Sunday 22 July 2012

Recap : 2011-12 Winter

When my friend and consultant Kripanarayanan called me around half four on 19th of December 2011, my heart raced as I took the call while on our way to Jaipur. Very matter of factly he said 'yeah, he's won but just by a length or so' and hung up. It was more of a relief that Plenipotent won his first race, a maiden million than to evoke a fist punching celebration. This was also when my wife and me were on our small holiday after our wedding. it was such a lovely gift! It happened to be our first 'million' winner and once I sat down to watch the race replay in the evening, it gave me enough reason to celebrate after seeing the manner of his win. He was green and drifting in the straight but once the joc gathered him, he took the race in a matter of strides. A few weeks before this race, we had a similar reaction to Montpelier's first outing win in a maiden. At Mebajeona we sure knew that we had sent out a few exciting horses to run this winter but how good they actually would prove was to be seen on the turf. It was very exciting but at the same time we I was wracked with nervousness as this was our first big crop (big by our standard of 12 two year olds) with a few got abroads as well as the first crop of our highly regarded but deceased stallion, Home Affairs. Thus, the pressure was on us to deliver or it would be another case of 'small farm, question mark on various aspects of farm management...' etc and a whole lot of people would have just said 'I told you so' or put it down to blink luck. Anyway, it did work out for us and boy, how. Plenipotent and Montpelier met in the Darley Arabian Stakes, Gr3. Plenipotent won the race but Montpelier ran a nice third despite drifting in the straight. This was our first Group race in a fairly long time. Next up, Plenipotent again won a Gr3 million in taking style by almost 5 lengths. The form of the race showed up when the runner up went on to win a Gr3 in his subsequent start. In the meantime VIjay's Pride made a smashing debut to lift a maiden Million on the Derby day at Hyderabad. She just cruised to land the race as she liked and showed good promise. Montpelier who had been improving with each run then ran out a decisive winner of the Godolphin Barb Million,Gr3 thus giving us a third Group race this season. In all we had three Gr3 wins and five million races (incl the Group 3 wins). All from just four horses to run for us in Hyderabad. They were amongst the first horses bought by trainers LVR Deshmukh and Leo D'Silva and we were delighted that they did well for everybody. In the meantime, the progeny of Home Affairs started firing in Bombay. After showing promise in a maiden on the Indian Derby day, Capital Attraction ran out a fine winner of a 7 furlong showing guts to fight out the finish. Home Factor, our first winner by Home Affairs won his second start in good style under Richard Hughes.he followed that up by a nice effort in finishing second to the highly rated Deja Vu. He is another with promise for the next season. Rodeo, a half brother to the smart Radical Attraction won his third start in fine style going start to finish in a 9 furlong to win as he liked. He likes ground and will be an interesting prospect in the future. Both Capital Attraction and Rodeo a trained by Sanjay Kolse while Home Factor is trained by Ivor Fernandez. In all, we had three winners from four starters by Home Affairs in Bombay. Hopefully some of these would be classic contenders in the monsoon season. Vijays Pride did us proud by winning the Fillies Championship,Gr1 in Bangalore. We'll relive that in the next blog. We would like to pay a rich Mr Pratap Chander Reddy who was the first amongst the seasoned owners to buy from our farm. We are so happy that we could provide him with his first ever Gr1 winner in Bangalore.  We'd love to hear your thoughts on the season too! Comment here or join us on Twitter or Facebook and share them. 

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