Caballus
We’ve all been struck by it, at various points in our lives: that sight that barges into the mind’s landscape, arresting the eye, setting the pulse thrumming a little faster. Sometimes it’s a person. For many, it’s a horse.
Breeder Verna Metcalfe has been around thoroughbreds for probably more decades than she’d care to remember. But whenever she’s hit with the feeling, be it from a passing car or walking through a gate, it’s still like the first time.
“There’s nothing you like more in this business,” she says, “than driving past a paddock, or looking into a bunch of weanlings, and you go, ‘Geez – what’s that?!’”
That excitement grabbed her very soon after the birth – this month three years ago – of a colt by I Am Invincible (Invincible Spirit) out of a Commands (Danehill) mare ironically named Calming Influence.
He was the third product of this mating, but after the unspectacular first two Yarraman Park – home of sire and dam – sold the latter for $290,000 to Victorian hobby breeder Reg Ryan in-foal with this one, this one who turned out quite special.
With a richly dark coat, the neck and shoulder that revealed his sire, and an imposingly confident air, he would affect many the same way as Metcalfe in subsequent months, as he grew on Middlebrook Valley Lodge.
Magic Millions and Inglis came by and inspected him and Metcalfe says: “They went ‘Wow!’ too.”
Inglis won that battle, and he went to Easter, in Bhima Thoroughbreds’ draft. Still, Ryan placed a typically modest reserve of $400,000 on him, for there were many better pages that day.
Trained by Chris Waller, Calming Influence had won five races, but all in town, up to a 1400-metre benchmark 90 at Flemington, and was retired on the back of two Group 3 placings, at Rosehill and Scone, in her last two starts. Her dam Calming (Zeditave) had won eight times, including an Adelaide Listed, but the page wasn’t exactly dripping with black type.
“Reg and I have worked together for 20 years,” says Metcalfe, “and when we set a reserve, we always look at the horse and what it’s cost. We never put a huge reserve on our horses, we just put what we’d like. If it gets over that, we’re happy.”
In this case, the reserve was $110,000 more than the pregnant mare had cost, which would keep Ryan happy enough.
But there’d been many more “wows” around the colt that week, and when the bidding started on Lot 91, the heavy hitters emerged. The reserve was soon in the rear-view mirror, then half a million, then three-quarters, were breached. When the gavel fell, there were seven figures on the board. He went for the neat $1 million to Coolmore’s Tom Magnier. He’d paid $1.4 million for the lot before, a colt by Snitzel (Redoute’s Choice), but he was having this one, too, leaving other bidders including Newgate Farm unsuccessful.
Sixteen months later, he’s now known as Caballus and, after being held back till June for a debut at Canterbury, on Saturday at Randwick he showed he could give his pedigree a substantial upgrade in the coming years, driving to the line to claim Sydney’s last two-year-old race of the season.
Raced by a Coolmore-headed coterie including Sir Peter Vela and Winx part-owner Debbie Kepitis, Caballus was one of the six I Am Invincibles in the 11-strong field for the 1100-metre event. Perhaps with many missing the bad luck in his first-up eighth, he wasn’t the most fancied, but at $12 he overcame the most favoured of them, $2.90 favourite Estriella, with the next shortest one, Godolphin’s Shaken, third.
I Am Invincible, now boasting his second general sires’ title and a new high service fee of $302,500 (inc GST), leaves impressive types, robust and strong like himself. On that measure, Caballus was close to the dux of this crop, but he also had something that set him apart from even some of the finest of his sire’s stock.
“From day one he was just a superstar – one of those horses you look at and just go ‘Wow’ every time you look,” Metcalfe says. “The main thing was his presence. And he had a beautiful head, neck and shoulder – a typical Vinnie. You could tell he was a Vinnie by looking at him standing there.
“But what he also had was that he was such a great mover. A lot of Vinnies aren’t good movers, not good walkers. I guess he has a lot of sprinters, and they’re often not the best walkers, because they’re too chunky and heavy in the shoulder. But he got a lot of attention at the sale, because he was a Vinnie who moved so well.”
Sounds odd to think that for all his success as a sire, and at the sales, I Am Invincible’s offspring aren’t the most fluid of movers – although perhaps the reputation came when he covered mares for $11,000 (inc GST) in his early years, not those owned by the breeders who’ve stumped up the $200,000-plus in the past five or so.
“People say Vinnies aren’t great movers, and I do get it,” says Yarraman’s Harry Mitchell. “They’re not massive overstepping sort of horses. After all, he’s a sprinting stallion, so they’re perhaps not going to be massive walkers, and, for example, the Danehill line certainly walk better than the Invincible Spirit line.
“But while people say that, I think it probably was the case early on, but a lot of them walk pretty well now. He’s obviously covering much higher-grade mares than he started with.”
People also say you shouldn’t give up on a mating after one or two tries, if you believe in it. Yarraman bought Calming Influence in 2017 for $570,000. Her first Vinnie throw was Barassi, a $300,000 yearling who’s now a five-year-old entire still awaiting his first start for Toby and Trent Edmonds. Her second was the filly Covalent, who Bjorn Baker bought for $270,000, and who’s had one Taree maiden win amid ten starts.
The pair hadn’t been much to look at, with no unusually good swagger to speak of, and were missing one vital word, so Yarraman took a fateful decision.
“We had the mare in partnership, and we’d had a couple of foals that were OK but weren’t ‘Wow’,” Mitchell says. “We decided to sell her – regrettably! That’s what you do sometimes.
“We loved the mare, a beautiful black mare by Commands, and paid a lot of money for her. We got pretty good types but not quite what we were hoping for. We decided to sell her, for what now looks a very cheap price, then she had this beautiful horse Caballus.”
It’s at least with some mirth Mitchell recalls a subsequent sale-related step taken after Caballus cracked a million at Easter, as a few Yarraman mares in-foal to I Am Invincible who were slated for sale were swiftly led back to their barns.
The beneficiary has been Ryan, a semi-retired 71-year-old roof plumber from near Wodonga, who “bred” his first horse – Albury maiden winner Huon Dapper – 30 years ago, after buying his dam in-foal to Sir Dapper (Vain) for $5,000 from Mike Willesee’s Transmedia Park Stud.
Ryan has five mares and his peak so far is breeding Gold Coast Magic Millions 2YO Classic (RL, 1200m) winner Military Rose (General Nediym), this time with a mating he designed. He said he was stunned when watching the online Inglis Chairman‘s Sale of 2020 and seeing only muted interest in Calming Influence.
“I’d had her looked at, but wasn’t optimistic, since she was in-foal to I Am Invincible. I thought she’d be out of my league,” Ryan says.
“But in the bidding, she was on $250,000 and struggling. I thought, ‘Crikey – she’s got to be worth more than that.’ She was a Commands mare who’d won five city races, so she could run a bit. They [Yarraman] had probably paid overs buying her for $570,000 first up, but I thought she was unders this time.”
Ryan went to $280,000, the bid went $10,000 higher, and the then ten-year-old was passed in. He received a phone call from Inglis soon afterwards, and acquired her for $290,000. He was just as delighted to receive another call from Inglis a year and a bit later.
“They said they’d inspected her colt and rated him the best yearling they’d looked at. I knew he was a type, don’t worry about that,” he says.
Ryan’s previous best sale was a $735,000 Snitzel colt in 2015, who also fell to Magnier, and who became the city-winning but injury-plagued Bastille. Seven years on, he didn’t think he could surpass that figure with his I Am Invincible colt.
“At the sale he got a lot of inspections and a lot of people looking at x-rays, and I thought maybe he’d make $500,000,” Ryan said. “I was pretty happy when he passed that. I didn’t think he’d make a million, that’s for sure.”
On face value, there seems not a lot of magic in Caballus’ pedigree. The sole repetition in the first five generations is Danzig (Northern Dancer) at 4m x 4m, through his sons Green Desert and Danehill. And Danehill’s son Commands, for all his quality and quantity as a broodmare sire, isn’t even among I Am Invincible’s top 11 nicks.
But it seems at least some magic happened in Calming Influence’s third date with Big Vinnie.
“Sometimes it takes a couple of years for a mare to get rolling,” says Mitchell. “I always think of [Blue Diamond winner] Catchy. Her dam had three foals by Fastnet Rock before her, and they were no good, but then Catchy was the fourth.
“Sometimes you sell mares too late. Sometimes you sell them too early. We got our timing wrong on this one, but good luck to the people who bought her.”
“Lucky” Reg Ryan now has a Zoustar (Northern Meteor) weanling colt from the mare, who’s now in foal to Ole Kirk (Written Tycoon). He also has a major profit from his purchase of Calming Influence which means he can spend a lot less time on roofs, and hopefully more time in an armchair watching Caballus live up to his movie-star looks – and that breed-defying walk.
“Yeah, he was a real good walker,” Ryan recalls. “They say a lot of the Vinnies aren’t good walkers, but I’ll tell you what – they all seem to be able to run!”