A Big December Sale in Store for Overbury with Siblings to Calandagan and Gewan

[Wandering Eyes]

As updates go, being a half-sister to the Cartier Horse of the Year is not a bad one, especially when the mare in question is carrying to Calandagan's sire, Gleneagles.

Caliyza has plenty more in her favour to boot. She's a dual winner by the late Le Havre and, only five, she is in foal for the first time. Offered as lot 1452 by Overbury Stud on Monday during the first of two Sceptre Sessions, the Aga Khan Studs-bred mare is returning to Tattersalls just 12 months after being bought in the same ring for 155,000gns by Richard Brown of Blandford Bloodstock. Since then, her year-younger half-brother has won three consecutive Group 1s and could even deliver yet another update on Sunday in the Japan Cup.

“I would stress that anything that looks clever that happens at Overbury Stud has been organised by Richard Brown,” says Overbury's Simon Sweeting modestly. “There's no point in saying otherwise. We're incredibly lucky that he can be bothered because he's got far more important things to do than to be buying horses for Charlie and me. So it's not me that's being clever.”

The Charlie in question is Charlie Wyatt of Dukes Stud, with whom Sweeting has had a 25-year business partnership and a friendship that stretches back even farther to his days working in Newmarket for Luca Cumani and Henry Cecil. Traditionally, Overbury Stud and Dukes Stud combine forces to sell as foals, and this year is no exception, aside from the fact that this year they are selling a half-brother to this year's G1 Dewhurst Stakes winner Gewan (Night Of Thunder), which does make the Overbury draft a little exceptional. The colt (lot 747) is from the first crop of another Dewhurst winner in Native Trail, whose 35 foals sold last week at Goffs returned an average of €40,772, including a top price of €150,000.

It has been quite the year for the Overbury Stud and Dukes Stud partnership, as not only did the Yuesheng Zhang-owned Gewan win the Dewhurst and G3 Acomb Stakes among his three victories for Andrew Balding but Havana Anna (Havana Grey) – a Tattersalls December Foal Sale graduate at 42,000gns – won twice, including the Listed Marwell Stakes, as well as finishing runner-up to True Love in the G1 Cheveley Park Stakes. 

“We've got some nice foals,” Sweeting says. “A half-sister to the second in the Cheveley Park and a half-brother to the winner of the Dewhurst. So I'm excited – well, nervous, but excited.

“Havana Anna's sister we've actually put in on Saturday. She's a lovely foal. She's by Caturra and she'll just stand out there,” he adds of the daughter of the Danehill Dancer mare Miss Villefranche.

“I would definitely rather sell on a lesser day. I always feel that a horse might make a bit more than it deserves. If it was going to make below the average of Friday, it'd sell better on Wednesday.

“The Miss Villefranche foal should be a Friday horse, but she'll still make her money on the Saturday, I'm sure. There'll be some people who haven't bought what they want, and we might get lucky. I spend a lot of time trying to work out what days to put them on, and I always try and undersell them a little bit rather than over.”

He continues, “We've been lucky selling on Saturday, and that's where we sell most of our stock. We've been at it for 25-odd years together now. We were both getting started in our respective farms at the same time, and we thought if we combined our forces, we could get a slightly better mare. And it's gone on from there.

“And, yes, we've produced something decent this year. I mean, there have been some lovely horses along the way, as well as some bad luck, and it just seems to have come together this time, which is wonderful. But, as Charlie said, we've chucked an awful lot of money against the wall.”

Some of it has clearly stuck, however, and this is not the first twirl in the spotlight for Sweeting, a successful dual-purpose breeder who is in an elite group to have produced top-level winners on the Flat and over jumps. On the National Hunt side he has bred the Grade 1-winning hurdlers Thyme Hill and Cornerstone Lad, by the late Overbury stallions Kayf Tara and Delegator. So does having the Dewhurst winner and a live Classic prospect top that?

“Of course. It's wonderful. And you just have to pinch yourself to believe it really has happened, ” he says. “And, of course, we've got the winter now to dream about it all again. The great thing is [Gewan] is in the best place. There might be trainers as good as Andrew, but there's none better. He's trained the Guineas winner twice in the last few years, so the horse has got the best possible chance to go on and do that.

“The whole thing is really exciting. But we've had 25 years of knowing what the flip side is, so it helps keep you very grounded.”

 

 

Simon Sweeting and Charlie Wyatt | Tattersalls

 

There was indeed a time when it looked as though events were conspiring against Sweeting and Wyatt when it came to Gewan's dam Grey Mystere (Lethal Force), another Blandford purchase, this time from Arqana four years ago.

“We thought we'd had terrible luck with the mare in that she lost her foal last year. That was dreadful but it happens. And last year we were kicking ourselves because we got 100,000gns for Gewan. It might sound like a lot of money, but actually it was a slap in the face for a Night Of Thunder colt but it was because his x-rays weren't great.

“Rob Dallas, who's our vet, said he was absolutely fine for racing. And we sold him to Mick [Murphy, Longways Stables], who is one of Rob's clients, so he was able to reassure him. But if he had had good x-rays, that horse would have been bought by Mick Kinane and he'd be in Hong Kong now and we wouldn't have had the Dewhurst winner. So it can work out. When it seems like a bad result at the time, it can actually work out in your favour, and it has done in this case.”

The eight-year-old Grey Mystere is now booked in for a return visit to the soon-to-be-crowned champion sire Night Of Thunder. Sweeting of course has his own team of stallions to manage at Overbury in Gloucestershire, where the roster is led by Jayne McGivern's popular dual-purpose stallion Golden Horn, whose son Trawlerman was last week named Cartier Stayer of the Year. 

“Jayne limits the number he can cover. We could sell 250 nominations but we're restricted to 175 or thereabouts,” says Sweeting, who added that Golden Horn's 2026 book will contain more Flat mares than in his three previous seasons at Overbury. 

“It's straightforward for him to get through a book like that. He's very fertile and he's a pretty straightforward animal to work with.

“And he rewards us. He's had an absolute marquee year. Everything that you thought could come together for him has done all at the same time. To have Cheltenham winners and Royal Ascot winners is beyond dreams.”

“We've booked a lot of really nice Flat mares for next year – ones that I'd be excited about.”

With his mix of six Flat and National Hunt stallions, Sweeting is well in tune with the changing fortunes of the bloodstock sector as breeders exercise more caution and foal crop numbers reduce.

“As long as you get the [stallion fees] right and you're sensible about it, then we are in a position with these stallions to get the mares. But the problem is that there isn't the breadth anymore,” he says. 

“At Overbury, we're very lucky with the horses we've got. They do seem to be popular. Yes, a horse in his fourth year, like Caturra last year, is always going to be a little bit more difficult. But when you've got Golden Horn, when you've got Ardad, who this year has had 37 two-year-old winners, more than any other UK-based stallion, he's absolutely bang up there. But there aren't enough stallions about to give a chance to some of those to pop up that nobody would have expected necessarily to be the successful ones. There has always been some of those around, and we're going to start missing those now because only the commercial, attractive-looking horses are the ones that are actually going to be given the chance in the first place. Thank goodness there are some fairly attractive horses coming to stud for the first time this year.”

The covering season can be a concern for another day, however. In Sweeting's immediate future, he has some select foals to sell, along with potentially one of the jewels of the Sceptre Sessions in Caliyza.

“Everything that could have fallen into place has fallen into place for her,” he says. “Calandagan has done what we hoped that he might. His half-sister Calamandra is Group 3-placed now. Their dam is in foal to Siyouni.

“Caliyza is a great outcross. She's very easy to mate. There's no Northern Dancer blood in there, and it's Clodovil's family.”

Sweeting adds, “I hope people will appreciate the mating. When we sat down and we were thinking about it, we weren't sure that we were going to sell at that stage and we wanted to breed a racehorse rather than something that would draw attention at the sales, and I think Gleneagles has had a good year. He's popular. And I hope what is inside can go on and be a great racehorse.”

 

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