Buying Group 1 winners

HUBERT GUY has had a long career in the bloodstock business.

He moved to California in the early 1980s for a few months’ work experience and stayed for 35 years.

He started working as a bloodstock agent when advised by a lawyer that doing some international business was a good way to get a valid visa while he was waiting for a green card. Over the years he worked with some of the leading California-based trainers and bought numerous Grade 1 winners from France to the US.

He is now based in Lexington, Kentucky but over the last few months has had an outstanding run in France having bought, and for a time part-owned, two of the best three-year-olds of their generation – the Group 1-winners Zellie and the Frankel colt Onesto, last month’s impressive winner of the Grand Prix de Paris.

“I had bought a horse for Elizabeth Fabre before which had worked out well,” Guy recalls when recounting the story of Zellie. “When I said I was looking to buy a foal by Wootton Bassett at the sales in 2019 she and her daughter Lavinia were keen to be partners.

“We bought Zellie for €140,000 from the Haras de Grandcamp in Deauville. She had the pedigree – her dam is a half-sister to the 1,000 Guineas winner Speciosa and her second dam a half-sister to the top racemare Pride. She was a little small, but what I loved was her walk and her way of moving.

“We took her back to the yearling sale in 2020, which was moved to September because of covid, and there was no interest in her at all, no vets, and when she went through the ring, no bids.

“She was still a little small, still walked beautifully so she went into training with André Fabre. When he first worked her Fabre said he was pleased.

“She made her debut at the end of May and won by a head at Saint-Cloud in the colours of Lavinia Fabre beating a well-regarded filly of Jean-Claude Rouget’s. She won her next start three weeks later after being blocked in the race and coming from an impossible position. It was then that I said to Lavinia that we had perhaps found a top filly. A month later she won a Listed in Deauville by 3l and we sold her after the race.

“I knew Fabre was keen to take her to run in England, but in the end she went to ParisLongchamp for the Group 1 Prix Marcel Boussac on Arc weekend and won comfortably. We had sold her very well indeed, but still it was a thrill. It is incredibly difficult to win these championship races and we don’t always appreciate just how unlikely it is when you buy a horse that it ends up winning one of these top races.”

Guy is no longer involved with Zellie although he has, of course, followed her career carefully.

“She ran a great race to be fourth in the 1,000 Guineas and then ran flat in the Prix de Diane. I don’t know why, but I think these top racehorses are like the most finely tuned Formula 1 racing cars. They are fabulous machines but fragile and once you go into the red, more often than not, you never get back to where you were before.

One of the main constituents of Guy’s business today is buying yearlings in the US to sell at the Ocala two-year-old in training sales.

He was at the 2021 Ocala sale when he saw a colt by Frankel put up one of the best times of the 900 horses in the sale.

“I called Jean Etienne Dubois and told him I had seen a Frankel colt put up a sensational breeze despite the fact that he has the pedigree of a 1m4f horse,” he recalls. “Onesto is out of a Sea The Stars mare from the family of Dansili – his second dam is a full-sister to Hasili, the dam of Dansili and the Group 1 winners Champs Elysees, Cacique, Bank’s Hill and Intercontinental.

“I was not, of course, the only one who had noticed and we had to go to $535,000 to buy him and he went into training for a partnership with Fabrice Chappet.”

ONESTO WON ON HIS DEBUT at Chantilly last September looking like a future top horse. He disappointed on his seasonal reappearance, but then won the Group 2 Prix Greffulhe to set up a run in the Prix du Jockey-Club (G1) in which he finished fifth, beaten only a length behind runner-up El Bodegon.

“It was obviously disappointing to finish fifth when we were so close to being second!” says Guy. “I think he could have been ridden closer to the early pace, but then at the first draw we were thrilled to be in stall nine, and when it was redone we ended up drawn wide in 14!

Onesto proved that he had not shown his true form in the Jockey-Club with a decisive win some six weeks later in the Group 1 Grand Prix de Paris.

“It was a wonderful victory,” smiles Guy. “He won without being touched by the whip and is a very, very good horse. His trainer Fabrice Chappet has done a great job.

“I was not that surprised as we always thought he was a Group 1 horse, but between thinking that and achieving it is a difficult step to take and he has done it now.

“I was surprised by the second horse Simca Mille, who seems to improve 3l or 4l with every start and who pushed Onesto right to the line, while we easily beat the foreign-trained runners whom I had feared.

“Now he will run in either the Prix Niel or the Irish Champion and then on to the Arc. I am really proud, just once in a while I can find a really good one, the Group 1 horse that we are all looking for!”

Guy adds: “Onesto is probably the best horse I have ever bought, and he is the 28th Group or Grade 1 winner I have been involved with.

“He has that turn of foot which I saw at Ocala, that day he went fast, and now he has learnt to relax and use his speed at the end of his races.

“His sire Frankel is also something exceptional and probably the best stallion in the world today. Onesto is his seventh Group 1-winning three-year-old and he gets 1m4f horses with that extra kick and natural speed.

“We shall find out how good Onesto is over the coming weeks and months, and the plan is, of course, to maximise his value as a stallion.”

Guy adds that he bought one two-year-old this year in Ocala to race in Europe.

“I bought a Medaglia D’Oro filly out of the top race mare Day At The Spa for $150,000, one bid over the reserve. She is currently in pre-training with Jean Pierre Dubois and for time being he is happy with her.”

Early starts

GUY’S FAMILY had nothing whatsoever to do with horses or racing, but an early passion for riding and then racing led him to start riding out in Chantilly and then ride as an amateur jockey mainly in jump races.

“There was a time when I would get up at four in the morning and bicycle to the Gare du Nord to catch the train to Chantilly to ride out,” he remembers. “When you are young and passionate you are able to do things like that.”

Those he got to know at the time included Pascal Bary and Patrick Barbe and it was Barbe who got him a job with Charlie Whittingham in California.

“I left thinking I would stay for a few months but in the end I stayed and have never left the US,” he smiles. “I had thought I wanted to become a trainer, but started off looking for horses in France who could race on in California and that has never really stopped.”

He enjoyed a remarkable partnership with the Peruvian-born trainer Julio Canani, for whom he bought 15 Grade 1 winners, including Silic and Tuzla, first and second in the Breeders’ Cup Mile in 1999, and Val Royal, who won the same race in 2001 despite having missed almost a year with a tendon injury in 2000.

Californian racing is now no longer quite the same thing that it was 20 or 30 years ago.

“There was,” Guy says, “a whole generation of Californian owners who disappeared at around the turn of the century – John Mabee, Allen Paulson and many others – and we never succeeded in replacing them.

“There was also a group of outstanding trainers in California, such as Bobby Frankel, Ron McAnally, Julio Canani, Charlie Whittingham, John Gosden, and there were never replaced either.

“These days social media is so important, and people don’t want be involved with something which can be seen in a negatively. Also my impression is that some of these Californian people who could get involved just don’t like losing – you don’t stay long in racing if you don’t learn how to lose.”

He still buys some horses in training to race in the US, but it has become a very strong market.

“At the end of the day there are not that many horses who fit the bill; few of these are on the market and those who are have become very expensive.

“When you see the prices fetched at auction recently by horses such as Speak Of The Devil, Rougir or Txope you can understand if people want to put their horses through a sales ring rather than doing private sales.”

He had always looked at yearlings, even if he didn’t buy many, but from 2005 onwards Guy starting looking seriously at the American sales, as well as those in France and sometimes in England and Ireland, with a view to pinhooking for the Ocala two-yearold sales.

He sees around 3,000 or so yearlings every year.

A breakthrough came in 2011 when he bought a First Samurai filly for $23,000 at Keeneland September.

“I had seen her at the farm, she was bred by Bill Betz who is one of the best in Kentucky, and always loved her, but her sire was not in fashion so I was able to get her for so little.

“She made $650,000 at Ocala, went to Bob Baffert, was named Executiveprivilege she won two Grade 1s and finished second to Beholder in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.

“In today’s market she would have made double that, I had 15 vets and when she went round the walking ring outside she made all of the others look like low quality claimers.”

THIS YEAR has been excellent for Guy – he and his partners bought 13 yearlings in 2021 and sold ten as two-year-olds for an excellent profit.

“Ocala is,” he says, “a huge and open market. There is demand at every level and if you have the right horse you can make a lot of money.”

At the same time Guy buys some yearlings in France to go into training.

“Over the years, I have bought some with Fabrice Chappet and we have been lucky together, and if he works with other people too, we still buy a few together.

“I have also bought some for Vivaldi, one of the most successful French partnerships, and they have horses with Rouget and Stefan Wattel in Deauville, and then thanks to Zellie I have also an involvement in some with Fabre as well.”

Guy moved to Lexington in 2015, mainly because he was fed up with taking the flight from Los Angeles to Paris ten times or more every year.

“It is,” he says, “easier from Lexington and then from here I can get to all of the major East Coast tracks in less than two hours in a plane.”

He spends around two to three months a year in France.

“You have to keep looking at the horses,” he says. “If you see them regularly but not every day you notice how they are changing.

“After 40 years I am still trying to make better choices, to apply what I have learnt over the years, and hoping to get lucky. If you want to have success you have to think outside of the box otherwise your chances will be even slimmer.”