thing is that a few more commercial breeders come on board, as up to now he’s operated in the breed-to-race market. Commercial breeders don’t send their mares to A$3,000 stallions as the sales companies want to sell the most expensive yearlings because they work on commission, which is fair enough, so those breeders use the A$50,000, A$100,000, A$150,000 sires whose progeny get into sales and make more money.

“But I recently spoke to Inglis, the major sale company in our state, and asked if they’d take St Jean yearlings in future. I told them I’d never entered anything in their sales before as I didn’t think they'd get in, and they said ‘well, they wouldn’t, but now you can have three'.”

There is an outside chance that a bigger stud notices St Jean is exceeding expectations and takes him for its own roster in future, but Dwyer is insured against the loss of such a capable sire by owning a handful of breeding rights in him.

“We’ve got about 52 mares on the farm who we haven’t been breeding from because I'm 64 and my wife doesn’t want to get left with a whole heap of horses if something happens to me,” he says. “But I’ll probably put some of them in foal to St Jean and sell them when they’re pregnant, to reduce my numbers and get a few more foals out there.”

It might have taken 15 years for St Jean to become an overnight success, but he is at least in good nick in middle age. 

“He looks fantastic, with a lovely shiny coat and perfect knees, but it’s not like he’s done a lot of work for a horse of his age,” says Dwyer with a laugh. “He’s typical of European stayers, in that he’s not close-coupled and he’s got longer pasterns than a lot of our sprinters. They’re not sloppy, though, and when he walks he doesn’t go down on his bumpers.

“He’s 16.1 hands with large feet and his progeny tend to grow into similar types. They can be a little awkward when they’re first born because they’re large and they’ve been cramped up in the uterus, but if you leave them alone they naturally grow into very correct individuals who can cop a lot of work.”

What a couple of beauties, as they might say down under.

I couldn’t be happier for St Jean, who has proved once again that rags-to-riches tales can happen in the multi-million-dollar stallion industry, or for Dwyer, the horse’s patient custodian who, like so many of his compatriots, is an interviewer’s dream.

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Pedigree pick

Set a reminder on your phone to watch the fillies’ maiden over a mile at Yarmouth at 2.35 today as it looks a fascinating heat, featuring Darkwing, Fractional and Ottoman Empress, all of whom showed promise on their one previous outing, and several well-bred newcomers, including Hot Silk and Society Girl, who are actually cousins as their dams are half-sisters.

 Music Academy, another debutante in the contest, gets my vote, though. She is a Kingman full-sister to Parent’s Prayer, who won the Princess Elizabeth Stakes, and Treasure Fleet, who is unbeaten in three starts and has achieved a peak Racing Post rating of 100 for Charlie Appleby, out of the Listed-winning Exceed And Excel mare Pure Excellence.

The filly, trained by Ralph Beckett for Doreen Tabor having been purchased as a yearling for 600,000gns, hails from the Connaught Bridge family nurtured for years by Peter Harris. Funnily enough Harris, who bred Pure Excellence, has an expensively sourced newcomer of his own in the race in Ladykirk, who hails from another of his old key families.

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