Hong Kong accolade continues Per Incanto’s rise
A shared knowledge of Hereford cattle helped pave the way for Little Avondale Stud to acquire Per Incanto (Street Cry) a little more than a decade ago and set in motion a stallion career that has seen him emerge as Hong Kong’s leading sire by winners this past season, taking the accolade above Australian-based big-hitters Exceed And Excel (Danehill), Snitzel (Redoute’s Choice), Sebring (More Than Ready) and the emerging Deep Field (Northern Meteor).
When Angus Gold rang Little Avondale’s Sam Williams and his Masterton near-neighbour Bruce Perry about the prospect of standing a speedy son of Street Cry (Machiavellian), the New Zealanders soon found themselves on a plane ride to England.
Sri Putra had been highest on the list of a possible new stallion for the Little Avondale roster before Gold’s call and Williams and Perry went to see the son of Oasis Dream (Green Desert), as well as a handful of other prospects, before they arrived at Shadwell for a providential appointment.
“The last horse we saw was Per Incanto and when he came out of his box and paraded in front of us, I made sure I didn’t look at Bruce; I made sure I didn’t change my facial expression, and I thought ‘ahem, yeah, this is the best horse we’ve seen and we don’t need to be going home until we’ve made a deal on this horse’. He sold himself to me the first time we saw him,” Williams recalled.
But the Kiwis had to sell themselves too: they had to show that they were the right fit for the Shadwell horse.
“Angus had said to us that the boss, Sheikh Hamdan, doesn’t just sell to anyone, if he doesn’t like the place he’s going to, he won’t sell to them. For Angus to quote the horse rather than just try to sell the horse said a lot, because Sheikh Hamdan apparently told three other people who tried to buy the horse ‘no’, so Angus said he’d put a strong word forward for us,” Williams continued.
“We went into Richard Lancaster’s (Shadwell’s stud director) office and we were chatting away and I noticed he had a picture in his office of Herefords and a big Herefords book on his desk. I said ‘you need to come down to visit because the oldest Hereford Stud in New Zealand is just down the road from us and they’re having this centennial Hereford sale this year.”
Williams made sure to forward the Herefords sale catalogue to Lancaster as soon as he was back home on the banks of the Ruamahanga River.
That good impression has paid off handsomely – not least with Shadwell subsequently entrusting Nadeem (Redoute’s Choice) to Little Avondale, the farm where his dam was bred – as the recent conclusion of Hong Kong’s 2020-21 season had Per Incanto with 17 individual winners of 30 races from 28 individual runners; Exceed And Excel and Snitzel had 13 individual winners apiece for 18 wins and 20 wins, respectively. This season’s tally gives the Kiwi adoptee an overall Hong Kong haul of 69 wins from 29 individual winners.
Per Incanto also currently leads the Singapore standings by winners, neck and neck with Showcasing (Oasis Dream) at eight winners each but from only 14 runners compared to his rival’s 27.
“Per Incanto has gone to another level, not just in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand but also to our biggest market, which is Australia. At the recent Magic Millions Sale, the highest-priced weanling by a New Zealand-based sire to ever sell at auction was a Per Incanto, sold for half a million dollars to John Moore. He knows how well the Per Incantos have performed in Hong Kong and he bought the horse on a pinhook.”
Overall, the 17-year-old stallion has produced 257 winners of 743 races. Of those, 20 are stakes winners including four Group 1 scorers – Shadows Cast, Dal Cielo, Santa Monica and Bonham – with his rate of winners to starters being 65.4 per cent.
Lost And Running has the TAB slot for the upcoming Everest (1200m), Bonham sold recently to Seamus Mills Bloodstock for AU$1.6 million and will race on in Australia, as will Charms Star, second in the New Zealand Oaks (Gr 1, 2400m) and the Queensland Oaks (Gr 1, 2200m), while good young prospects are emerging on both sides of the Tasman. He also sits second in New Zealand this season by winners and third by earnings.
Those are impressive achievements for a stallion who raced mainly in Italy and started out for Little Avondale at a modest NZ$4,000 covering fee.
Per Incanto was the result of Paolo and Emma Agostini of Scuderia Archi Romani sending their mare Pappa Reale (Indian Ridge) – a great-granddaughter of the English 1,000 Guineas winner Waterloo (Bold Lad) – to Darley’s Street Cry in Kentucky. The youngster went into training with Roberto Brogi in Italy and won five of eight starts, including a hat-trick to start his three-year-old campaign. The climax of that sequence was an impressive two-length victory in the Premio Tudini (Gr 3, 1200m) at Capannelle, which brought a private sale to Shadwell – thought to be about €1.6 million – and a move to trainer John Dunlop in England.
But Per Incanto failed to replicate his Italian form in three starts in England and was transferred to Kiaran McLaughlin’s barn in the US. He won an allowance optional claimer at Aqueduct over six furlongs in March 2009 but went wrong when last of eight on dirt in the Westchester Stakes (Gr 3, 8f) at Belmont Park a month later.
“He got a virus and he bled so that’s why they sent him to America where he won then ricked his joint for a lead-up race before a planned run in the Breeders’ Cup,” Williams said.
The stud master loved the Street Cry element and was taken with Per Incanto as a specimen but he still had to overcome some prejudices.
“Street Cry was an easy story to tell, to advertise, but his half-brother Patapan was a flop at stud down here,” Williams said. “I had a couple of people going, ‘oh, you bought an Italian horse?’ but I went, hang on, it’s not form to be scoffed at.”
The Agostini’s had previously bred and raced the top class Le Vie Dei Colori (Efisio), a Group 1 winner in Italy and a Group 2 scorer in England, who prior to his untimely death as an eight-year-old was making his name as a sire, not least with Hong Kong’s champion miler Gold-Fun. After Per Incanto arrived at Little Avondale, Beauty Only (Holy Roman Emperor) made the move from Italy to become Hong Kong’s champion miler, while Willie Cazals (Aussie Rules) also left Italy for Sha Tin and ran a closing second in the Hong Kong Vase (Gr 1, 2400m) before then relocating to New Zealand where he won the Livamol Classic (Gr 1, 2000m). The merits of Per Incanto’s roots and his strengths as a progenitor are now apparent.
Williams, whose family established Little Avondale more than 80 years ago, believes the stallion has key traits that he passes on to his progeny, which have benefited them in Hong Kong’s difficult environment where horses spend a lot of time boxed, with little to no access to paddocks.
“He’s very straight forward, he’s very physical, he’s very much the Street Cry mould and he’s a big, strong horse. He’s boxed every night and he’s a smart horse,” Williams noted.
“If he comes out and sees a bucket of food there, he’ll walk straight past the mare. He loves his tucker! Once he’s covered a mare and you put him in his box, he always gets a treat of a carrot. If you walk past his box and forget to give him his carrot, he calls out, he lets you know every time.
“He knows his groom’s (Helen Phinney) car as well. Every time he hears her pull up in the morning, he’s calling out because he knows he can get to go out to his paddock.”
Having started at a low covering fee, Per Incanto has made his name the hard way. There are no stars among his Hong Kong progeny but he has produced some talented runners in the stakes-placed Morethanlucky and Time To Celebrate, as well as the high-end handicapper Duke Wai. Now, with better mares in his books, Williams hopes that a better class of offspring will emerge in Hong Kong, too.
“It is exciting up there for the horse. He’s got the numbers in and a lot of new horses have just gone up. The latest Ready To Run Sale here had a good number bought for Hong Kong and the same from the yearling sales. If he was standing in Australia, he wouldn’t be standing at NZ$25,000, he’d be twice that,” he observed.
Breeders are nowadays appreciating the value of Per Incanto as a proven source of winners capable of upgrading his mares and with more quality now in his books, Williams hopes the first of his Hong Kong Group race winners will not be too long in coming.
“There’s been a number of Hong Kong breeders that have mares down here that have booked mares into him,” he added. “I’ve got a half-sister to Glorious Days, a three-quarter sister to Beauty Generation, a half-sister to Golden Sixty and a half-sister to Werther all coming to him this season. That’s mares related to four Hong Kong champions, so people are certainly mating their mares for that Hong Kong attraction. I think it’s all in front of the horse.”