‘I’m busting to buy a Group 1 colt’ – Price backs Extreme Choice again at Classic
Mick Price has ecstatic and agonising memories when it comes to Extreme Choice (Not A Single Doubt) and yearling sales, and they both spurred him on at Inglis Classic on Tuesday.
In the happy corner, he was the man who bought Extreme Choice – also at Classic in 2015 – for $100,000, before training him to the two Group 1 victories that set up his astonishing stud career.
In the blue corner, he just missed out on buying one of his daughters when she went to Anthony Cummings (Bart Cummings) for $275,000 at Inglis Easter in 2021. Later named She’s Extreme, she became just Extreme Choice’s second elite-level winner, taking the ATC Champagne Stakes (Gr 1, 1600m) and VRC Oaks (Gr 1, 2500m), before nabbing a cool $3.4 million in a broodmare sale.
“I was the underbidder on her as a yearling, stupidly,” said Price, always good for an entertaining chat. “And of course when I was talking to Anthony later he said, ‘I had not one more cent’.
“I spec them, so it’s a matter of courage. I just have courage or no courage.”
Price would have loved to have trained that filly, but he’s especially keen to have a star colt by his old explosive sprinter, who ended as the sale’s leading sire by averages, with three or more lots sold.
That’s what he’s hoping he bought at Riverside on Tuesday, for $360,000. The colt was presented by Extreme Choice’s home stud Newgate Farm in tandem with Gooree. He boasts an impressive page, being out of an unraced sister to Northern Meteor (Encosta De Lago) and a half-sister to two other stakes winners.
Price has had sons of Extreme Choice before, of course. The best of them has become a sire himself in Rosemont’s Extreme Warrior, who’s making a promising start in the hope he may have inherited just a drop of his father’s potency.
Yet Extreme Warrior’s racing record came without the elite success craved by so many studs – and Price.
The Group 3 and Listed winner ran favourite in both his attempts at elite level – in the Coolmore Stud Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m) and The Goodwood (Gr 1, 1200m) – but finished down the track in each, and was retired following the latter after just eight career starts.
“He was a very good colt, but I couldn’t get him right when I wanted to. Hopefully this one I can,” Price said.
“I’m dying to buy a Group 1 colt by Extreme Choice. I like fillies, but we train a lot of colts, and I’m bursting to buy a Group 1 colt by Extreme Choice. That would give me fantastic pleasure.”
Like any good “at first sight” story, Price remembers like yesterday the 2015 Classic sale, back under the oak tree at Newmarket.
“Luke Wilkinson was my bloodstock man at the time,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Go there, give me 30 horses to look at, I’ll fly up for a day and I’ll pick six’.”
Wilkinson, now Kia Ora Stud’s racing manager, has a famous story in which he was inspecting another horse when some other chunky, muscular colt went walking by, some 50 metres away. Wilkinson stood up his original quarry and went running after the head-turner.
“That was Extreme Choice, and he became one of the six,” Price said of the Blue Diamond Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m) and Moir Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m) victor.
“We paid a hundred for him, and he was just a very, very good horse and he’s become an amazing stallion.
“He was so good for the stable, and then it does give you a thrill to see one of the horses you train become a good stallion. It brings back memories.
“I know he doesn’t get a huge amount of runners because of his fertility issues, but those that he does – every time you see one you think, ‘Is this going to be one of his Group 1 winners?’”
Though famously sub-fertile – only 44 offspring comprise his current crop of yearlings – Extreme Choice is shooting the lights out at stud. His 18 stakes winners from 148 runners gives him a ballistic stakes winner to runners ratio of 12.16 per cent. Better still, a stunning six of the 18 are Group 1 winners, which has helped make him Australia’s most expensive stallion, at $330,000 (inc GST) last spring.
Price believes his new colt – who’s already inherited his dad’s chestnut colouring – stands a good chance of joining that disproportionate black type honour board amid a short list of Extreme Choice offspring.
“Newgate are amazing breeders. Gooree are amazing breeders. Northern Meteor is sitting there on the page and these Extreme Choices, I know there’s some at Melbourne Premier, and if you get a really hot market they’re going to have a one mil, or a two mil, in front of them,” said the Cranbourne-based conditioner, who trains in tandem with Michael Kent Jnr.
“So I think, for what I paid for a beautiful, strong, chestnut, lively colt, it’s fantastic.
“You go shopping for these good colts at Sydney Easter, and all these colt syndicates are on them, they won’t be $360,000, they’ll be $1,360,000 or $2,360,000.
“So I thought this boy was a beauty – athletic, strong runner, showed himself off well, plenty of spark about him.”
Price has his trusted methods at yearling sales, including a cool approach to inspections, and one last critical look out the back as a yearling prepares to enter the ring.
“I do them [inspect them] once and do a shortlist. They don’t change after the third and fourth look,” he said in a chat out the back of the Riverside arena.
“And then I watch them before they go into the ring. I go off them or on them depending on what I see here.
“It’s the last look I make. Every sale I’m the same. If I’m out here, sometimes a light goes on, or it goes off. I’ll have buyers waiting and thinking that I’m buying, and I’ll go ‘No, I’m not buying’.
“Everything I buy, I buy on spec. I rarely have an order like most trainers.”
Moments after his Extreme Choice colt, Price made his second-largest purchase of the sale in spending $280,000 on a Coolmore-consigned colt by their resident stallion Home Affairs (I Am Invincible) out of an unraced Galileo (Sadler’s Wells) mare.
All ten of Price’s Classic purchases will need owners – except one who blew no budgets.
“My magnificent purchase yesterday was one horse for $10,000. I had good notes on him! What do you do?” he said with a laugh regarding a Widden Stud offered colt by their stallion Portland Sky (Deep Field).
“That one is sold to my mum.”