Perth home builder Doak flying high
More Aspen could be icing on the cake after record-breaking Pride Of Dubai result for WA owner
On Saturday afternoon, Kim Doak’s beloved West Coast Eagles were handed their biggest shallacking in the club’s 36-year history.
Such is Western Australia’s investment in their respective football teams’ fortunes, particularly AFL club the Eagles, their performances can shape the mood of the state’s populace.
The 171-point defeat, at the hands of 13th-placed Sydney Swans, became the major talking point of the weekend and the game will dominate Perth media all week and for the foreseeable future.
For Western Australian racehorse owner and staunch Eagles supporter Kim Doak, however, Sunday provided a beacon of light on a dark sporting weekend in what otherwise has been, on the thoroughbred front at least, a whirlwind six weeks for the Perth breeder.
Doak sold the unbroken Pride Of Dubai (Street Cry) – half-brother to J J Atkins Stakes (Gr 1, 1600m) winner King Colorado (Kingman) – for a Magic Millions Winter Yearling Sale record price of $260,000, only days after supplementing the colt into the Perth June sale. He hopes to cash in on their dam tomorrow afternoon through rival auction house Inglis.
Perth residential home builder Doak, who races up to 50 horses with his partner Maria Manfredini and his father John in partnership with Ascot trainer Luke Fernie, owns rising 13-year-old mare More Aspen (More Than Ready), the mother of the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace-trained King Colorado. She is in foal to Maschino (Encosta De Lago) and is being offered for sale through this week’s Inglis Digital online auction.
“King Colorado doing what he did [in the J J Atkins] changed everything for the mare and his younger brother. One of the owners in King Colorado actually reached out before his first race at Kembla Grange and said, ‘I am interested in trying to buy the mare. Is she for sale?’,” Doak told ANZ Bloodstock News yesterday.
“He told us who he was and what his interest was and that he had her first (southern hemisphere-bred) foal and he said, ‘we think he’s going to be really good and we are seeing if they could get hold of the mum’.
“We were open to it but they weren’t able to come up with the money – and it wasn’t a lot of money – and when King Colorado came out and did what he did my phone blew up.”
He added: “To be fair, I had a little wager on King Colorado just out of support for the owner and for more of an interest than anything else and he obviously won at big odds in the J J Atkins. I was just thrilled with the little collect and I thought, ‘why is everyone ringing me saying well done?’.
“We had no idea that it was going to lead to what it did, so we were a bit naive.”
Doak paid $42,500 for More Aspen, a Listed winner in Dubai, in 2021 when in foal to Coolmore’s Pride Of Dubai and when her subsequent Group 1-winning Kingman (Invincible Spirit) colt was a weanling.
After King Colorado’s breakthrough Group 1 in Queensland earlier this month, Doak sought the advice of Magic Millions’ David Houston and Grant Burns and Inglis’ Sinead Flannery after fielding numerous phone calls from bloodstock agents about purchasing More Aspen and/or her Pride Of Dubai yearling son.
“We spoke to Magic Millions, Perth is a Magic Millions town, and we have a really good relationship with Sinead (Flannery), Sebastian (Hutch) and Rusty (Chris Russell) at Inglis, so we we reached out to Sinead and got her thoughts as well,” Doak said.
“Just with the timing of it – More Aspen has tax advantage status – we felt the Inglis online sale was the auction that was the best vehicle for her.
“We also spoke to Magic Millions, they had the Winter sale over here, which probably wasn’t the best option for the Pride Of Dubai, but timing wise it was the only live auction we could put him into.
“Magic Millions hit the phones and reached out and they did a really good job, I can’t complain with what they produced… and the mare is sitting there and we’ll see how she goes. We won’t be sleeping much on Tuesday night waiting for Wednesday afternoon [when the auction countdown occurs].”
The Pride Of Dubai colt was born at Maluka Thoroughbreds in Victoria in 2021 and she was subsequently covered by Darley’s Northwood Park resident sire Brazen Beau (I Am Invincible), but she unfortunately slipped the pregnancy, prompting Doak to transport the mare to the West.
Doak praised Maluka’s Luke and Mags Anderson for their care of More Aspen and her then foal, as well as Eva Highley of Willow Dale Farm, who prepared the record-breaking colt for the Perth sale at short notice.
Trainer Fernie also deserved credit for identifying More Aspen as a likely prospect who had the potential to help diversify the pair’s bloodstock portfolio, having bought numerous weanlings and yearlings in 2021.
“We were just scrolling through the broodmares almost as a due diligence, not really thinking we’re particularly clever or that fussed, if I am being really honest, but Luke said – and there’s hundreds of these lots online – that this one just stood out to him,” Doak recalled.
“He said, ‘there’s something I really like about this horse’ and when I looked at the page I saw that she was Danehill-free and I knew that she was coming off a good farm in Segenhoe and I knew that someone must have liked her at some point because they put her to some expensive stallions and the Kingman obviously turned out to be King Colorado. Those little join-the-dots sort of things happened.
“She wasn’t too old, she had a reasonable track record in her own racing career and obviously she came from a very good family when we looked into it a bit more, so we thought we’d just have a throw at the stumps if the pricing stayed within our budget and we’d see how we’d go and it just worked out that way.
“It’s been a weird, crazy, unexpected and exciting blast really. You hear about these things. You’re happy for everybody, but you don’t really expect it yourself, so it’s come out of the blue, really.”
Lastly, on the Eagles’ current predicament, placed on the bottom of the ladder with a dismal percentage of 47.3, Doak quipped: “All things in life have balance.”