IT entrepreneur Delzoppo aiming for Tiara jackpot with Electric Girl
$520,000 Chairman’s Sale purchase set for mating with Darley’s Anamoe
Eleven years ago, Simon Delzoppo bought into Starcraft (Soviet Star) filly Dayeala. She wouldn’t reach any great heights on the racecourse, but she did enough to whet the racing and breeding appetite of the Australian IT entrepreneur.
Fast forward to 2023, and Delzoppo and his wife Mimi Kleber have about nine broodmares, a breeding right in Godolphin’s champion racehorse Anamoe (Street Boss) and a Group 2-winning mare bound for the Darley first season sire in Tattersall’s Tiara (Gr 1, 1400m) contender Electric Girl (Declaration Of War).
The final Group 1 contest of the Australian racing season, the Tattersall’s Tiara will be run at Eagle Farm on Saturday.
Agent Neil Jenkinson can lay claim to buying Dayeala as a yearling, with the mare, now a rising 13-year-old, placed in three of her four starts for Gold Coast trainer Toby Edmonds, but it was an experience which put Delzoppo on a path towards a growing investment in the industry.
Dayeala’s first foal is the Sara Ryan-trained, Viribright Racing-owned seven-time winner and stakes-performed sprinter Much Much Better (Stratum).
“Mimi’s had a little bit of a horse background through shows and things like that as a younger lady and so she’s always been a little bit interested in it and Simon raced a mare with some friends and I some years ago and we had a little bit of luck,” Jenkinson recalled yesterday.
“As a broodmare, her first foal was Much Much Better who we sold for $280,000. I think Simon pricked his ears and went, ‘hang on, there could be a bit of fun in this’.
“Since then, we’ve got a nice bunch of mares, which took a couple of years to put together and this year Simon’s got eight foals on the ground. There’s a couple of really nice foals; a lovely Street Boss colt and a lovely Bivouac filly, and some others for next year’s sales, so the next 12 months, I hope, will be a lot of fun for him and he’ll get some of the money back that he’s spent.”
Dayeala cost NZ$70,000 from the 2012 New Zealand Bloodstock Select Yearling Sale but Delzoppo’s latest thoroughbred acquisition, the Team Hawkes-trained Canterbury Stakes (Gr 1, 1300m) third placegetter Electric Girl, cost considerably more at $520,000 from last month’s Inglis Chairman’s Sale in Sydney.
“Simon bought a breeding right in Anamoe and we were going through that [Chairman’s] catalogue and the first thing I said to him was that we had to make sure we had a mare good enough to go to him, so that was the brief,” Jenkinson said.
“Commercial reality says it makes much more sense to buy a mare in foal as it brings to life income a little bit quicker, but I thought (Electric Girl) was an opportunity to give Simon and Mimi some fun.
“When I went through her form and a couple of others at Chairman’s and a few that I knew were coming to the Coast, I thought her run behind Artorius and Imperatriz at weight-for-age [in the Canterbury Stakes] gave her a really great chance in the Tiara, so she was the mare we targeted to try and bring her up to win that race for them.”
Electric Girl, who won the 2021 Hot Danish Stakes (Gr 2, 1400m) and the Millie Fox Stakes (Gr 2, 1300m) last February for the estate of the late Ross Williams, won a Randwick barrier trial last week, having not raced since finishing unplaced in the All Aged Stakes (Gr 1, 1400m) at Randwick in mid-April.
“The plan was to run her in the Dane Ripper the other day [at Eagle Farm], but she drew a bad gate [14], so we just thought the better preparation was to stay focused on the Tiara, which is the race we wanted to try and give her the best chance in,” the agent said.
“We thought if she had a hard run she might not have been at her best for this week, so we decided to scratch and leave her in Sydney and she went and trialled really well at Randwick last Tuesday.
“According to the boys, she’s going to present in really good order and now that we’ve drawn a good gate, it gives her a really good chance to win I hope.”
In 2000, Delzoppo co-founded internet business AusRegistry, which operates the .au website domain registration process, selling the company in 2015 to a US-based organisation.
His boutique broodmare band resides at Vinery Stud in the Hunter Valley, while Delzoppo also has homebred Pierro (Lonhro) filly Araletta in training with Peter Moody at Pakenham.
The two-year-old is out of the South African Grade 2-winning mare Fursa (Hard Spun), who Jenkinson purchased for $150,000 on behalf of Delzoppo in 2019 from the Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale, making the filly a half-sister to the Clinton McDonald-trained stakes-placed three-year-old Get Up Girl (No Nay Never).
Araletta reportedly jumped-out well at Pakenham yesterday, her first public hit-out this preparation.
“We’re not trying to set the world on fire with expensive mares, we’re trying to find that middle-of-the-road sort of mare that there’s some upside in,” Jenkinson said of Delzoppo’s thoroughbred investment strategy.
“[Fursa] might be a half-sister to a nice horse rather than the big, expensive nice horse. I don’t need to tell you who dominates that part of the market, so we float around and buy mares below that level, which make sense from a commercial point of view.
“As I’ve said to Simon, they’re not collector’s items, so to speak, but if we can find the ones that can throw the really good types and hang on to them for a few years, and the ones that leave you a bit cold with their types, we can move them out and keep it as a bit of an ongoing cycle with eight to ten mares.
“I think that gives Simon enough size to run it as a business and certainly gives him enough bills to pay.”