Racing: Shelling out for a Derby dream ticket

Mares and fillies are the main attraction at the December Sales as breeders stalk the lineage of future Classic winners.

THE FLAT season is now a distant memory these grey winter days for those out and about on the racecourse, but behind the scenes in Newmarket last week many a long-term masterplan was being hatched with Epsom, Churchill Downs or even Flemington as the final objective. The occasion was the Tattersalls December Sales, the final flourish of the British auction calendar and the year's last great international gathering of the bloodstock circus.

There, in the shape of pregnant mares and maiden fillies, was the seed- corn that will provide for the future of Thoroughbred breeding. Horsemen and women from all over the globe came, as they have for more than a century, to secure the choicest bloodlines, to buy into some of the Turf's great families and to maybe, just maybe, launch a dynasty of their own.

A strong December Sale represents faith in the future, and though last week's edition was not a patch on the feeding frenzy of 12 months previously, when the filly Dance Design topped the trading at an extraordinary 2.5 million guineas, it was still one of the best on record. The note was caution rather than lack of confidence; some of the major bloodstock players (or possibly their financial advisors) appear to have paid a visit to Planet Earth recently.

Buyers from nearly 50 countries gave some pounds 35 million for the 958 mares and fillies and odd stallion prospect sold last week. The high point came when Shell Ginger, soon to become a mother, waddled round the ring. The pretty chestnut four-year-old never fulfilled the promise of her juvenile career with Aidan O'Brien, but she is a daughter of Woodman of excellent family and is expecting a Sadler's Wells foal next month. Auctioneer David Pim knocked her down for a cool 775,000 guineas and she went back to Ireland to await her firstborn who will, in an ideal world, win the 2002 Derby.

Glorosia, winner of last year's Fillies Mile at Ascot but disappointing this term, transferred to the ownership of Baron Georg von Ullmann for 650,000 guineas and will be given the chance to recapture her sparkle as she remains in training with Luca Cumani.

Wellspring's only victory came in a Pontefract maiden last year but, as a daughter of Marwell carrying to Cadeaux Genereux, she was valued last week at the 625,000 guineas given by a client of the Niarchos family's Fresnay-le-Buffard stud. Fanjica, whose great-grandmother Ivanjica won an Arc, took the Lancashire Oaks three years ago and will, at a cost of 330,000 guineas, grace the paddocks at Shadai Farm in future.

The Coolmore team were delighted to snap up three-year-old Encens, a minor winner in the French provinces in the Niarchos colours, for 305,000 guineas. Sure, her dam is a half-sister to Khaled Abdullah's great mare Slightly Dangerous, dam of the 1993 Derby winner Commander In Chief, and produced Scenic early in her stud career, but her two-year-old is Cupid, Group One-placed for Aidan O'Brien & co.

If he wins the Derby, what will Encens' children be worth? Does Mr Magnier know something we don't?

For 300,000 guineas, 12-year-old Party Doll, from the family of Dream Well, made the transfer from Normandy to the Lloyd Webbers' Watership Down Stud in Hampshire, where she will, presumably, continue to breed like a rabbit.

And Loure, whose best effort was to finish second in a Yarmouth maiden seven years ago, proved that succesful gambles are not restricted to the track. Three years ago, at the same fixture, Newmarket bloodstock agent Jill Lamb shrewdly picked the beautifully-bred mare out of the 106-strong cull from Sheikh Mohammed's Darley Stud for 80,000gns and last week her client traded back the 10-year-old, with a sibling to the smart filly Entice due in March, for 420,000 guineas.

All the big studs and stables offload stock surplus to requirements each year, and when the opportunity comes to buy into a top bloodline, breeders flock like vultures, at all levels of the market, to weave more threads into the tapestry that is the Thoroughbred stud book.

Take the Jim Joel dispersal 12 years ago. Sheikh Mohammed, then in the process of building up his broodmare band, bought just one mare, paying 600,000 guineas for Lady Moon, in foal to Kris. She died young, but that Kris baby was Moon Cactus, who proved a high-class runner and went on to produce the Sheikh's 1995 Oaks heroine Moonshell as her first foal.

And it is not only at the top of the market that hopes can be fulfilled. Take Regal Beauty, for instance, the cheapest of that Joel draft at 5,200 guineas. She was sold as a barrener to Michael Poland, who hit the jackpot when her first foal for him proved to be King's Theatre, runner-up in two Derbys and winner of the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes. High Estate, the last foal she bred for Joel, went on to sire this year's Derby hero, High-Rise.

The influence of the Joel consignment filtered worldwide. Daffodil Day, for instance, a half-sister to the Derby runner-up Connaught, went off to the Antipodes and became responsible for an Australian Derby winner, Dance The Day Away. Last week, among the unheralded 25,000-guineas also- rans, Daffodil Day's ordinary grand-daughter Lower The Tone, twice a winner at lowly Tralee in Ireland and in foal to Night Shift, picked up the December Sales baton for her family.