Shiki
If Shiki (Too Darn Hot) wins the Gold Coast’s Magic Millions 2YO Classic (RL, 1200m), it would serve not only as a major boon for the South Australian breeding industry, but a huge vote of confidence for how her breeders Cornerstone Park do business.
The Waterhouse-Bott trained filly is on the third line of betting at around $10 for the $3 million sprint, and five years of meticulous planning will come to a head when she jumps on Saturday, albeit with jockey Tim Clark having to negotiate an awkward gate in ten of 16.
Cornerstone, tapping into the choice livestock and winery conditions of the famous Barossa Valley, is one of the flagships of the South Australian breeding industry. And so it probably should be, having some daunting shoes to fill in that it’s the old Lindsay Park – the legendary breeding institution established by Colin Hayes.
The SA industry has faced considerable challenge and change in the past several years, mostly with the impact of making it smaller, but victory for Shiki on Saturday would showcase how the state can, and often does, punch above its weight.
Cornerstone used to stand stallions, but logistics and the reality of the shrinking local broodmare band led them in a different direction in 2023. That was around the time businessman John Frankhuisen – who made his fortune not in making wine but the labels that go on the bottles – bought out Sam Hayes, Colin’s grandson, to become the stud’s major shareholder.
His fellow shareholder is general manager Sam Pritchard-Gordon, the expat Englishman who learned his craft at some of the most successful studs in the UK before branching into Australia, first as a trainer and later joining Hayes at Cornerstone.
Pritchard-Gordon was moving to improve Cornerstone’s mares – who now number around 17 – when he bought Shiki’s dam Jest Excel (Exceed And Excel) at the Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale of 2021, for $120,000. Veteran SA breeder Steve Millar bought in with him, and is thus the co-breeder of Shiki.
Jest Excel was a fast mare who’d won three south-east Queensland provincial races from 900-1000 metres for Tony Gollan. Her first owners for her stud career were renowned judges Sheamus Mills and Dean Harvey, who bred her first foal – a now four-time country winning six-year-old mare named Love My Louis (Capitalist) – before putting Jest Excel up for sale.
A healthy sprinkling of black type dotted the mare’s page. She was a half-sister to Jiang (Testa Rossa), who won the VRC Maribyrnong Plate (Gr 2, 1000m) before going to Hong Kong as Blue Genes and winning.
Third dam Elegant Shell (Deep Diver) won four stakes races in Perth before throwing another black type victor and the dam of Perth Group 2 winner Zabanella (Zabaleta).
Pritchard-Gordon was drawn to the fact Jest Excel was by a noted broodmare sire in Exceed And Excel (Danehill). It also fitted his business model, and budget, that she was in-foal to Pride Of Dubai (Street Cry).
While that Coolmore stallion would make a strong fist of trying to win Australia’s champion sires’ title in 2024-25 – before ultimately weakening into third – in 2021 he was yet to enjoy such salad days.
This worked in the favour of Pritchard-Gordon, who relishes the challenge of buying in-foal mares.
“It’s one thing I love doing,” he told It’s In The Blood. “If I’m buying horses at a sale, I make a point of working really hard and seeing everything. But shopping on a budget, where I get a bit of value is with mares carrying the wrong pregnancies, or slightly less commercial pregnancies.
“I don’t have to forfeit a physical or a pedigree. Where I find the value is if they’re not carrying the right pregnancy I can get a mare at the right price.
“Pride Of Dubai had gone a bit cold at that point, and that allowed us to buy Jest Excel, who was a fast mare, and a good physical.”
Targeting – and assessing – in-foal mares also brings its challenges, but Pritchard-Gordon backs his eye and his experience.
“It’s something I’ve always done, and enjoy doing,” he said. “Having worked for some big breeders, you get an eye for it, and it’s one thing I always pride myself on.”
Validating Pritchard-Gordon’s assessment of a “wrong pregnancy”, the Pride Of Dubai colt sold as a yearling for $60,000, and was onsold to China via the Magic Millions 2YOs In Training sale, for $80,000.
First, Cornerstone and Millar put Jest Excel to Eureka Stud’s Spirit Of Boom (Sequalo), which produced an attractive colt, later known as Excelboom. Bought as a yearling at the Gold Coast by Tony Gollan and John Foote for $160,000, the now three-year-old gelding won his first race at his sixth start only last Friday.
A day later, his little sister Shiki franked the Gatton maiden form by winning the Gold Coast’s Gold Pearl (1100m) by 2.04 lengths, to go with her ATC Gimcrack Stakes (Gr 3, 1000m) victory on debut two starts earlier, and providing further validation to the mating that produced her.
Pritchard-Gordon had selected Too Darn Hot (Dubawi) before he was Too Darn Hot the boom stallion and too darn hot to pay for. At that time, with the Darley shuttler’s first Australian crop being yearlings, he only stood for $44,000 (inc GST). After taking the country’s first and second-season sire titles, his fee was $275,000 (inc GST) last spring.
The attraction for putting Jest Excel to Too Darn Hot was multi-faceted.
“The idea worked well physically, but also the mare was throwing a really good type of horse,” Pritchard-Gordon said.
“Cornerstone really needed to kick some financial goals, and I’d been eyeing up sires whose progeny I liked as foals and backing my judgment in.
“I’d liked the look of the Too Darn Hot foals we’d seen on the ground, and I thought an Exceed And Excel mare would make a good cross. I wanted to put some stout European blood across a pure Australian product, which she is being by Exceed And Excel and with her damsire being Rory’s Jester, and it’s worked well.
“Jest Excel was fast but probably needed a bit of stamina brought into her. I thought Too Darn Hot could do that given his maternal page. That, coupled with the physical, has worked out well.”
Too Darn Hot’s dam was the outstanding Da Re Mi (Singspiel), whose three Group 1 successes came over distance in Ireland’s Pretty Polly Stakes and Dubai’s Sheema Classic (both 2000m), and the Yorkshire Oaks (2400m).
Plus the mating has subsequently been shown to be prescient. Exceed And Excel has turned out to be Too Darn Hot’s best nick for stakes winners, with more than seven runners. It’s produced three of them from 14 starters, at 21 per cent, among ten winners overall, plus two stakes placegetters.
The three stakes winners are Shiki, Tropicus and Fitzella, a filly descended from Exceed And Excel’s shuttling to Britain, who won Ascot’s Princess Margaret Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) last July.
Too Darn Hot’s sire Dubawi (Dubai Millennium) over Exceed And Excel’s sire Danehill (Danzig) runs at 13 per cent, with five stakes winners from 37 runners. But Dubawi has fired with another son of Danehill in Dansili, with that nick yielding ten stakes winners from 44 runners at 22 per cent.
Cornerstone offered Shiki at Inglis’s Sydney Weanling Sale of 2024. Riverstone Lodge and Suman Hedge Bloodstock obliged for $150,000, later flipping her at the Gold Coast for $420,000, to Waterhouse-Bott and Kurrinda Bloodstock, in whose blue and white colours she races.
Riverstone, Hedge and Bevan Smith Bloodstock also pitched up when Cornerstone offered the then-unraced Shiki’s half-sister by Ole Kirk (Written Tycoon) at last year’s Gold Coast National Weanling Sale, paying $200,000. That filly was pinhooked at the Gold Coast on Wednesday for $380,000 when bought, unsurprisingly, by Waterhouse-Bott in cahoots with Rapid Equine and Kestrel Thoroughbreds.
Pritchard-Gordon is angst-free about the pinhookers making almost three times the weanling price for which he sold Shiki.
“We’re a young farm. It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “In fact, it makes me happy, because it means I’ve produced the right product that can go on and people want to buy. Plus those bigger farms can get them into the top yearling sales more easily.
“So that idea works well for Cornerstone at this stage of its development. Shiki was a good looking foal we got good money for as a weanling, and it was good to see Riverstone make good money on the other side too.
“And it’s all worked out in our favour because she’s ended up in a stable that gets the best out of two-year-olds.”
Too Darn Hot’s capacity for breeding stamina is shown in the diverse range of his distance winners. Three of his 31 stakes victors have come at 1000 metres, and one in the “2400 metres or more” range, where he’s had 15 winners from 42 runners.
Shiki looked to have speed to burn when she won her heat in the fastest time of Sydney’s first set of official two-year-old barrier trials, and then when she narrowly took the Gimcrack. But by the style of her win last Saturday over 1100 metres, it would appear she’d have no trouble with 1200 metres and further.
Following a spell after the Gimcrack, two more trial wins preceded a disappointing fourth of seven at $1.80 on resumption in a 1000-metre Randwick two-year-old plate won by Magic Millions favourite Warwoven (Sword Of State). Co-trainer Adrian Bott later reflected she was too fresh and had gone overly hard in front that day.
Settling fifth at the Gold Coast last Saturday to, as Bott said, “harness her speed”, she produced an explosive burst in the straight and won comfortably, raising hopes for her grand final this weekend.
Cornerstone will send seven yearlings to Inglis’s Melbourne Premier Yearling Sale, and 12 to Magic Millions Adelaide, though Pritchard-Gordon says the farm’s sights are on more major sales after the broodmare improvements made since Frankhuisen bought in.
“Off the back of John investing into nicer mares, we have fewer mares that fall into that Adelaide rank. We’re giving ourselves the opportunity to get into the bigger sales,” he said, adding Cornerstone was confident of expanding on the large handful of stakes winners it has bred.
“I’d like to think we’re changing the direction of the farm and hopefully there’ll be more and more from here on in.”
As for the impact of a Shiki victory this Saturday?
“It’d mean everything,” he said. “At the end of the day, hanging your hat on a particular horse is becoming a more and more important part of a vendor’s profile.
“Shiki will go close to being a Champion Two-Year-Old if she can win, and that would be a glowing endorsement not only for our farm but for South Australia. Our state only breeds about two per cent of Australia’s horse population, so it would prove that location has an overriding bearing on how good the stock can be.”
Shiki’s is a fairly rare “clean” pedigree with no inbreeding. Finally some duplications occur a little further back, highlighted by the great Northern Dancer (Nearctic) at 6m, 7m, 6m x 5m, 5m, in a diverse spread via Shareef Dancer, Lyphard and Sadler’s Wells, then Danzig and Lomond.
Buckpasser (Tom Fool) appears in strong positions at 6f x 6f via Con Game, dam of Too Darn Hot’s third sire Seeking The Gold (Mr Prospector) and Spring Adieu, Danehill’s second dam.
Almahmoud (Mahmoud) is the most repeated mare with seven spots from generations seven through nine, six of them being her mighty daughter Natalma (Native Dancer).
Nearco (Pharos) is the dominant stallion with 16 appearances, from Hyperion (Gainsborough) and Pharos (Phalaris) with 13 each, and Blenheim (Blandford) with ten.
Jest Excel now has a November filly foal by Artorius (Flying Artie) at foot and remains empty, with Pritchard-Gordon mulling a return to Too Darn Hot next spring.