Movers and sheikhs

Money doesn’t talk in Newmarket; it whinnies. This would be the ultimate sleepy one-horse town – if it wasn’t for the thousands of horses. When I arrived, I almost crashed the car at the roundabout at the entrance to the town where a dozen men were erecting a vast bronze statue of a rearing stallion. I saw no children-crossing signs in Newmarket (come to think of it, I saw no children), but there are endless horse-crossing signs. It is a shrine to the horse; a place where people – the wizened grooms, the failed punters, the men with big stomachs who fill the town’s numerous bookies – know their place and pay obeisance to the equine masterpieces who gallop across the heath on autumn mornings.

Newmarket is mad about horses: the rearing stallion is just the first of many bronze statues of great champions; the local Women’s Institute meets in a building called the Stable; even the Chinese takeaway just off the high street is called Golden Horses. The racing museum in the centre of town contains the skeleton of the legendary Eclipse (it looked like a dinosaur to me), the head of Cloister (you remember, the winner of the 1893 Grand National), and the tail of Gladiateur (the first French winner of the Derby, dubbed “the avenger of Waterloo” by his countrymen). It also has a large chart tracing the lineage of all Derby winners back to the three original thoroughbreds: Darley Arabian, Godolphin Arabian and Byerley Turk. Inbreeding may have produced our dysfunctional royal family, but it seems to have worked for horses.

Newmarket’s horse worship is particularly acute at present, not just because the Cambridgeshire (a huge betting race established in 1839) is being run tomorrow, but because this is the week of the Houghton yearling sale, when the cream of Europe’s bloodstock comes under the hammer in the ring at Tattersalls. Tattersalls (usually referred to as Tatts) is the Sotheby’s of the horse world and the Houghton is its pride and joy. For this sale, Tatts excludes all but the best-bred horses and this year its catalogue, small but select, featured only 210 lots, the Rembrandts of the horse world.

Fifty lots were auctioned on Tuesday, the first day of the sale, at an average price of more than 250,000 guineas. This traditionalist world has yet to catch up with shillings, let alone decimal currency, and still trades in the units favoured by the 18th-century gentlemen who turned Newmarket into racing’s HQ. (Guineas ceased to be legal currency in 1813, so you might have forgotten what they are worth: a guinea equals 21 shillings, or £1.05, or the large amounts of dollars, deutschmarks and yen that light up on the board above the auctioneer’s head.)

Tattersalls was founded by one of those 18th-century sporting gentlemen, Richard Tattersall, in 1766. Today, it is a multimillion pound business selling 10,000 horses a year. It is not just by selling in guineas that Tatts likes to preserve the forms of the past. The term “gentleman” preserves a special aura: lot two, a grey filly (few of these untrained one-year-old horses have been named when offered for sale), was lovingly described as “the property of a gentleman”.

The gentlemanly side of racing has, however, always been largely mythical. Commercial racing developed as a result of the 18th century’s love of gambling and the egomania of the leading landowners. Newmarket’s primacy began even earlier – with Charles II’s passion for racing on the heath. Racing has always been synonymous with money, sex and, occasionally, violence; it is as much the sport of thugs as of kings.

Today, it is increasingly the sport of plutocrats, and they are nowhere more in evidence than at the Houghton sale. A generation ago, scions of famous families would have dominated the buying and selling; now it is multinational businesses, and two in particular – the Irish-based partnership of bloodstock expert John Magnier and gambler-millionaire Michael Tabor, and the racing operations of the mighty Maktoums, the ruling family of Dubai.

“On the turf and under it all men are equal,” according to a 19th-century motto in Newmarket’s racing museum. It’s a nice notion, and there is a sense in which racing has always been a conspiracy of toffs and toughs against the middle class. But the brutal truth of modern racing is that there are now two massive players and the rest. The Houghton sale, in particular, has become the duelling ground of the two giants and their animating forces – Magnier, generally reckoned to be the shrewdest man in racing, and Sheikh Mohammed, one of the four Maktoum brothers, probably the richest.

The ring at Tattersalls in which the horses are sold is highly theatrical: circular, dominated by a large chandelier, and with a glass roof which allows you to watch the sky darken as the prices rise. There must be 500 people at the auction: perhaps 50 are there to buy, the rest to watch. Most of the buying is done by bloodstock agents acting on behalf of owners and trainers. A horse selling for 250,000 guineas is routine; only when they reach double that does the audience – trainers in baggy jackets, merchant banker types in pin-striped suits and women who wear sunglasses on their heads even though the sun set two hours ago – really wake up. The man next to me spots a friend on the other side of the room but, with bidding having reached 600,000 guineas, decides it would be better not to wave.

Much is expected of lot 32, a colt from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Watership Down stud. Bloodstock agent John Ferguson, bidding on behalf of Sheikh Mohammed, bought the horse for a million, less than expected. As the horse paraded around the ring, it gave a whinny, which the auctioneer interpreted as “surely I’m worth more than that”.

As with all theatrical performances, the best was kept until last: lot 54, another colt from Watership Down, the son of champion sire Sadler’s Wells and Darara, the winner of a group one race in France (group one races are racing’s holy grail – the classics and a handful of other great races around the world). There would be no petulant displays of equine amour propre from lot 54, because this was a horse that both Magnier and Sheikh Mohammed wanted. The irresistible force was about to meet the immovable object. Who would blink first?

“The Magnier-Tabor consortium and the Maktoums have the biggest purses and if they both really want a horse, and they’re not prepared to back down, they or their agents go at it until one stops,” explains one insider. “It’s a bit like two boxers under the old rules: the winner is the fighter left standing.”

The competition between Magnier-Tabor and the Maktoums has been fuelling a worldwide rise in bloodstock prices, accentuated by the increase in prize money in the US, the gradual recovery of the Japanese economy and the growing commercialisation of breeding, which is causing big studs such as Magnier’s Coolmore operation in Ireland and those owned by the Maktoums to keep their stock. The way for studs to make money is to charge owners to have mares covered (euphemism) by their stallions. Sadler’s Wells is current world champion sire and last year covered more than 150 mares at a price of 150,000 Irish guineas a shot.

“As wealth increases around the world and fewer horses come up for sale because breeders are keeping them, it’s a sellers’ market and prices have gone through the roof,” says Observer racing correspondent Graham Rock. “Technology has made a lot of people very rich, racing is a traditional way of enjoying wealth, and that has put pressure on the market to satisfy these big players. In any sort of market that would make prices rise.”

Buyers at the Houghton are, in the words of Mail on Sunday racing journalist Alan Smith, “chasing a dream”. Twenty years ago, their sole dream was to win one of the classics; now, for some, the dream is rather more hard-nosed – to produce another Sadler’s Wells, a horse that has become a breeding superstar. Thus great races become a means to an end. The Houghton is what one observer calls a “rich man’s Hamleys”, but these are toys with a purpose and a potential payoff. Whoever controls the best bloodlines, as Magnier does at the moment, can make a killing.

But you can lose a packet at the Houghton too. “The whole game is a lottery and this is where you buy the most expensive tickets,” says Tony Morris, bloodstock correspondent of the Racing Post, the bible of the betting masses. “In 1998, the top price was three million [for Abshurr] and no one looking at it could understand why it was making so much money. Tabor-Magnier let Sheikh Mohammed have that one and it has never been on the racecourse yet.”

The yearlings on sale at the Houghton have never raced, never even been trained; they are not fully grown and will change physically over the next year or so. “It’s highly speculative,” says one bloodstock expert. “It’s like going to a middle school in England and trying to pick out Olympic runners.”

“Nobody ever knows what will make a great horse, no matter how much money you’ve got,” says Morris. One American buyer at the sale made a similar point: “Lots of people here want to buy pretty horses, but pretty horses don’t always win races.”

Lot 54 was certainly pretty – but then they all looked good to me. Just before they entered the ring, they had their hooves painted like models on the catwalk. Should one of these models do anything unfortunate round the ring, an old retainer with a bucket and mop would rush out to clear the stage.

Lot 54 was also about to make history. Its price leapt 100,000 guineas at a time, with Magnier and Sheikh Mohammed doing their own bidding. The adjoining bars rapidly emptied and a hush descended on the ring as the audience realised the play’s denouement was approaching. The existing European record for a yearling of three million guineas was passed and the bidding reached 3.4 million. The auctioneer looked at Sheikh Mohammed imploringly, asking him to raise his bid: “It would be a nice round figure, sir.” But the sheikh wouldn’t budge and Magnier won the day.

“He looked the part and everything about him was right,” said Michael Tabor afterwards. “I’m delighted. It won’t be a bad deal for at least two or three years.” Tabor and Magnier will certainly be hoping that lot 54 can run faster than Abshurr.

“Well done, team. That was exciting to say the least,” I overheard the auctioneer say to his assistants later. Tattersalls’ staff were happy; Magnier and Tabor were happy; we in the audience were happy, having had some excellent sport. But, in the long term, will commercialisation and the concentration of power really benefit racing? “It’s much more of a business than it used to be,” the former Irish champion trainer Dermot Weld told me. “It used to be a fun game, but now it’s very much a business.”

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