During the boom years of the 1980s, the massed oil wealth of the princes of Dubai and Saudi Arabia were pitted against British millionaire Robert Sangster in a battle for control of one of the world’s rarest, most precious and most unpredictable commodities: top-pedigree thoroughbread racehorses.From the Jockey Club to Kentucky, from Royal Ascot to Belmont Park, high society and new money celebrated a horsebreeders’ bonanza as hundreds of millions of dollars were waged in the ultimate racing gamble. Horsetrader is the thrilling, compulsive story of the rise and spectacular crash of the Sport of Kings.Robert Sangster was the man responsible for the boom. together with Irishmen Vincent O’Brien, the world’s finest trainer, and stallion master John Magnier, Sangster undertook the revolutionary policy of buying ‘baby’ stallions – the world’s most expensive yearlings. And the man who could win at this game, they decided, was the man who bought them all. they sent prices through the roof in bidding wars fought with breathtaking daring. Top stallions became worth three times their weight in gold – the breeding rights to them became a licence to print money.This book traces the gripping story of how Sangster and his little band of Irish horsemen ransacked the world’s most prestigious bloodstock auction, the Keeneland Sales in Kentucky. It witnesses too the terrible crash – the bankruptcies and the ruined thoroughbred farms. Written with the full co-operation of Sangster himself, Horsetrader is the inside track on an awesome bid to corner the thoroughbred market.
Оглавление
Nick Robinson. Horse Trader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings
Copyright
Dedication
Authors’ note
Contents
Prologue: The Historic Blackballing of Lord Soames
1. Chalk Stream
2. A Glimpse of the Green
3. Facing the Almighty Dollar
4. The Raiders from Tipperary
5. Empires of Kentucky
6. The Minstrel’s Battle-song
7. Bonanza in the Bluegrass
8. The Soft Steps of the Bedouin
9 ‘Would You Sell Him for $30 Million?’
10. Three Derbys
11. Tipperary v. Arabia
12. The $40 Million Short-head
13. Summit in the Desert
14. The Crash of ’86
15. The Harder They Fall
16. Running Out of Cash
LOMOND
CAERLEON
SADLER’S WELLS
WOODMAN
LAST TYCOON
17. The Magic Touch of the Irish
Epilogue
Index
About the Publisher
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To Joe Thomas and Northern Dancer.
They are both gone now, but they left behind an
.....
‘I am proposing’, he said, ‘that we go back to what happened forty-three years ago. At that time there was a general reluctance among people who were put up for the Jockey Club, not at all sure whether they would get elected or not. I myself missed the blackballing system – they never had an opportunity to get me – which is perhaps the only reason why I’m here at all! But in 1924 they passed a resolution making membership the province of a Membership Committee. The late Lord Derby was made chairman, as I remember. A few of us were elected under that system and then, suddenly, they went back to the old method of blackballing … Can’t remember why.
‘Personally I dislike blackballing. I always have. Doesn’t give a man a fair chance. I have never blackballed anyone in my life. For anything. Also I think this system leaves a possibility of one of us making an error. I mean, you might be talking to someone, and put the damn thing in, and it goes into the wrong ‘NO’ or the wrong ‘YES’. There is the possibility for error. I don’t like it.’
