Armstrong In Sprinting Game For The Long Run

[Wandering Eyes]

He’d had enough of this hot, noisy bar; enough of his pals’ drinking and staring at ladies dressed up for the races. They had marched straight in, on arrival, and hadn’t left. Now David Armstrong wanted some air, and at least to see a horse. He’d never previously set foot on a racecourse, after all–even though they only lived a couple of miles from Haydock in those days.

His father-in-law did the bore-hole there, and the head groundsman had produced some passes for a Friday evening meeting. Armstrong hadn’t felt the slightest enthusiasm, when his brother-in-law Neil called. Give it to someone else, he said. But Neil pressed him. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll pick David Parsons up on the way, we’ll all go.” Actually it was Parsons who drove, not being a drinker. So here they were. But where were the horses?

Armstrong found his way outside, wandered towards the parade ring. A miniature stand, just three or four wooden tiers; two or three steps up; and his life changed forever.

“I looked down at the horses being splashed down after the race,” he recalls now. “The buckets of water, the steam. And the hairs come up on the back of my neck. And that was it. I didn’t leave there until we were going home. I was proper smitten. Nothing to do with gambling, nothing to do with boozing, nothing to do with women, nothing to do with Haydock. Just those horses. Those athletes that had excelled themselves, that had come back in hot and steaming. Just the animal.”

True moments of epiphany tend to be confined to fiction. In most of our lives, some seed of intrigue only gradually blossoms into obsession. But there has been nothing commonplace about the trajectory of this life. Armstrong started out, 30-odd years ago, begging and borrowing the deposit on two rusting old trucks to haul sand and stone. Now he sits at his desk in one of his quarries outside Bolton, a fleet of 70 tipper lorries and a dozen concrete mixer trucks outside; a fortune made, reinvested, augmented. Waste and recycling, for a long time, but the mainstay nowadays is five quarries: cut stone, aggregate, and ready mixed concrete. One quarry, at Chorley in Lancashire, has even ended a worldwide search for the right material to complete Gaudi’s Basilica de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Sure enough, a second dizzy ascent began when Armstrong returned from Haydock that June evening in 2003. Until that point, racing pigeons had been his game. But he got home to his wife Emma, and announced that they would be auctioning their birds after the season ended that September. Now they have 27 broodmares, and head to Royal Ascot next week with another home-bred sprinting star in Mabs Cross (GB) (Dutch Art {GB}), who won the G3 Palace House S. at the Guineas meeting and was beaten under a length when rattling home in the G2 Temple S. last month. At Haydock, of course. This time, he sponsored the entire card.

Mabs Cross is a daughter of the first horse he bought at auction, and also his first winner: Miss Meggy (GB) (Pivotal {GB}), purchased for £20,000 by Tim Easterby at the Doncaster breeze-ups in 2004, four months after Armstrong scattered his pigeons in a three-day sale at Birmingham. This cherished mare condenses her owner’s achievements from a standing start. For she not only won her debut at Thirsk, and promptly followed up in a stakes race, but in time became dam of Armstrong’s 100th winner.

“I was brand new to the industry, completely,” he stresses. “An annual bet on the Grand National, that was it. And I’m not a gambler, never have been. So there was nothing I thought I knew. Once I put my foot over the threshold, it was a massive learning curve that first three or four years: everything, the good, the bad, as much as I could take in, day and night pestering people.”

On one level, it can be an advantage to come fresh into a world of unquestioned norms. Especially if the questions you ask are founded not just in commercial experience, but in a lifelong affinity with animals. Armstrong was raised on a three-acre smallholding with ponies and donkeys, hens and geese, and developed a corresponding interest in breeding. Not just pigeons, but cattle and other livestock. In his new passion, equally, it is breeding that has driven the expansion of his stable.

“You go to the races, it’s over in a minute,” he says. “Breeding is continuous, the rearing and the planning. It was the same with the pigeons: the breeding interested me more than the racing. That hybrid vigour–We bought a lot of stock birds from Holland and Belgium. Streets ahead of this country, they were. But with pigeons you’d inbreed very close, a lot closer than with horses, and two or three different lines. And then those lines would be put completely outcross. Don’t get me wrong, you’d still get some that were no good. But you’d breed some very good pigeons. I don’t think there’s any set pattern, really, but it’s all interesting, experimenting.”

“This year, I’ve specifically inbred some of the mares closer than ever. The champion racehorse of 2017 [Enable (GB) (Nathaniel {Ire})] is 2 x 3 [to Sadler’s Wells] and that tells me everything. Until this year I’ve not been closer than 3 x 3, 3 x 4, but now we’ve come back another generation. And we’ll see what the results are.”

As it happens, it was a pigeon racing friend–the same David Parsons who had driven him to Haydock that fateful evening–who first focused Armstrong on his stock-in-trade, the sprinter. Parsons had always loved poring over Thoroughbred pedigrees and was sharing some of that knowledge as they returned from the pigeon dispersal in Birmingham.

“And he’s going on and on, and I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about,” grins Armstrong. “But then he said this to me: ‘You’ve done very well with sprint pigeons, 75 to 200 miles, that’s what you love. You’ve won from France, you’ve won lots of different races, but you love the sprinters. Now in racing all the sheikhs, all the big money men, are focusing on the milers and above. So you’ve more chance of breeding a very good sprinter.’ And he was absolutely spot on. That advice went unappreciated for a good few years–through lack of understanding, not lack of respect. But by God I do appreciate it now.”

It was also Parsons who introduced Armstrong to Easterby’s farrier. And when Easterby took him to see his St Leger winner Bollin Eric (GB) (Shaamit {Ire}) at stud, Armstrong’s eyes really lit up. All those mares and foals! Very soon he started laying the foundations of his own breeding programme.

“Miss Meggy only had half a page,” Armstrong recalls. “The bottom half was pure white paper. She’s made her own pedigree. But she got me hooked quite quickly on Pivotal. So I bought Mayleaf (GB) (Pivotal {GB}) as a yearling at Newmarket. She was not the best of her knees and didn’t get to the racecourse. But she was a bloody flying machine, and built like a tank.”

Sadly Mayleaf died when her first foal was just three months old. Armstrong called the colt Mayson (GB) (Invincible Spirit {Ire}), and in 2012 he won the G1 July Cup by five lengths. Less than 10 years after first setting foot on a racecourse, Armstrong had home-bred a champion sprinter. Moreover he wasn’t even present, having instead gone to York to see the debut of a colt named Garswood (GB) (Dutch Art GB}): the next turn of the wheel. Though beaten that day, a couple of years later Garswood scored a Group 1 success of his own in the Prix Maurice de Gheest.

Today both Mayson and Garswood are standing alongside the venerable Pivotal at Cheveley Park Stud, long a natural port of call for Armstrong in his quest for speed. “I have a lot of time for Cheveley Park,” he confirms. “It’s a proper set-up, with a success-rate with sprinters that’s absolutely second to none. It didn’t take a lot of thinking about. It is a great match, and we’re very grateful to be honest. [Stud co-owner] David Thompson is the most interesting fellow I’ve met in my life, and they treat us so well we almost feel part of the family.”

The stake he did retain in the young stallions required Armstrong to expand his broodmare band; and now he must also cater to a handful of breeding rights in Ribchester (Ire) (Iffraaj {GB}). Bought for €105,000 at the Orby Sale, just a couple of months after Garswood’s big win at Deauville, Ribchester was sold to Godolphin when still a maiden and subsequently won four Group 1 races.

“It was a good deal for me at the time, and it’ll always be a good deal,” Armstrong shrugs. “Often if you don’t sell, something goes wrong; and I’m not one who dwells on things afterwards. With the breeding rights, I’m over the moon about him.”

Birchwood (Ire) (Dark Angel {Ire}) was likewise sold to Godolphin before he won a Group 2, and is now at stud in France. All four stallions who started out for Armstrong did so from the yard of Richard Fahey, but the string is now spread elsewhere.

“I owe Richard so much and of course Robin [O’Ryan, Fahey’s assistant] as well,” Armstrong says. “We had fantastic times but it came to an end and we move on. Obviously we’ve had one or two different trainers since, Michael Dods is our main trainer now and he’s absolutely grand. We just fit perfect together. This is certainly not a criticism towards Richard’s yard but I’ve gone away from big yards. I’m not saying we wouldn’t find ourselves with a horse in one, some day, for whatever reason. But provided they can train the horses, [I prefer] medium to small yards. Not that they’re not ambitious. It’s the managing of the business.”

Armstrong himself, of course, has built his own business giddily from the humblest roots. To have achieved an equivalent elevation in a second walk of life, and so quickly, can hardly be a coincidence. In both cases, he suspects that his own pedigree tells.

“My father was a grafter,” he says. “He was a lorry driver and miner and quarry worker. But he just worked. That was his ethic. And that was what we had to do, day and night. Because there was no great margin in haulage. It’s absolutely just determination–and a bit of luck along the way. But I literally mean day and night. During the daytime you’d be finding work for the lorries; and at night you’d be maintaining the lorries. I’d go to work on Monday morning and wouldn’t go home until Wednesday night. Just making sure those lorries were on the road the morning after.”

Not that he treats the horses exactly as he does business. Yes, a fairly commercial approach is required to make the whole enterprise sustainable; and he is a stickler for maintaining standards, both in the racing string and among the mares. But there is room for sentiment, too.

“When we lost Mayleaf, I made it my business to find her dam Bayleaf (GB) (Efisio {GB}),” Armstrong says. “I found her at Tally Ho, and did a deal to buy her in foal to Bushranger (Ire) (Danetime {Ire}); we foaled the colt, and he won. But all I wanted–though I knew there was a one percent chance of it coming off–was to send her to Pivotal to breed another Mayleaf, if you will.”

“Obviously, one, she needed to get in foal and two, it had to be a filly. Anyway she’s in foal to Pivotal: great. She foals: oh, grand, yes it’s a filly. We put the filly in training, and she had the same problem with her knees. She comes home, where do I send her? Straight to Invincible Spirit, of course. Hope we get a colt. And we do get a colt, January last year, with virtually the same markings as Mayson. Apart from a white leg he’s almost identical.”

Armstrong picks up a piece of paper from his desk; a thickset man, measured and comfortable but with zero hint of the conceit or swagger you see in some self-made men. You can’t help but admire what he has achieved, or to hope for fresh chapters in his remarkable tale.

“For me, we’ve only the thickness of that paper there as the chance of this colt being any good,” he says. “But by God it’s exciting along the way. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s the unknown–that’s what does it. I’ve had many people tell me: ‘You’ll pack it up after a few years. Such-and-such a person, it’s cleared him out; and this person, and that person.’ But you’ve got to stick on, you don’t give up. If you love something… Provided you can afford to do it, can accommodate the number of animals you want, then I’ll never give it up. I go to bed thinking about it, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, I wake up in the morning thinking about it. It’s my passion: the Thoroughbred, and trying to breed another champion.”

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