2006

A TIMESPAN of 18 years on from his last victory in the race, Dermot Weld struck again in the Boylesports Irish 1000 Guineas. Nightime, owned and bred by his mother Marguerite, produced a scintillating display to run out a six-length winner of the fillies’ classic on only the third start of her career.

After making her debut in a seven-furlong Group 3 here in October, Nightime, who comes from the first crop of the Epsom Derby winner Galileo, didn’t run again until landing a maiden at Cork six weeks prior to this, and bridged the gap to classic company with consummate ease.

Last year Pat Smullen looked on from fourth place as his wife, Frances Crowley, sent out Saoire to win the race, but it was his turn last Sunday as he recorded his first victory in an Irish Guineas.

For the Weld family this was a triumph to rank alongside that of Grey Swallow in the Irish Derby in 2004, and afterwards the winning trainer remarked: “I thought Grey Swallow winning the Irish Derby was the most pleasurable day of my training career, but this equals it.

“My mother has six mares and breeds on a small scale, but she has bred two classic winners in the last three years, and that’s what this game is all about.

“She had been working well and I was expecting a very good run. She won well in Cork and I entered her in the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot, which shows you what we thought of her. I wanted to sell her as a yearling but my mother said no, that she was a special filly, and she has been proved right.”

Reflecting on a special performance, Pat Smullen said: “It was an unbelievable display. I thought she would run a big race, but she has surpassed my expectations by winning so easily.”

[Nightime is now dam of five winners, two at the highest level. Her daughter Zhukova, by Fastnet Rock, won the Grade 1 Man O’War Stakes and later sold to Godolphin for 3,700,000gns.

Nightime’s son Ghaiyyath, a son of Dubawi and a €1.1 million foal, won three Group 1 races, including the Juddmonte International and the Coronation Cup, and has just completed his first season at Kildangan Stud]

Derby winner is bred at Dollanstown

1961

AS is frequently the case, most preconceived ideas of the capabilities of the runners were upset in the Derby on Wednesday, which was won easily by a horse, Psidium, bred in Ireland, by a French-bred sire Pardal, out of an Italian-bred mare Dinerella, and who started at 66/1.

Mrs Arpad Plesch, the owner of the horse, is French, and she is the wife of a Hungarian banker. Psidium is trained by Harry Wragg in England and was ridden by the French jockey Roger Poincelet.

This was Wragg’s first Epsom Derby winner, although he won an Irish event with Talgo and has ridden three English Derby winners.

Psidium’s dam was the first mare purchased by Mr and Mrs Arpad Plesch when they bought the Dollanstown Stud, near Kilcock, where the winner was bred.

Madame Suzanne Volterra, attractive millionairess owner of Dicta Drake, runner-up in the Derby, has a very special attitude towards the matter of luck. Her life story has, in some respects, resembled a fairytale.

As a penniless young girl, she fought her way up through the French theatrical world and was a ballerina at the Paris Opera, where she met and married Leon Volterra, multimillionaire owner of a dozen Paris theatres, night clubs and music halls.

Monsieur Volterra’s passion was racing, and when he died unexpectedly in 1949, after only four years of marriage, he left ‘Suzy’ over £13 million and a string of thoroughbred horses, which his will requested her to keep, if possible.

At the time she knew very little about horses, but when the Aga Khan promised to help her, she decided to keep the stable.

Today she owns over 100 thoroughbreds, which provide her principal interest in life.

She studies their different temperaments and idiosyncrasies, talks to them, and even gave up using a favourite perfume because she thought it made them nervous.

In 1955 Madame Volterra became the first Frenchwoman to win the Epsom Derby with Phil Drake, the sire of Dicta Drake.

[Born Suzanne Grimberg, Madame Volterra died just days short of her 94th birthday in 2006. She bequeathed her racing trophies to France-Galop in honour of her late husband]

Leading stallions leave Ireland for England over their tax treatment

1936

A MOST unfortunate circumstance is that income tax on stallions’’ earnings, apart from every other consideration in connection with their place in horse production, necessitated the owners of Blandford, Tolgus, Soldennis and Salamis removing them from studs in Ireland to England.

Blandford was the greatest sire there has been in Britain and Ireland, and was located at Cloghran Stud, Co Dublin. His owners did not willingly remove him from that establishment but, following the decision of the House of Lords in the case submitted by Lord Glanely, Blandford’s owners fared so much better in the matter of assessment to income tax on his earnings, they could adopt no other course.

The House of Lords ruled that a stallion owner racing stock begotten by his stallion is conducting one enterprise and not separated enterprises, and that, accordingly, tax is assessable on the profits of the joint enterprise of breeding and racing. Here in the Free State, tax is assessable on the profits of a stallion’s earnings, although horse breeding is a department of farming.

Foster breeding

The Government desires to foster horse breeding, which properly it considers an important national industry, but its present method of assessment, to tax on stallions’ earnings, handicaps the industry very severely.

Tolgus has sired the winner of the English Oaks. He was not bred in Ireland, but rather in England, and imported to stand here because he introduced a strain of The Tetrarch through a new channel, Stefan The Great.

The crack two-year-old race this week was the £400 Patriotic Plate at Baldoyle. The winner was Mr Joseph McGrath’s Inishbofin, a son of Tolgus. The stallion therefore would be a valuable asset to our horse industry, were he still at Mitchelstown Stud, Athboy.

It is a most unhappy outcome that broodmare owners in Ireland are deprived of opportunities to use him when he has achieved his greatest triumph.