Elarqam Extending Attraction Fairytale

[Wandering Eyes]

Three seven-figure yearlings in four years, from barely a dozen mares. “Not too bad, for a little hick operation in the Borders,” says the Duke of Roxburghe. It is a wry, perfectly weighted remark. He has, after all, just driven through the park of the largest inhabited castle in Scotland. But if Floors Stud is the only parcel of his estate that might remotely qualify him as David, rather than Goliath, he is always reliably free of airs.

The Duke opens the gate into a paddock where three yearling fillies sprawl in the spring sunshine. Their visitors cause them to get curiously to their feet: one by Gleneagles; one by Dark Angel; and Attraction’s daughter by Invincible Spirit.

Depending how her 1,600,000gns half-brother Elarqam (GB) (Frankel {GB}) performs in the first Classic of the season at Newmarket on Saturday, this strong, compact filly might conceivably command a similar sum in the sales ring herself. But the Duke has other plans. She has already been named, as Motion; and whatever she can achieve on the track, the hope is that one day she can be welcomed back to the farm, a precious new conduit for the charisma of perhaps the most accomplished Thoroughbred ever bred in Scotland.

Though the dividends from her colts have made a huge difference to the sustainability of the stud, the Duke had been desperate for Attraction (GB) (Efisio {GB}) to produce another filly. Her first two foals, in 2007 and 2008, were both fillies; both immediately showed themselves capable of winning at stakes level, at least; and both died as 3-year-olds, one of grass sickness and the other tipping over and breaking her neck when being led innocuously through a yard. Other than the Grade III-placed Cushion (GB) (Galileo {Ire}), co-owned with Coolmore, it has since been colts all the way-bar this precious yearling here.

Elarqam was followed by the Dubawi colt who last autumn brought 1,350,000gns at Tattersalls, again from Sheikh Hamdan’s Shadwell Estates. Then came Motion, and earlier this month Attraction delivered a full brother-another colt!-to Elarqam. “He looks fabulous,” the Duke says. “Though a different type. He’s not the same colour, he’s a lighter bay, and doesn’t look like the mother. Elarqam is just a male version of Attraction, they’re two peas in a pod. The Dubawi, again, was completely different. Wasn’t as naturally robust and muscular and strong as Elarqam. He was quality, yes, but I suspect you’ll be more likely to see his best as a 3-year-old.”

Since named Maydanny (Ire), that colt has followed Elarqam to Mark Johnston’s yard-where their mother, of course, was stabled during her own racing days. After Elarqam won his second start, a Group 3 at Newmarket last September, Johnston confessed that he had not been so nervous about a runner since.

“And I said exactly the same thing, watching in the office here on television,” the Duke says. “I was like a caged lion, walking up and down. Because for all the great luck we’ve had in the sales ring, at the end of the day what it boils down to is breeding good horses. And he had always been a stunning colt. It was so exciting to see him do that.”

By an extraordinary Guineas winner out of an extraordinary Guineas winner, Elarqam is certainly preceded to Newmarket by an air of destiny. Yet if he could win the Qipco 2,000 Guineas, he would complete the strangest of paradoxes-whereby a mare wildly out of line with convention, in her own physique, has become a paragon of the sales ring. Attraction’s forelegs were so corkscrewed, and her action so splayed, that purists broke into a cold sweat at the very sight of her. The Duke feels indebted to the candour of Henry Beeby, who conceded that it would be pointless trying to sell her at Doncaster; unless, perhaps, they tried to breeze her.

“I don’t mean this rudely to other trainers, but with most of them she’d never have achieved half what she did with Mark,” the Duke remarks. “He thinks out of the box, doesn’t pay attention to the norms, and just said okay, let’s get on with it. She won her maiden about now, at the end of April at Nottingham; and the Cherry Hinton [July 8] was her fifth race. How many other trainers would have done that?”

So far as her ability to throw a correct foal is concerned, the Duke has a plausible theory. “None of the rest of her family has had the conformation she was born with,” he says. “Her dam Flirtation (GB) (Pursuit Of Love {GB}) was a lovely fine big stamp of a mare, good-bodied, probably toed out a little bit. Attraction toes in both [forelegs], and she’s offset in one if not both.”

“Hindsight’s a very useful commodity but I remember when she first started running, [longstanding bloodstock adviser] John Warren said: ‘You’re never going to want to breed from a crooked thing like that.’ I suppose I was trying to think of the cup as half-full, rather than half-empty, but I just felt she was so unlike anything else in the family that she had probably lain wrongly in the womb. None of her foals, almost, have had anything like her conformation problems at all. One was quite offset but basically they’ve been good, correct animals.”

But exonerating her family of any innate defect does not alter the way she has exalted a page that had offered little immediate distinction; and that she did so by dint of a fairly yeoman covering for Flirtation, from Efisio. So if Attraction inherited anything freakish, it was sooner in “sleeping” genes than conformation.

“It was a fluke,” admits the Duke. “No getting away from it. She was out of probably, at the time, one of the lesser mares on the place; and the cheapest nomination. It was only because she was so crooked that we ended up never putting her in a sale, so there was no genius behind it.”

“Flirtation’s dam was a non-winner, and the next dam never ran. Flirtation herself only ran once. We only kept her because she was such a good-looking mare. We were trying to buy mares to upgrade the yearlings-and you either couldn’t get into families or you had to compromise on something, looks or performance or pedigree.”

The Duke had decided that since the arrival of the Maktoums in the marketplace, the only way of making financial sense of a stud was to operate at a higher level. His father had started it up in 1948.

“He was an old-fashioned owner-breeder,” the Duke recalls. “Didn’t spend a fortune on nominations, and used to race everything; Dick Peacock in Middleham trained them. He loved a stayer. Sweet Story won the Northumberland Plate twice and the Yorkshire Cup as well. And he owned a horse called Guide, who stood here, a half-brother to Ballymoss. I think my father was underbidder on Ballymoss to Vincent O’Brien.”

He was still only 19 when losing his father in 1974. At the stud dispersal Jocelyn Hambro-who subsequently became his stepfather-bought a No Mercy foal and made him a present of a half-share. The colt won a maiden on the July Course, in his colours, and the young Duke was hooked.

If Attraction was unquestionably the game-changer, then Floors Stud has been no one-pony trick. Comic (Ire) (Be My Chief), homebred out of a Lowther winner and one of several projects shared with the Duke of Devonshire, has produced two elite winners in Viva Pataca (GB) (Marju {Ire}) and Laughing (Ire) (Dansili {GB}); while her 2013 and 2015 sons by Dubawi raised 1,400,000gns and 750,000gns, respectively, at Tattersalls. A venerable old dame of 22, she is still on the farm-alongside her nearly blind daughter Blinking (GB) (Marju {Ire}) and stakes-winning granddaughter Twitch (Ire) (Azamour {Ire}).

So putting Floors on the racing map has been a long, patient process. Putting it on any kind of map is quite an achievement, to be fair. Though the Duke feels that remoteness counts against the region economically, with 50 miles to the nearest dual carriageway, it is also the key to its glory. From the castle, the border country unfurls dreamily across the Tweed to the Cheviot Hills. Kelso’s adjacent jumps track, meanwhile, is a classic of its type: a ritual congregation of a widely dispersed agricultural community, with an open fire in the members’ bar of the little Georgian grandstand.

Acceding to a dukedom as a teenager must have brought burdens as well as benefits. As any breeder of Thoroughbreds could testify, custodianship of a legacy handed down by generations past will always bring its challenges. Just as a new roof for the castle requires a wind farm on the grouse moor, so matings must be planned-however reluctantly-as much with the sales ring in mind as the racetrack. One way or another, then, racing is fortunate that a man so seasoned in balancing responsibilities to past and future recently agreed to become chairman of the National Stud.

“I think we’ve really exciting times ahead,” the Duke enthuses. “The National Stud came back into Jockey Club ownership eight years ago, when the brief was to stem heavy losses and get into cash positive. Ben Sangster as chairman and Brian O’Rourke as stud manager did a great job in stabilising the ship.”

“I think the u.s.p. is the training and education progamme we do. Besides the main, six-month diploma course, we’ve now joined up with the TBA in a progamme for older students. We have a terrific responsibility to the industry but in order to do all that we need the building blocks. Boarding and spelling are crucial now, because over the last 10 to 15 years the big stallion studs have stopped boarding mares. And we have also identified the need to get into the stallion market. We have been standing stallions on behalf of other people, but this season we’ve been lucky enough to get Aclaim (Ire) (Acclamation {GB}) and to buy Time Test (GB) (Dubawi {Ire}).

“We have also realised the need to invest in the infrastructure of the stud. For obvious reasons, cashflow as much as anything else, it needed a facelift. The stewards have very kindly agreed to support that, and we’re going to be spending a considerable sum over the next three years to upgrade the facilities. Not to compete with the likes of Darley and Juddmonte, you can’t do that. But just to make the place something the Jockey Club and the industry can be proud of. We’ve a terrific new stud manager, in Tim Lane, and there is a buzz about the place.”

The Duke reports that 38 breeding rights have been sold in Time Test, who will also shuttle to Little Avondale Stud in New Zealand. So he has his chance.

Attraction, of course, showed how unpredictable breeding can be; yet her son, conversely, could be about to make it all look a simple case of breeding the best to the best. She is returning to Frankel this spring, needless to say, so is away in Newmarket. (All the mares, in fact, once absorbing the benefits of the Scottish winter, are sent away to foal near their next covers.) As she left, the Duke and stud manager Aonghus Ryan-who previously worked under Peter Reynolds at Ballymacoll-doubtless whispered instructions in her ear to conceive a filly this time.

For her defining attribute, both as a runner and now as a broodmare, is something far more elusive than perfect conformation. If anything, her notorious running apparatus ultimately served only as a clue to what lay within.

“Mark said the reason she was so successful was heart,” the Duke says. “Determination, guts, grit. That’s very symptomatic of the way his horses run, of course; and it’s what saw her through all her conformation issues. Mark says she must have felt it. I’m not saying she hurt every race, but she can’t have had that conformation, and that action, without something getting in her brain.”

“But she had this will, that she wasn’t going to be beaten; and I think that has followed through into her children. It was so exciting to see Elarqam last year. And the great thing is that Sheikh Hamdan and Mark said straightaway that he’d be put away for the Guineas. So we have had from Sept. 28 to dream about what might happen. It’s been a free hit. But at 3.35 pm on Saturday we’re going to find out.”

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