Whitsbury Manor Wheels Keep On Turning with New Recruit Elite Status and Dragon Symbol’s First Foals

[Wandering Eyes]

There are many ways to celebrate breeding a Classic winner, but Ed Harper must be in the minority in having selected a betting shop on Newmarket High Street as his first destination after departing the town's Rowley Mile, the landmark achievement of his family's Whitsbury Manor Stud still barely having sunk in.

As it was, little more than an hour after the homebred Chaldean had skipped to glory in the 2023 edition of the 2,000 Guineas, Harper found himself in front of a wall of screens, ready to watch the 17:55 at Doncaster.

A five-furlong maiden for two-year-olds, it attracted a field of six, with the market dominated by another Whitsbury Manor homebred now going by the name of Elite Status and racing in the colours of Sheikh Mohammed Obaid Al Maktoum.

It was a debut which, by hook or by crook, Harper was never going to miss.

“He was a real talking horse even before he debuted at Doncaster,” Harper remembers. “The day he debuted was actually the day of the 2,000 Guineas won by Chaldean, whom we bred.

“My fiancée was very surprised when I dragged her from Newmarket Racecourse, where we'd just watched our pride and joy win the 2,000 Guineas, to a betting shop on the High Street in Newmarket to go and watch a horse that had never run before.

“She thought, 'How can this possibly be important enough to leave Newmarket and go and watch this?', but I explained that we had high hopes for Elite Status and he didn't disappoint. He won pulling a cart at Donny and then went on to win the [Listed] National Stakes by an absolute mile.

He adds, “I've never had so many text messages about a horse we've bred than after the National Stakes at Sandown. My phone just absolutely blew up with people saying, 'What was that?'”

Now, Harper is optimistic that his phone will be red hot with enquires once again as Elite Status prepares to join his sire, Havana Grey, on the Whitsbury Manor stallion roster for 2026. His return to the place of his birth is imminent, just shy of three years since “the champ” departed to be offered at the Tattersalls December Foal Sale.

“From the get-go he was just a standout foal,” says Harper. “Walking around the paddocks, he could make a lot of the others look very weak. I nicknamed him 'the champ' very, very early on – he just stood out.

“He sold very well [for 56,000gns] at the foal sales for what he was. He was by a second-crop stallion [Havana Grey] that wouldn't have been on everyone's immediate list from that point of view but, as soon as they saw him, he couldn't have been busier. Then, obviously, he came back as a yearling and made 325,000gns to Karl Burke, so he was an exceptional yearling.”

That “exceptional yearling” soon showed himself to be a racehorse of significant quality, too. He registered his third success as a juvenile in the G3 Prix de Cabourg at Deauville, before twice lowering the six-furlong track record at Newbury as a three-year-old, first when winning the Listed Carnarvon Stakes and then when going faster still in the G3 Hackwood Stakes.

“He beat some proper horses that day,” Harper says of that Hackwood victory. “He beat the Group 1 winners Kind Of Blue and Regional – and he did it well. It could easily have been a Group 1 on a different day.”

He continues, “We've been so keen to get the right son of Havana Grey here. He'll be the first son of a current standing stallion that we've ever stood at Whitsbury. We didn't know whether it was going to be possible, but he fits the bill for us so well. He's the highest-rated runner by Havana Grey on RPRs at 119, he's absolutely beautiful, and we know every inch of his pedigree.”

Those inches extend to an intimate knowledge of Elite Status' broodmare sire, the former Whitsbury Manor stallion Swiss Spirit, in addition to the operation's overwhelming success story that is Havana Grey.

Surely, given Harper's longstanding love affair with “the champ” and his bloodline, the homecoming of Elite Status for this next phase of his life must give the stud director that warm and fuzzy feeling inside?

“I'm not a sentimental person in terms of just loving a horse for the sake of it – it's got to be right,” Harper counters. “We make very, very commercial decisions here at Whitsbury and I'm not afraid to make the tough decisions.

“But it does answer the questions that we sometimes can't answer with other stallions. When we're looking to buy a stallion, just from its race career, we don't know what they were like as a foal most of the time. We don't know what they were like as a yearling, we don't know what their temperament was like, and we don't know what they were like to prep.

“We answer all of these questions with Elite Status and Dragon Symbol. We know they were absolutely bombproof and rock solid at Whitsbury – and those are the attributes that we want back.”

Confidence In Dragon Symbol's First Foals

The attributes Dragon Symbol has passed on to his progeny will be in evidence at the forthcoming foal sales, with eight from his first crop scheduled to sell at Goffs, before another 48, no less, go through the ring at Tattersalls.

Like Elite Status, Dragon Symbol returned home to Whitsbury Manor at the conclusion of a racing career which yielded five wins, plus six top-four finishes at Group 1 or Group 2 level during his three-year-old campaign alone.

Described by Harper as “the most consistent sprinter around for many years”, the son of Cable Bay covered full books numbering over 140 mares in both 2024 and 2025, including a healthy number in his Whitsbury Manor harem.

“Everybody knows that Whitsbury supports its stallions very, very strongly,” Harper continues. “People won't be surprised to see the strong foals that we bring to the sales and we've also scattered a few foals amongst other consignors, so that our consignment isn't just solid Dragon Symbols. We've spread some nice ones about, so there will be a good choice across all of the days.”

He adds, “It's a big test when you take the first foals to the sales, but we know that they look right and we're very confident that they're going to show themselves well. I've had it in the past where, after the first day of showing, some cracks start appearing, maybe in the attitudes and the way they show. But I'm very confident that's not going to be the case with Dragon Symbol.

“We know the stallion particularly well because we bred him – we saw him as a foal and as a yearling – and we've done extra work with these [foals] and absolutely know that they're going to do their bit.

“It's a totally different environment at the sales. Foals have to put up with a lot of showing, especially the nice foals – they will be doing up to 80 shows a day. It's that 70th or 80th show of the day that really shows what they're made of and we're very confident that people will like what they see.”

A colt out of Abraj Dubai (Street Cry) is singled out for particular praise by Joe Callan, Whitsbury Manor's head of bloodstock and sales. The half-brother to Havana Grey's Listed winner Star Of Lady M will be offered as lot 649 at Tattersalls, while lot 467, a half-brother to this year's Listed Windsor Castle Stakes third Azizam (Havana Grey), is another to earn a favourable mention when it comes to the Whitsbury Manor draft at Park Paddocks.

At Goffs, meanwhile, Baroda Stud will consign the first Dragon Symbol foal to go under the hammer, specifically lot 47, a half-brother to four winners out of the unraced Invasor mare Ealaan.

“He's a very good representative of what the stallion can do,” says Callan. “Hopefully, he'll catch the attention of people and they can see straight off the bat what the stallion is producing. We sold his sister [Little Havana] last year for 200,000gns to Amo Racing. She ran once and showed a lot of promise. I know they're quite positive on her, despite her missing a bit of time this year, so he could be an exciting lot on the first day.”

Summing up what prospective buyers can expect of Dragon Symbol's first foals, Callan adds, “He's definitely stamping them. They all have good depth, good shoulder, good hip and very similar heads. Very importantly, they all have a great temperament and they're good movers. There's a mix of colours, some bay and some grey, but overall he's definitely stamping them and we're extremely pleased.

“A real testament to a stallion is when they cover a larger second book than they do first book. That's a real gauge on people being impressed and we've seen that with Dragon Symbol. The next step is to get them in front of buyers at the sales and, hopefully, everyone is as pleased as we are.”

“You Have To Go Hard Or Go Home In This Game”

Certainly, there seems to be an air of quiet contentment among a team at Whitsbury Manor which has never been afraid to do things differently.

A case in point was the decision to limit Havana Grey to mares who are 16hh or smaller. That restriction remains in place for the 2026 breeding season when, Harper points out, Elite Status will be in situ and able to cover some of the bigger mares deemed not suitable for his sire.

What also sets the Whitsbury Manor team apart from many studs of a similar size is its dedication to working with small breeders, plenty of whom benefitted from the early successes of Havana Grey and stud stalwart Showcasing when they began their stallion careers at basement fees.

Given that track record, it's little wonder that those same breeders have been found forming an orderly queue when a new sire has been recruited to Whitsbury Manor in recent years – see Sergei Prokofiev and Dragon Symbol – safe in the knowledge that the team at the Hampshire farm will be giving it both barrels with its own broodmare band.

“The amazing thing that Showcasing and Havana Grey have done for our business is they've given us the firepower to really bring it up a notch,” Harper explains. “Every time we retire a new stallion, we can raise the bar of the support they get. People will see that at the sales and, hopefully, British breeders can benefit from that down the line when they know they're sending their mares to horses that are going to get the best possible chance.”

He continues, “Hopefully, Whitsbury does have that reputation of working with breeders, because we've been there and done it from the bottom up. It's a survival technique, really. Dad did it for 30 or 40 years before and he's very much passed on the idea that, if we don't help the breeders survive, we don't have a business model.

“Our aim is to buy and stand stallions that will keep small breeders in business. When they succeed and go up into the next echelons, then those stallions tend to look after themselves after that point. But to get them there, we really need to work with breeders.”

Whether Elite Status can make it into the upper echelons of the stallion ranks, only time will tell, but already he's come a long way from that Doncaster debut. For Harper, too, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since that pit stop at the Newmarket betting shop, with this year alone bringing the birth of a child and a typically hectic yearling sales season.

“Things at Whitsbury are pretty dynamic and finding a slot for things like this [the interview] is not easy at this time of year,” he sums up. “But we've got an amazing team, everybody pitches in, and I fully trust everyone. I try not to micromanage. My philosophy is to get good people and let them do what they have to do.

“We couldn't be more excited. We have five stallions heading into next year. It's a bit scary – that's going to be busy – but you have to go hard or go home in this game and that's what we try and do.”

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