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Even before it became clear that Queen Elizabeth had her best chance in decades of winning today’s Derby at Epsom, 2011 was shaping up to be a landmark year for UK flat racing.
This was chiefly because of a breathtaking display by Frankel, a powerful bay colt with four white socks, in the first Classic of the season, the 2,000 Guineas, contested over Newmarket’s Rowley Mile.
The prince, whose main non-racing company, Mawarid Holding, operates in fields such as financial services, media and distribution, describes the performance as “one of my most exhilarating moments in racing”.
“Frankel is the best for many generations,” says Lord Teddy Grimthorpe, Prince Khalid’s racing manager, speaking from the UK base of Juddmonte Farms, the prince’s breeding operation that is tucked away along leafy lanes outside Newmarket in Suffolk. “He still has more to prove … but his performance in the 2,000 Guineas, however you look at it, was very, very rare.”
Frankel, a son of 2001 Derby-winner Galileo whose next racecourse appearance is likely to be at Royal Ascot later this month, is typical of Juddmonte – like Workforce, the female side of his pedigree is dominated by the operation’s own horses. In Frankel’s case, his dam, grand-dam and great-grand-dam are all Juddmonte brood mares.
Prince Khalid began assembling this brood-mare collection in the early 1980s at about the time Juddmonte itself was established.
A quarter of a century later, and Lord Grimthorpe maintains the prince has built “one of the greatest brood-mare bands in the history of breeding”.
“It’s youth development,” he says. “Now Prince Khalid is racing fourth- or fifth-generation Juddmonte-breds, sometimes on both sides of the pedigree ... The development of brood-mare families has been an absolute trademark of his.”
A considerable spin-off benefit of this approach is that, these days, Juddmonte is able to sell substantially more bloodstock than it buys. According to Lord Grimthorpe, last year the operation – which now extends to 700-800 animals across 10 farms in the US, the UK and Ireland – bought just two yearlings while selling more than 100 horses.
Despite all this, Lord Grimthorpe says Juddmonte is “not run as a commercial operation”.
While it could make a consistent profit “if you sold stock more aggressively, more quickly at various stages of its life”, he acknowledges that, in most years, the prince ends up putting money into the business rather than taking it out. He describes the scale of the operation as “the equivalent of a medium-sized company”, with about 250 employees worldwide.
A considerable chunk of Juddmonte’s income is derived from the efforts of the operation’s 10 stallions, particularly Oasis Dream, whose nomination fee is £85,000 ($140,000) per mare in foal, and Dansili (£65,000).
With these star performers capable of covering 120-130 mares a year, their annual earning potential runs into millions, although Lord Grimthorpe cautions that not many stallions can generate more than £5m a year.
He estimates the range of covering fees for “young, unproven stallions” at between £5,000 and £25,000, while acknowledging that “if you get it right at the top end, it is a good business”.
The racing manager describes bloodstock as “the futures market of futures markets”, on the basis that at least five years is needed before a stallion’s first crop of three-year-olds has performed on the racecourse, enabling a judgment to be made on whether that stallion has the right stuff.
“You can look at statistics all you want, but only 3 per cent of stallions are absolutely top dollar,” he says, adding that the same rule of thumb applies to racehorses.
Just as Prince Khalid’s horses are scattered around 10 separate farms, so his racing stock of about 250 is divided among 13 trainers.
“I think it gives tremendous diversification to the operation,” Lord Grimthorpe says. “If you have all your eggs in one basket, then if one trainer is having a bad year, your whole operation has a bad year. That has huge implications for your breeding stock.
“Prince Khalid’s whole operation lives or dies on how his racing stock does, because in most cases he will own the stallion and the mare.”
This umbilical link between breeding and racing means that a big race win is likely to benefit an organisation as vertically integrated as Juddmonte at a number of different levels. Not only is there the prize money to take into account, but the quality of the performance should also quickly be reflected in the value of the racehorse itself, as well as the stallions and mares in its pedigree.
This may help explain why a horse such as Workforce, which last year became only the sixth in history to win both the Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, has been kept in training. “He has the pedigree to suggest he would be better as a four-year-old,” Lord Grimthorpe says. If he is, European race-goers have further treats in store.
