WHEN Mick Murphy and his wife Sarah O’Connell decided to make a big move and up sticks from their previous yard near Dundrum, Co Tipperary to their current base in Ardmore, Co Waterford, it was a significant investment into their future.

Ardo Farm is a purpose-built facility for their breeze-up and pre-training operation and likely cost a pretty penny to develop, but was deemed decidedly worthwhile for an outfit fully committed to progressing at their chosen disciplines, and the evidence in the sales rings very much suggests they are on the right trajectory.

Forty stables, a three-furlong sand gallop, a four-and-a-half-furlong woodchip gallop and access to no less than seven beaches within three kilometres of the yard has given the operation an enviable advantage, not to mention the fact that there can’t be many more beautiful settings in Ireland to work with horses than the peaceful surrounds of Ardmore, based on the Waterford coast line, a poster area for the sunny south east.

Ardo Farm, the base of breeze-up consignor and pre-trainers Mick Murphy and Sarah O'Connell, in Ardmore, Co Waterford

It’s all a change for the better but one thing that hasn’t changed is the name Longways Stables, which remains the banner which Murphy’s team sell under at the breeze-up sales.

In a sector where reputation is everything, Murphy decided that having built up that name for so long, he couldn’t just let it go. The breeze-up sale sector has progressed significantly over the last decade and Longways has gone with that tide, with the sale of Royal Ascot scorer Le Brivido a catalyst for their more recent progress.

“It’s the results on the track that count,” Murphy asserts this week, in the middle of a rare let-down period for the yard. “Getting a good sale is important but it’s far more important that the horse you sell goes on and does something, especially if you want to stay in this game long-term. Le Brivido was a horse we had and he won the Jersey Stakes in 2017.

“Once you sell a Royal Ascot winner, it definitely highlights your profile that bit more. You’d feel more confidence at the sales.

“Now you have guys like Norman Williamson and John Bourke selling on classic winners this season, and that is obviously an ultimate goal for everyone in the game and a sign of where the sector is at now, but for sure, Royal Ascot is still a big feather in the cap of breeze-up consignors.”

Short-head

Le Brivido was a short-head away from a classic when just touched off by Brametot in the Poule d’Essai des Poulains. He is by Siyouni, who has been a lucky stallion for Longways. A year after Le Brivido’s excellent classic campaign, Murphy sent a filly by the same sire to the Goffs UK Breeze-up Sale and she smashed the record at the sale at £450,000.

Mick and Sarah with Le Brivido, after the colt stormed to victory in the Jersey Stakes at Royal Ascot \ Healy Racing

This year, it was another Siyouni colt who proved the highlight of the Longways graduates, selling for €520,000 at Arqana. That was the highlight of what seems a very solid performance from the Longways draft at all the major breeze-up sales. However it is often misleading to directly correlate big numbers at sales to success, on an individual and overall scale, and while the general outlook for the breeze-up sector is overwhelmingly positive, Murphy says it was more difficult than it looked to sell horses this year.

“Overall, we were happy,” he reflects. “But with the breeze-up horses getting great results on the track, I just thought that didn’t follow through to the sales as much as we thought it would. Look, there are a lot of things going on in the world at the moment and maybe that is the reason, but some horses did not sell so well.

“There just didn’t seem to be the depth of buyers we thought there was going to be. The top horses had plenty of people on them but towards the middle, it was less than that. It just seemed a bit more select.

“But we were happy and now is the time you just want to see your horses go on and represent you well. We have a few in line for Ascot. Harry Time was a horse we sold to Michael O’Callaghan and he goes for the Coventry. There’s a Zoustar filly that Karl Burke is aiming for the Windsor Castle and there is a Kingman horse, Omniking, who we are told goes very well and is in line for Ascot as well.”

Chance

Murphy never planned on becoming a breeze-up consignor and, truthfully, his progress into one of the leading consignors in the sector owes something to chance.

He was a self-described journeyman jockey who, despite limited success, went to work with a smile on his face, and that continued in to his next position, assistant trainer to Edward O’Grady.

“Edward was a great man to work for,” he recalls. “I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and I’d still talk to Edward and I’d always be trying to pick his brain, he’s a very clever man.

“I set up a breaking and pre-training yard and dabbled away with a few point-to-pointers and a few horses on the track but that was only a hobby, really. The main business was the pre-training. Michael English, an owner of mine, contacted me to ask me would I take a couple of yearlings that he couldn’t sell and breeze them.

“So that’s how it started. I used to do a few National Hunt breeze-up horses as well, when those sales were on at Cheltenham, Newbury and Goffs. But basically, when I started off I was just doing the breeze-up horses for other people, and it kind of evolved from there. We still pre-train a good few for Henry de Bromhead, and we’ll be busy after the store sales coming up, but the breeze-up is a large part of the business now.”

Mick Murphy congratulates Oliver St Lawrence who purchased his Siyouni colt for €520,000 at the Arqana Breeze-Up Sale \ Zuzanna Lupa

With that, Murphy has a unique position of experiencing first-hand the sector’s enormous influence as a vector of the sales industry.

“When I first got into breezing, we were like second-hand car dealers,” he reflects. “We were left with what the trainers didn’t want. Now I think it’s gone the other way where there are five or six breeze-up operators who are exceptionally strong.

“A lot of the new trainers, the likes of Michael O’Callaghan and David Loughnane, have favoured the breeze-up sales. The older-fashioned trainers still like to buy yearlings and have them all the way through but the younger brigade are definitely finding the breeze-up market good business. We take a lot of the risk out of it for them.

“I suppose the type of breezer that sells well has changed over the last few years as well. You can buy six-furlong, seven-furlong, mile type horses now. It’s not just all on the speed. Of course at the sales, the horses that clock well are inclined to sell the best but over the last number of years you can have a broader number of horses to look at.

“There was a time when your breeze-up horses were solely about sharp two-year-olds but of late now that definitely has changed and it gives us the option to buy staying horses and that’s very positive.”

Like in any buy-to-sell sector, success breeds success, and can lead to a multiplier effect. The success of Longways Stables has allowed for a greater quantity of more expensive yearlings, which in turn spreads out the risk.

“For us, that is definitely the case,” Murphy says. “We had 28 breezers this year, 25 were fully our own or in partnership, with the three others belonging to clients. It is a numbers game. You can have one or two expensive yearlings and get lucky but that wouldn’t be sustainable.

“I have found in the last few years that the more expensive horses are the ones that work for us. I’m happy to target them, I’m not sure if Sarah is as happy, she gives out to me regularly for spending big money! But we’ve just found they work for us.

“We have a few guys there who buy into a few horses that we come back with and we’re open to that as well, we’ll always take a phone call.”

High risk, reward

For all that you can spread your risk, Murphy agrees that operating as a breeze-up consignor remains a high-risk, high-reward practice and requires a certain perspective and fortitude to deal with, in direct contrast to pre-training and breaking horses. For the last four months of the breeze-up season, the preparation is intense, with long hours, not least when the sales come along, a six-week moving circus that can make or break your year.

“It’s all action but it’s exciting,” Murphy says. “From around Valentine’s Day we step up horses a little bit and you always look forward to that period, where you can find out the nice ones. There is always a sleeper in there as well, one that you didn’t expect. During the winter they’re just horses but then when you start to step things up, they come out from under the bushes.

“Sarah plays a huge role. She worked for Coolmore and Rathbarry for years and she is a vet nurse. When I’m away at the sales, I could be gone for a long time and might fly back in one morning and be gone again in the evening, so she is there to oversee everything and that’s crucial.

“We’ve a really good team at home and we have our own breeze-up rider, Tim Clarke, who used to be an apprentice to Sir Mark Prescott. He has been with us for two seasons now and I think it’s very important to have a rider who is familiar with the horses. Not everyone has that available to them so we’re lucky to have Tim.

“He has gone back over to Newmarket for the rest of the summer now but he’s keen to get into the breeze-up game himself and he’s going to come to all the sales with me later this year.”

The ever evolving sector broke new ground this year with the first ever breeze-up sale in Dubai. Organised by Goffs, the sale featured 52 two-year-olds sold at an average price of €152,000 and was largely praised, with vendors describing the format and nature of the breezes as refreshing and positive, with less pressure to impress on the clock given the horses were unlikely to see the track until this autumn.

“I thought it was a very good idea,” says Murphy, who sold three horses at the sale. “It was very well done and we were very well looked after. We didn’t make any money at the sale but we were probably guilty of having the wrong type of horses there. They definitely had a preference for the dirt/American-bred horses.

“We had a Siyouni colt and a Cracksman colt and maybe they weren’t the right horses for that sale. We’ll definitely go back next year with American-bred horses. It was a learning curve for us and for Goffs, but I thought it was a good idea. It was different from the breeze-up sales where you have to have horses very well-prepped, but you could go to Dubai with more of a back-end type.

“They didn’t want them to breeze, they just wanted to see their action. A half speed was plenty fast enough. I think it’s definitely a sale that will continue to build.”

Integral

Indeed, like lots of breeze-up consignors, Murphy sees the shift of focus away from pure speed as an integral function of why the breeze-up sales are producing more quality horses. With that he is vehemently against any move to introduce official times.

“I think official times would undo all the good work that the breeze-up consignors have been doing in the last 10 years, to change the overall product to make it a bigger variety of horses,” Murphy asserts. “We don’t need to move the focus back on to pure speed. Times are important to people but not everyone. Different people have different ways of getting an edge at the sales and you negate that when you bring in official times, which will in turn make the market less competitive.”

Competition is key and Longways looks set to be one of the leading players in the breeze-up game for some time. Now is a short time to recharge before an influx of store horses enter the premises after the upcoming Land Rover and Derby Sales. Then it’s time to restock for the breeze-up class of 2023.

All action at Ardo Farm, but that is what it was built for.