Stay Inside
If you take an only sometimes fertile, thousand-dollar mare and put her with a misfiring first season stallion and get her in foal, that’s a result, right?
If you can then sell the mare for $90,000, you’d be clicking your heels.
But if the product of that mating goes on to win the most influential stallion-making race in Australia, then we’re right in the racing fairytale wheelhouse.
She Will Reign fitted the category four years ago, as a $20,000 purchase who won the Golden Slipper and its $2 million first prize.
But now 2021 victor Stay Inside – an omen-named winner of an edition delayed a week by a deluge – has added a more improbable chapter among racing wonder stories, a joyous ride of persistence and hope which has gathered up several winners along the way.
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Nothin Leica Storm was unwanted, and just about alone.
Bred by the Hunter’s Byerley Stud, she failed to attract a reserve of $35,000 as a yearling in 2009 (which subsequent events prove isn’t that cheap really). She was by American sire Anabaa out of Nothin’ Leica, a fair-to-middling daughter of Nothin’ Leica Dane who won twice in Sydney.
Anabaa had sired some outstanding talent, like Anacheeva, Virage De Fortune, and European champion mare Goldikova. This daughter would be no Goldikova however, unless that 14-time Group 1 winner won a Cessnock maiden we didn’t know about. Aside from that, three bush placings dotted Nothin Leica Storm’s 20-start career.
Her last start was a 12th of 12th at Port Macquarie. Her appearance at the 2015 Inglis Australian Broodmare Sale was even more forlorn.
To say she was unwanted would be an understatement. Her owner, Mullaglass Stud’s Richard McClenahan, recalls he “probably tried to sell her because I’d bought a few too many that year”.
He wasn’t expecting big things, or even little things, so set a tiny reserve equivalent about the size of a just-okay quaddie – one thousand dollars.
A grand? … Anyone? … Someone?
No one.
“Her pedigree was good but there was just no one at the sale for her,” McClenahan tells It’s In The Blood.
The mare was led away to an uncertain fate.
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Enter Paul Maguire. Nearing 70, the friendly, archetypal havachat Queenslander had been making horses for nearly 30 years, a sideline to his property, furniture retail, transport and other businesses.
He and wife Lyn had bred a few decent horses from Maguire Breeding and Racing. In the late 1990s, Gene’s Interest had won 14 races, four Listed, and nearly $500,000, and Director’s Special snared two Listed races and $300,000. Shares in Doubtfilly (Not A Single Doubt), fourth in Pierro’s Slipper of 2012 at the chancer’s odds of 90-1, and Time To Reign, who was fifth in Kiamichi’s two years ago, whetted Maguire’s appetite for the two-year-old major even more.
In the boutique category with a handful of mares, he had to live by his wits. In two-up, there’s a bloke called the Sleeper Catcher, who makes his money picking up cash the bettors have forgotten they’ve laid down, perhaps in a giddy state. Maguire operated similarly in his great game.
“I used to like to look through auction results and look at pass-ins,” he says.
“I saw this one had been passed in so I rang Simon Vivian at Inglis and asked why. I thought she’d be a $10,000 mare with those bloodlines. He said, ‘I dunno, maybe she’s got three legs. I’ll get back to you in the morning’.”
Next morning, Maguire was “getting toey”. He liked Anabaa mares, and had found this one’s mother was a half-sister to the dam of Caulfield Guineas winner Wonderful World.
“I rang an inspection bloke and asked him to go check her out,” he said. “He wandered down to the stalls while I was on the phone and he says, ‘She’s not here – she’s gone!’”
Nothin Leica Storm was already back at her owner’s property. Maguire shrugged, decided to do what this industry is based on and “take a punt”, sight unseen, and pay the reserve.
McClenahan was on holiday in Canada. Maguire was at home in Mackay. And so this decently-bred mare changed hands, from absent vendor to absent owner, for a three figure sum plus one dollar.
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“There was nothing wrong with her to look at,” says Maguire of his first meeting with Nothin Leica Storm, at a farm in the Hunter two months later. “I had her vetted, she was fine, and the stud owner said he’d go halves with me. I said: ‘No you won’t!’
“If you get ‘em cheap I’m keen on over-servicing them – by our standards anyway – so we sent her to Victoria to Written Tycoon.”
Woodside Park’s soon-to-boom sire was standing for a fee of $19,000 then – three years later it hit $110,000. A stunning colt ensued, and with his looks leading others to peer into his pedigree, he sold at the 2017 Magic Millions National Weanling Sale for $140,000.
Maguire justifiably savoured his 7,000-1 reward for his canniness, but not all was rosy. He’d sent the mare to two Queensland sires for a second foal, Rich Enuff and Show A Heart. She’d missed both times.
She was packed away for another spring day, and this time the Maguires picked Blue Diamond winner Extreme Choice, standing in his first season for $38,000 at Henry Field’s Newgate Farm.
There was more dicey news. It had quickly become evident Extreme Choice had some serious fertility problems (which would lead him having one mare a day, and three initial crops of less than 50 foals). Furthermore, it emerged that Nothin Leica Storm’s expensive Written Tycoon colt had died, apparently of pneumonia.
But a monumental friendly card soon turned. The mare successfully got in foal to Extreme Choice.
Like a shrewd soccer manager – echoing Arsenal’s economics graduate boss Arsenal Wenger’s line of scouting youngster and selling them just before their top – Maguire cashed in his chips.
“We had a mare, the first foal’s died, she’s missed twice, and the next stallion has fertility problems. I thought we’d try trading her on, and get out ahead,” says Maguire.
“In business, the principle we use is always be willing to sell when something reaches near peak in value. Whether we got that one right, in hindsight, I’m not sure after last Saturday!”
Maguire sold his bargain basement mare into the realms of the heavyweights, for $90,000.
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Education technology maven Matthew Sandblom had made waves in breeding as a powerhouse supporting Field at Newgate Farm. He was setting up another operation at Kingstar Stud and his instincts and research led him to Nothin Leica Storm.
“I’m a big fan of Extreme Choice,” says Sandblom, who owns “a decent chunk” of the stallion. “Obviously, his fertility issues restricted his numbers, so I was keen to buy mares in foal to him. She was a good-sized mare and I liked the cross with Anabaa.”
“We were only a young farm in our first year of operation,” says Kingstar’s nominations manager Conor Phelan. “You’re building and buying furiously, and Nothin Leica Storm was one of our first.
“She had a fair racetrack record. She had missed, but sometimes you’ve got to put that down to a young mare and take a punt. But she had got in foal to Extreme Choice, and if you could get in foal to him, you can forgive any suspect breeding history of the mare.”
The future Slipper winner arrived on August 23, 2018. Newgate bought him from Kingstar for $60,000 as a weanling, and sold him for $200,000 as a yearling, into the care of Richard and Michael Freedman. As the magnanimous Maguire puts this horse and his mum’s history: “A lot of people have licked the ice cream on the way through.”
Another deal was sliced in February, when Newgate bought back into the colt after he’d won his first two starts. After his commanding Slipper win, Stay Inside is destined to stand alongside his dad later on.
Meanwhile, his mum kept on missing. While the first meeting with Extreme Choice worked, the next three have not, nor second-tries with other stallions in those three years.
Her owners, however, reason she may not be a mare for all seasons, but alternate ones, as she struggles to fall pregnant with a foal at foot. Last spring, she gave that theory some backing by bearing what Phelan calls a “very nice” filly by Newgate’s Russian Revolution.
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“It’d be nice if it officially said Stay Inside was bred by us, but I wish Kingstar all the best with her,” Maguire says. “They outlaid the money and we decided we’d move on. We bought other mares with the money. You’re always looking to improve the quality versus the quantity of your broodmare range.
“I don’t have any negative vibes about it at all. I love the Slipper and it was a great win to watch.”
And so Kingstar will hope to offer carefully-created yearlings from the dam of the 2021 Slipper winner, once wanted by no one except a willing old bloke who’d never laid eyes on her.