Avesta’s ‘biggest’ result after Extreme Choice colt sells for $675,000

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Who said American college life was all beer and frat parties and free love? For Avesta Bloodstock’s Jimmy Unwala, there was punting on horses too.

And while attending the University of Kentucky – “the best four years of my life” – Unwala took a trip to Los Angeles in 2004 and headed to Santa Anita. There, he saw a mare called Light Jig (Danehill), trained by the forever-commemorated Robert Frankel – win a Group 1 over 2000 metres. He won some money on her too.

Yesterday at Inglis Easter, that 2004 outing paid him a dividend around half a million dollars more than that return he earned at the track.

Avesta sold Lot 126, a colt by the coveted sire Extreme Choice (Not A Single Doubt), for $675,000. The horse had walked an interesting path to Riverside, with Unwala’s fingerprints all over it.

Unwala, who got some study in at college in completing an equine science degree, was designing matings at Aquis Farm in 2020 when an unraced American mare named Fadetta (Rock Hard Ten) came across his desk.

He was keen on her, a well-proportioned, biggish type who he thought would make a good match for the more compact Extreme Choice. But he liked her dam even more. It was none other than Light Jig, God bless her heart, who he’d kicked home at Santa Anita half a world away and 16 years earlier. Good thing you never forget a winner.

Fadetta duly got in foal to Extreme Choice but then, Unwala left Aquis to fully establish his new business, Avesta Bloodstock. That might have been the end of that, but a few months later, Fadetta bobbed up, in-foal to Extreme Choice, at the 2021 Magic Millions Broodmare Sale.

“When she came in the ring, I just had to have her. I loved the mating, the pedigree, the mare,” said Unwala, who paid his old employers $150,000 for her. “And her dam Light Jig was a mare I knew well, because I’d seen her win in person. And, yes, I had a bet on her.

“The other thing was this Grade 1 was a turf race. A lot of people might have undervalued the family thinking it was a dirt American family, but there was a lot of turf racing on the page.”

Not only a lot of the green stuff, but oodles of black type as well.

After bowing out with her Grade 1 triumph, Light Jig began a quite glorious stud career, throwing three stakes winners from seven runners, headed by Hollywood Derby (Gr 1, 10f) winner, Seek Again (Speightstown), who was four times placed at the top level.

That alone made her grandson ripe enough picking yesterday, but her appeal was given a further timely boost only on Saturday when Fadetta’s only runner to date, Divine Purpose (Divine Prophet), won the lucrative Capricornia Yearling Sale 3&4YO Classic (1300m) at Rockhampton, her fourth win from five starts.

Fadetta’s third foal was yesterday bought by the team of Rosemont Alliance, Suman Hedge, Snowden Racing and William Johnson Bloodstock, in what was Avesta’s biggest result in around five years of operation.

“For us, we have not gone out and bought really expensive stock. We started small, and we’re still in a nascent state of growing our business,” said Unwala, who prefers to call himself a horse trader rather than a bloodstock agent.

“So, to have that result, especially with one we bred, is amazing. It’s different if you just bring a pinhook to sale like this and get a result. To go through the emotions of having the mare, have the mating with Extreme Choice, hoping it doesn’t put a leg through a fence, the x-rays and scope are good, it doesn’t get cast in its box, etc.

“To get a result like that, it just puts it together, what we want to do, where we want to be seen. We want to be on the big stage eventually, with many more horses like that.

“Hopefully he goes and does something phenomenal on the track, because we still have the mum. So, fingers crossed.”

Unwala’s colt wasn’t the only major pinhook success for Extreme Choice. Lot 50, a son of the winning Zizou (Fusaichi Pegasus) mare Brave Soldier – who was bought from Turangga Farm in-foal by FED Bloodstock for $40,000 from Inglis Online in 2021 – sold through Silverdale Farm’s draft for $380,000 to Yu Long Investments.