High-class mare Prowess coming up for sale on Gavelhouse Plus

[Wandering Eyes]

A special standalone sale on Gavelhouse Plus will give breeders a rare opportunity to secure a trans-Tasman Group One winner.

The auction of Prowess will run from the 2^nd to the 8^th of August on Gavelhouse Plus.

Trained by Roger James and Robert Wellwood for a family syndicate headed by Dean Skipper, Prowess won eight of her 12 starts including five consecutive black-type victories as a three-year-old.

Prowess was a $230,000 yearling purchase at Karaka in 2021 from the draft of breeders Hallmark Stud, and she turned that into more than $1.65 million in prizemoney in her glittering career.

“She’s taken us on an amazing ride and it’s definitely a shame that it’s coming to an end,” Skipper said. “We have some mixed emotions about putting her up for sale.

“But the way we look at it is that we were just so fortunate to have had one as good as her, and now she’s ready to go on to the next stage of her career.

“She’s fit and well and a happy horse. She could probably even have made it back to the racetrack if we wanted to wait a bit longer. But she’s at a premium stage of her life to start her breeding career now, and we always set it up so that we would sell her at around this time and have her in the best possible condition for that.”

Prowess was at the forefront of the meteoric rise of her sire Proisir, whose service fee soared from $17,500 to $70,000 after siring five Group One winners in a single season in 2022-23 – trans-Tasman stars Prowess and Legarto, plus elite New Zealand winners Levante, Pier and Dark Destroyer.

Proisir has gone on to achieve blockbuster Book 1 averages of $188,947 at Karaka 2023 and $274,444 at Karaka 2024. The esteem for Prowess, her family and her sire was spectacularly illustrated in January when a full-sister to Prowess topped the Book 1 sale at $1.6 million.

“It was unbelievable to see the full-sister sell for such a big price at Karaka earlier in the year,” Skipper said. “It shows how highly the family is regarded now, and it’s a great reward for the hard work that Mark Baker and the Hallmark team have put in.

“Based on that, I guess we could say that we got Prowess quite cheaply in hindsight. But it was still quite a heady price to pay at the time.”

Prowess wasted no time in making that $230,000 purchase price look like a worthwhile investment. She made a big impression with a trial win at Taupo as an autumn two-year-old in April 2022, then backed that up on raceday with a runaway romp by nine lengths at Wanganui in her only juvenile start.

“We knew from quite early on that we might have something a bit special on our hands,” Skipper said. “Robert Wellwood texted me after the trial, telling me to watch the replay and then give him a call. I figured she must have done something, and I was blown away when I watched it.

“Then we were on course at Wanganui for her debut, and we were a bit overwhelmed when she won it the way she did. We didn’t even really celebrate – we were just awestruck.”

But it was as a three-year-old that Prowess really made her name. After spring placings in the Group Three Soliloquy Stakes (1400m) and against males in the Gr.1 New Zealand 2000 Guineas (1600m), Prowess embarked on a winning sequence that spanned five feature races between New Year’s Day and the end of March.

She kicked off with a comfortable win in the Gr.2 Auckland Guineas (1600m), then produced a scintillating turn of foot to stun a star-studded field in the $1 million Karaka Million 3YO Classic (1600m).

After returning to three-year-old fillies’ company with a five-length romp in the Gr.2 David & Karyn Ellis Fillies’ Classic (2000m), Prowess took on older horses at weight-for-age and recorded a rare win by a three-year-old filly in the Gr.1 Bonecrusher New Zealand Stakes (2050m).

James and Wellwood then set their sights on Sydney, and Prowess produced perhaps the most impressive performance of her career with a three-length blitz in the Gr.1 Vinery Stud Stakes (2000m) at Rosehill.

An injury-curtailed four-year-old campaign saw Prowess win the Group Two Crystal Mile (1600m) in Melbourne and place in the Gr.3 Taranaki Breeders’ Stakes (1400m).

“We started to realise just how good she was when she won the Auckland Guineas, and it was a picket fence from there and she just kept raising the bar,” Skipper said.

“Roger James has been training for a long time and has had some great horses in his stable, so when he started saying she was up there with the best he’d ever trained, it was incredibly exciting.

“One thing about her career that was very special was that we managed to capture the attention of a few people who weren’t previously into racing. They got behind her and were opening up TAB accounts so that they could bet on her. That was another part of the experience that we really enjoyed.

“It was just so much fun and we can’t thank everyone enough – the vets, the farriers and all the team at Kingsclere Stables. They’re the ones getting up at 3am and putting in all that hard work. We just paid the bills and got to enjoy the end result.

“She gave us some incredible memories, and now we’re looking forward to seeing what she can do in the broodmare paddock.”

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