Graceland Farm

Australian great Bart Cummings, trainer of 12 Melbourne Cup winners most of them selected himself as yearlings, shares what he looks for in a young horse

Thanks to the ever-efficient Amanda Carey, my catalogue for the 2012 Cape Premier Yearling Sale arrived yesterday.  Whatever the future holds for sales companies – and we’ve got to believe the TBA will respond to the Jooste/Kantor Money Machine’s guaranteed payment to breeders – it’s already obvious competition brings benefits.  The CPYS catalogue is an improvement on the TBA’s National Sales book which has hardly changed in 25 years (my back copies prove it!).

Apart from professional layout maps and liberal use of colour, the short profiles and photos of represented stallions will be a very welcome addition for new buyers. Congrats to Robin Bruss and team, too, for the iPad App which downloads in a flash and slots into the global Equiline offering. It’s something the TBA should repeat with its sales. The iPad App is pretty logical really – most buyers surely own iPads because if you can’t afford a tablet it’s hardly likely you’ll be in the market for a yearling.

Not sure how true it is, but the CPYS team has apparently been charged with hitting a R500 000 average price on the 349-catalogued yearlings. Quite a hop from last year’s R404 205, especially as there are 59 more yearlings catalogued. But this looks to be an even stronger entry than 2011’s debut sale and with a few substantial buy-back here and there, and some aggressive targeting of foreigner buyers, I wouldn’t bet against the sale achieving that targeted 25% increase.

On the subject of acquiring young horses I’ve been looking for an excuse to share my recently read advice from the great Aussie trainer Bart Cummings’ advice. Starting on page 375 of the Sir Patrick Hogan biography, Give A Man A Horse, author Dianne Haworth shares Cummings’ response after she asked him what he looks for in a horse at an auction.

Cummings told her “Champion horses invariably look similar in conformation…” So here’s part of his checklist:

• Short cannon bone and long arm.
• A fine leg with a hock closer to the ground.
• Deep girth that follows through to a sloping shoulder.
• Obviously a nice rein: “a long rein gives you better balance, a horse turns over a lot of ground and he’s got to be well balanced. The centre of gravity of a horse is the wither.”
• When the horse walks, it’s got to be balanced, got to “walk through” – a fluent walk is like poetry in motion.

Mostly, though, Cummins talks about being blessed with having an eye for a horse: “I teach people. I show people, but they don’t see the obvious. I’ve always been able to see something unusual and with horses it’s essential to see that.”