Yum
We love our streaks in racing, and in breeding too, and the joyously-named Yum (Ghaiyyath) extended a remarkable one on Saturday.
By winning the Jim Moloney Stakes (Listed, 1400m) at her fourth start – putting herself in markets for the Thousand Guineas (Gr 1, 1600m) and VRC Oaks (Gr 1, 2500m) – the John McArdle-trained filly lengthened the sequence of stakes-producing dams on her female line, to a remarkable eight in a row.
It started even before her 81-year-old breeder Ken Breese was born, in 1937, with the birth of British mare Phaetusa (Hyperion). She had Greek Justice (Fair Trial), who won the King’s Stand Stakes (1000m) in its second post-war running in 1947. It was a Principal Race, 30-odd years before the black type rungs appeared, but is now a Group 1.
Phaetusa is Yum’s eighth dam, having also thrown Court Fantasy (Court Martial) in 1957. Court Fantasy came to Australia and outstripped her mum by throwing two fillies who each won a black type race at Caulfield, in Mona Nursery Stakes (1000m) victor Star Fantasy (Star Affair) and Lemon Twist (Orgoglio), who won the Debutante Stakes of 1970 when it was an 800-metre scamper.
Star Fantasy begat Yum’s fifth dam, Golden Fantasy (Golden Orange), who kept the run going by taking Caulfield’s Victoria Handicap (1400m) in 1977, in the twilight of the Principal Race era.
Golden Fantasy became the fourth straight stakes producer of the line when her son Official Receiver (Bold Flip) won two Listed races and a Group 3 in Perth in the early 1980s, following up when daughter Brass (Prince True) won a Listed there as well.
In 1989 Golden Fantasy bore Mere Fancy (Noalcoholic). She’s where Breese comes in, buying her privately in the early 1990s.
Mere Fancy only had four foals and was sold off to China in 1998, but the third one was Tickle My (Perugino). Breese and family were left to race that filly, since her offset knees meant she wouldn’t get to a yearling sale – a family trait that’s turned out to be quite profitable for the breeder.
Trained by Bruce Purcell, Tickle My became the undoubted star of this successful line, claiming five black type events up to 2100 metres, and headed by the 2003 Sunline Stakes (Gr 2, 1600m) at Moonee Valley, in which she’d run second the year before.
Sent to the breeding barn for Breese, Tickle My threw Snitz (Snitzel), winner of Gosford’s Takeover Target Stakes (Listed, 1200m) in 2020.
Nine years before the Takeover Target winner she’d had Take All Of Me (Jeune), Yum’s second dam, whose third foal was I’ll Have A Bit (Smart Missile).
Trained by McArdle, I’ll Have A Bit won the Euclase Stakes (Gr 2, 1200m) and The National Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) at Morphettville, and ran third in The Goodwood (Gr 1, 1200m).
And now Take All Of Me’s first foal, Dream Food (Snitzel), has carried the sequence to eight straight stakes-producing mares, thanks to Yum.
The filly and her first three dams were bred by Breese, who grew up in Wangaratta, worked in the 1950s as a lad in the stables there of Hal Hoysted – he of the famed dynasty now up to its umpteenth trainer in Brisbane-based Matt Hoysted – and later built an engineering firm that allowed his vault into breeding and racing.
Breese still works at his Melbourne-based engineering firm four days a week. “When you retire, you die,” he says. Speaking to him by phone feels like speaking not to an octogenarian but a 40-year-old, which is in fact around the ages of his sons Jarah and Tylah, who comprise the ownership of Yum with Breese’s wife Jenny, and Jarah’s childhood friend Ravi Sharma.
It’s a great family (and friend) affair, and the owners are now eagerly looking forward to the rest of the spring and beyond for potential stayer Yum, as well as the breeding future after that.
This recent line of Breese’s has come about almost incidentally.
“We owned a mare about 30 years ago called Rich Habit,” he says of that Purcell-trained galloper, another black type winner, of the 1988 VRC Talindert Stakes (Listed, 1100m).
“We decided we didn’t want to sell her, so we bought a farm to keep her on in western Gippsland, near Cranbourne.”
Breese decided to buy a few more mares to populate the farm. His brood built up to around 16 mares at one point, but has scaled back to just four, kept at Tasmania’s Armidale Stud.
One of Breese’s original acquisitions was Mere Fancy, a merely unfancy seven-start maiden, but who, as we know, hailed from a successful line of broodmares. She gave more in the breeding barn than on the track, but just a little more.
“We sold her pretty early because she had two or three foals in a row whose legs weren’t very good,” Breese tells It’s In The Blood. “We were trying to sell yearlings but we couldn’t get her stock into a yearling sale.
“Tickle My was the classic example. We even had a couple of trainers come to the farm to look at her, but they didn’t like her knees. So we raced her ourselves, thankfully.”
The same went for her daughter, Flemington winner Take All Of Me, who had “terrible knees, which came from her dam”, and Dream Food, who won at Cranbourne and Stony Creek. Both were also trained by Purcell.
Yum did make it to a sale – Magic Millions Tasmania – but again “not a hundred per cent in front”, she was passed in half-way short of her $100,000 reserve.
Little wonder Breese takes a sceptical view of old rules about knees.
“Defects are overrated,” he says. “That’s clearly been our experience, especially with Tickle My and now Yum.
“If you can buy a straight horse you should buy a straight horse, but all things being equal, if they’re offset in front I wouldn’t let it worry me too much.
“Take All Of Me did eventually have to stop racing because of knee issues, but as for Tickle My, it never affected her, or Dream Food. I’d say to be careful, but don’t let an offset knee be the reason that you’d reject a horse.”
In Yum, as with last week’s column subject Revelare (So You Think), we might in time have another quality Australian-bred stayer to fight back against the wave of imported distance horses, albeit one sired by an Irish-bred shuttle stallion.
She’s the first Australian-bred stakes winner for Darley’s Ghaiyyath (Dubawi), who won four Group 1s from 2000 metres to 2400 metres. He shuttled four times from 2021, covering books that started at 103 mares and successively dwindled to 79 last season, and he hasn’t returned this year.
He’s had seven winners from 23 runners with one crop racing in this country, and six individual stakes winners (58 winners) from 128 starters worldwide at 4.7 per cent.
Breese thought outside the box in sending Dream Food to Ghaiyyath, and looks to have been rewarded.
“I just had a gut feeling about Ghaiyyath, in that I wanted to put a little bit of stamina into the Dream Foods,” Breese said.
“Clearly he was a champion horse, and I quite liked his breeding.”
So much so that Breese has repeated the trick for this spring, with Dream Food booked to another son of Dubawi (Dubai Millennium) from a champion Galileo (Sadler’s Wells) mare, in Rosemont Stud shuttler Henry Longfellow.
Rosemont will also take another of his mares, a city-winning daughter of Toronado (High Chaparral) and Tickle My, to put to their new sprinting sire Schwarz (Zoustar). In something you don’t see often, Breese completed a circle – and perhaps showed a mischievous sense of humour – by giving that mare the same name as her granddam: Mere Fancy.
Things could get confusing.
“I don’t know how we got the name approved really, since her granddam was also Mere Fancy,” he says with a laugh, “but obviously time had eroded the need to maintain the name.”
Dream Food’s female family already had some stickability, evidenced by Tickle My’s win in Sandown’s Eclipse Stakes (Gr 3, 2119m). The blend with Ghaiyyath appears to have reinforced it in Yum, after Dream Food had previously borne foals by Impending (Lonhro) and Toronado, to mixed reviews.
Catching the eye in Yum’s pedigree is a 5m x 5m of the great American blue hen Fairy Bridge (Bold Reason). It’s not quite that coveted pairing of her two full-brother sons Sadler’s Wells and Fairy Walk (both by Northern Dancer), but it’s probably the next best thing, in Sadler’s Wells and Perugino (Danzig), the sire of Testa Rossa et al.
Sadler’s Wells comes in as the father of Ghaiyyath’s damsire Galileo, while Perugino enters strongly in the bottom line as sire of third dam Tickle My.
Two more influential American Reine-de-Course mares give the pedigree strength with triple appearances in the seventh and eighth removes: Lalun (Djeddah) – at 8m, 7m x 7m through Never Bend (Nasrullah), Bold Reason x Bold Reason; and Thong (Nantallah) – at 7f, 8m x 7f in the form of Special (Forli), Thatch x Special.
The great Natalma (Native Dancer) takes a heavy hand with 11 appearances, from generations six to eight – ten through Northern Dancer (Nearctic) – while Mumtaz Begum (Blenheim) appears five times in the ninth generation of a pedigree underpinned by the great stallion Nearco (Pharos), who has 19 spots in the first nine columns.
“She’s a lovely filly,” McArdle says of Yum, who despite being a staying-bred November foal, got to the races as a two-year-old at Bendigo last March, albeit finishing seventh.
“She trialled up really well as a two-year-old, and even though her pedigree says what it says, we took her to the races in the autumn. In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t the best idea. She melted a bit and didn’t let down, so we gave her a nice break.”
After a break, Yum jumped from gate nine of ten over 1150 metres at Geelong in July and flew from the rear for a 1.31-length third in a good form race. She then won by a length at Seymour over 1400 metres as a $2.80 favourite, before taking the Moloney by 0.75 lengths at $21 for regular rider Jamie Mott.
“She looks like she’ll get out to a trip,” McArdle told It’s In The Blood. “Jamie’s very confident she’ll get out to a trip. All the data has her as a 2000-metre or 2400-metre horse, and she’s very strong in her work once she gets into her gear.
“I think she’ll be a better horse next year. She’s certainly heading in the right direction.”