Jason Coyle knows the value of getting a break in life, and is hoping he and an unfashionable stallion can receive one via a filly he went hard to get at Inglis Classic yesterday.
Winning Rupert (Written Tycoon) was moved on to Queensland’s Grandview Stud last year after five seasons at Newgate Farm. He’s had 64 winners from 128 runners. Those sorts of numbers might make it simple for even a journalist to deduce a 50 per cent success rate without pulling out the abacus, but it doesn’t make him an easy sell for a stud farm. Nor does his one stakes winner – who scraped in on the “bare minimum” rung of Listed class in Perth.
And yet Coyle, who has some 70 horses on his books, went to the limits of his usual budget yesterday to pay $180,000 for a daughter of the stallion, offered through the Vinery Stud draft for the Esplin family’s Tartan Fields.
Only nine Winning Ruperts have sold for more. His average yearling price last year was $47,000, and his top, from 2020, is the $425,000 paid for Tonneofgrit, who has clawed back half of that for Team Hawkes through 13 starts.
But this was something of a timely purchase, as that 64th winner for the stallion came on Saturday at Doomben through debutant Rupert’s House, for another Warwick Farm-based trainer in Bjorn Baker.
Coyle has cause to believe that gelding will add vindication for his faith in Winning Rupert, especially as he’d earlier beaten Godolphin’s dual stakes winner Zulfiqar (Exceed And Excel) in one of two Sydney barrier trial wins. And he’ll be hoping it was ominous, since Rupert’s House was also a $180,000 yearling.
Moreover Coyle – who was pulled from relative obscurity in Newcastle to become a dual Group 1-winning trainer for the short-lived Patinack Farm operation – feels Winning Rupert may have gained a boost in the making of this new filly by a female family he knows well.
She’s out of the unraced mare Semitone (Dubai Destination), which makes her a half-sister to Slightly Sweet (Charge Forward), who Coyle trained to win two Group 3s and a Listed race in a half-million dollar career from 2014 to 2018, after she’d been passed in as a yearling, in a lucky break for the Esplins.
“She’s a cracker of a filly,” Coyle told ANZ Bloodstock News. “She’s got everything you look for. She looks athletic, and the type of filly that’s going to come up quite early, given the cross. Winning Ruperts look like they’ve got speed on their side.
“But it always helps knowing the family a bit and having had success with it. Slightly Sweet was a very good three-year-old stakes winner, and raced against some good ones.”
In fact, she can boast to have beaten one quite good one in particular, named Winx (Star Cry). She ran third to the subsequent champion mare’s fifth in the 2015 running of the Surround Stakes (Gr 2, 1400m), and while the other mare then went on a bit of a hot streak for the next four years or so, Slightly Sweet remained a special one to remember for Coyle.
That was certainly the case when bidding started yesterday, and it underpins his belief that Winning Rupert, like most stallions, will have his day – a chorus no doubt sounded from Tunisia and Turkey last year by Scissor Kick (Redoute’s Choice) and Epaulette (Commands) when their sons won the Everest (1200m) and Blue Diamond Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m).
“For Winning Rupert, there’s got to be a good one come around eventually, like most sires,” Coyle said of the speedy stallion, who won once each at Group 2, Group 3 and Listed level in his six-start career.
“The Australian market is very quick to knock a stallion on the head, because there are so many stallions being brought on all the time. I’ve got no knock on Winning Rupert though. He’ll produce a nice horse.
“And for him, I’m a massive believer that if the mare is ever going to upgrade the stallion, this is the sort of mare that can do it. There’s a couple of stakes horses in the family.”
As much as he liked Slightly Sweet, Coyle is even more ebullient about the half-sister he’s just bought.
“On type alone, at this stage as yearlings, this filly has Slightly Sweet covered, which is hopefully a good indication for the future,” Coyle said. “Slightly Sweet was more the style of horse that needed a bit of time, but this filly has got it all put together, so there’s hope for a quick turnaround with her.”
Averaging 34 winners over the past three seasons, Coyle doesn’t have the buying power of many trainers, but is nonetheless confident he’s operating in the right channels, especially at the bargain-hatching Classic sale, where he’s hoping to buy several more.
“This was a big buy for me, but the market now says if you want to buy that level of horse which A, you like, and B, has black type down the page, and you can improve on it, this is what you have to go to,” he said.
“I would’ve loved to have bought her for $80,000 or $100,000, but you either go home with an empty truck or you purchase these quality horses who’d be every chance to succeed in Sydney.
“When you go through race results, under $200,000 seems to be where most of your Saturday winners come from. I’ve generally bought at up to the $150,000 mark. Nothing against those who want to spend a million dollars on a colt, but when you go through Saturday winners and stakes winners, their success rate isn’t that great.
“When you don’t have a blank chequebook next to your name it makes it a little harder. But that’s the reason you’ve got to look hard to find those horses that you like.”
Coyle describes himself as a “very hands on” trainer for the 40 he has in work, and would thus not like to expand.
“I tried it before: less quality, more work; it wasn’t worthwhile,” he said. “So improving the quality of horse in the stable, and turning up on Saturdays in town more often than at the provincials or country, that’s the ideal scenario.
“So purchases like this Winning Rupert filly are hopefully what the stable needs.”
Coyle did operate in the open chequebook zone for a time – a very short time. He trained for Patinack Farm at the height of its pomp, preparing Group 1 winners in Onemorenomore (Red Ransom) and Linky Dink (Keeper). As with everything in the Patinack shambles, it wasn’t to last, his tenure limited to just nine months. But despite acrimony at the time, he prefers gratitude for his time in the machine, over bitterness at being spat out of it.
“Patinack was Patinack,” he said. “It’s the reason I train in Sydney now and why I’ve got 40 horses in work, or I’d probably still be working ten at Newcastle and finding it tough.
“It’s tough to break into any metro market in Australia, and Sydney’s the hardest. So to have been there and trained two Group 1 winners in a relatively short time, with quality stock, that really launched me as a trainer.”
Showcasing his training skills, it was a vibrant time in the spotlight, the like of which the 45-year-old would no doubt love to feel again soon. Perhaps his next turn will coincide with Winning Rupert’s.
By Trevor Marshallsea