‘I Don’t Try to Buy Cheap Horses, I Try to Buy Nice Horses Cheaply’

[Wandering Eyes]

Think of the West Country and one tends to picture wintry days and the big jumping yards, but amid the rolling hills of Devon sits one of the smaller Flat operations which routinely finds at least one horse a year to ensure the stable punches well above its weight.

Step forward, Rod Millman, frontman of a family-run business which includes his wife Louise and sons James – the former jockey who has been an excellent addition to the roster of Racing TV presenters – and amateur rider Patrick. This year, it has been the fast young filly Anthelia which has kept the Millman name in lights, and on Saturday she bids to give her trainer a third victory in the £250,000 Weatherbys Super Sprint.

Millman first won the race back in 1997, in only its seventh year, with Lord Kintyre (Makbul), and Bettys Hope (Anjaal) struck for the stable again in 2019. They each ran in the family's silks, having been bought respectively for 9,200gns back in the days when the old Doncaster sales still operated in that currency, and £3,000 at the Tattersalls Ireland Ascot September Yearling Sale (which has now morphed into the Somerville Sale). Anthelia, too, fits that mould. The Yeomanstown Stud-bred filly from the first crop of Supremacy was bought by her trainer for £6,000 at the Goffs UK Premier Yearling Sale and she has paid him back in spades, winning her first two starts before landing the Listed National Stakes at Sandown. A step up to six furlongs followed for the Listed Empress Fillies' Stakes at Newmarket, in which she was beaten only two lengths when fifth. Millman believes that it was not the extra distance which scuppered her chances that time. 

He says, “She's very well and everything has gone right up to now. I think she stayed the trip okay last time over six but I think she just got a bit too far back and had too much ground to make up, and we were giving them three pounds as well, but she will be running over six later in the season, for sure.”

Such is the clamour for smart two-year-old prospects that, unsurprisingly, as soon as Anthelia started winning, the phone started ringing. 

“I sold a half-share to Middleham Park Racing after she'd won for reasonable money,” says Millman. “But after we'd won the National Stakes we were offered silly money for her to go to Royal Ascot. If I'd been ten years younger I'd have probably taken it, but it was a family decision and we'd bought her to have fun with, so we kept her, and we'll keep her and run her next year as well. I expect we'll sell her at the end of her three-year-old season.”

Millman, a dab hand at turning inexpensive and often unfashionably bred horses into useful campaigners, says of his buying strategy, “I don't try to buy cheap horses, I try to buy nice horses cheaply.”

It's clearly something he does well, and despite his prowess with early two-year-olds, he is not in the camp which views them as dispensable commodities. 

He says, “I try to buy something that will be mature for their age, but nearly all the good ones that I've had that have come out early and done well have made very good older horses. Woolhampton was second in the Super Sprint and has won a lot of money and she's still running well as a five-year-old. Cop Hill Lad was also second in the race and we sold him for a lot of money to Hong Kong and he ran there a long time. And Lord Kintyre was still on the racetrack at eight years old. Although we get them out early, they are not abused, and they last for a long time.”

Possibly the greatest advertisement of the trainer's skills in this regard is Whitbarrow (Royal Abjar), the winner of the Woodcote and the Molecomb Stakes in 2001 who ran until he was 11, winning 13 of his 109 starts. 

 

Anthelia and Lewis Edmunds win the National Stakes | Racingfotos

Millman decided to avoid Royal Ascot with Anthelia, but he is not a fan of the changes that have been made to the Windsor Castle Stakes, which will be run over six furlongs next year and restricted to the offspring of stallions who won over at least seven furlongs at two or a mile at three and up.

“The trouble is, the Windsor Castle was a race that people aimed at with that sort of horse and it gave people who were buying a stud fee for less than £5,000 a chance of having a good horse,” he says. “It's all very well saying that we want to put more stamina into the breed, but the market doesn't say that.”

He adds of Anthelia skirting the royal meeting, “I just felt that she would have a hard race. On the form I think she would have been placed, because the horses we beat weren't beaten very far. But I thought we'd keep our powder dry and not risk getting jarred up. Royal Ascot is like going to the Cheltenham Festival and I didn't think she'd win the Queen Mary, so I thought we'd miss that and keep ourselves fresh for the rest of the season. If you look at the Cheveley Park, there were only seven runners in that last year, so you only have to ride for place money and you'd probably get third. 

“We had some of the big people try to buy her because they wanted to have a runner at Royal Ascot, but she'll always have a value as a black-type winner. So I just hope that we can roll the dice a bit longer. I'm 68 now and it's nice to have a good horse to go racing with. Middleham Park have been super – they trust you to manage and they let you manage.”

Millman will also be represented at Newbury on Saturday by Adaay In Devon. Now four and the winner of seven races, she is also a dual Listed winner for her breeder, the Horniwinks Racing Syndicate, who managed to pick up her dam for £1,000 when a number of horses were auctioned at Exeter Market after Worsall Grange Stud went out of business. 

“They sold 35 or 40 horses in pig pens,” Millan recalls. “I didn't end up buying anything but a couple of farmers went down and thought they'd buy themselves a racehorse and they ended up buying Favourite Girl with a foal at foot. Then they put the mare to Adaay and that's how Adaay In Devon came to be.”

The trainer says that he no longer buys yearlings on spec but values the support of some studs, notably Whitsbury Manor, while he is sometimes sent horses from Ireland by Tally-Ho and Yeomanstown Studs. 

“I buy one every year to have fun ourselves, and any others I buy to order,” he says. “I'm lucky I have my two sons involved because I'm getting a bit older now and they take the pressure off a bit.”

Anthelia has certainly provided plenty of fun already this year, both for the Millman family and their partners in Middleham Park Racing, and her trainer has every right to hope for a third victory in the race in which he has enjoyed so many good runs in the past.

“She's got a good chance,” he says of the second-favourite behind Eve Johnson Houghton's Windsor Castle Stakes winner. “And she's only a pound wrong in the handicap with Havana Hurricane. He's rated 100 and we are 94 but we're getting five pounds from him, so we are not a million miles away.”

 

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