SUMMERHILL'S "USP"

Cheryl and I on Yasawa Island, Fiji
(Photo : Supplied)

“Travel these days takes more than money.
It takes the most precious commodity of the lot: time.”

Cheryl and I have been travelling a lot of late. The Wild Coast (there is only one), Cape Town, Jo’burg, Thanda Game Reserve, Phinda of the same, Melbourne and Yasawa Island in Fiji. Quite a mixture. It’s premature to talk about Fiji, because we’ve only just arrived, but it’s fair to say that it measures up to everything Captains Cook and Bligh had to say about it in the good old days (in Bligh’s case, before the Bounty crew made him walk the plank!).

Being racehorse breeders and hoteliers, you can’t avoid the comparisons between the way we do things and how others go about their businesses. Survival in the modern world depends upon how you distinguish your product from others, and I suspect that whatever Summerhill and Hartford are, it’s because they were built without money. When you have the funds, you simply pay and you get. When you don’t, you have to be creative, you have to be intuitive about what gets a pulse racing. It’s about authenticity, atmosphere and adventure, sounds, scents and scenery, tastes and taboos. Good hotels and good horses always reflect a sense of “place”, their environment, their histories, their traditions and importantly, their people. In the world of travel, a high level of discernment is creeping into every arena. Today, the customer’s interest in artisanal beer and food, for example, is echoed in an interest in artisanal hospitality. Hartford House is dedicated to sating people’s interest in the world’s distinctive places: you quickly lose any sense of being in a unique environment when staying in a typical high-end hotel in London, Paris or Shanghai, Cape Town, Sydney or Dubai.

Increasingly, travellers seek destinations that accommodate lifestyle and weather, bespoken to their surroundings and community. Hotels should reflect their past, and the architecture of their neighbourhood; discerning guests understand the difference between décor and design, and seldom mistake decoration for good design.

Travel these days takes more than money. It takes the most precious commodity of the lot: time. Most people can buy a car, a handbag or a smart pair of shoes, but travel calls for energy, curiosity, a degree of adventure, even bravery. Not long from now, the greatest indulgence will not be a Ferrari; it will be a fortnight in Zululand, or even a living being; let’s not forget, the greatest creature the good Lord ever created, is the racehorse. And you can come by yours with a week at Hartford. An Argentinean polo player on a recent visit to us, tells it like this: “I was waiting for that combination of bliss and despair which makes African journeys so memorable - a melodramatic pose, a “Hendricks” and tonic coursing through my veins, a three day scruff of beard, a whiff of revolution in the air!”.

Our places thrive because of their originality, they survive on account of their old fashioned values. The more technologically focused the world becomes, the less people want to check-in via iPad and have their pillow preferences stored in a computer. Instead, our guests like to arrive and be greeted by their surnames; they soon get to know themselves again by their first names. And if you’ll give us the time to unpack for you, you’ll find your clothes pressed and hanging in the closet. Simple, old-style service is the most pleasant luxury.

Hartford and Summerhill have become beacons of their trades. In a world in which it’s no longer so “cool” to be a waiter or a groom, we remember, every day, what an honour it is to serve.

Enquiries :
Linda Norval +27 (0) 33 263 1081
or email linda@summerhill.co.za
www.summerhill.co.za

IT'S ALL ABOUT UPBRINGING

Autumn on the Summerhill Estate
(Photo : Summerhill Stud)

“On Saturday, we’ll bid another consignment of the farm’s hand-made yearlings farewell.”

You’d be forgiven as you approached Summerhill Stud, for believing that its immediate precincts would be the perfect world of any one with a taste for beauty and an appreciation of tranquillity. A warm vein of cordiality greets you at the gates, and it’s quickly apparent that Summerhill is its own form of freemasonry, with the horse as its icon, where the groom and the boss belong to the same brotherhood, and their material differences seem incidental. Here the horse is not so much a way of life, as a reason for breathing. This is more than good real estate. Rolling hills and deep complex soils over sandstone and basalt, hundreds of great trees and emerald green pastures tell you the country is kind, but not soft. With their stately prime ministerial residences, their rich racing heritage, and the old chapel basking in the lee of Giant’s Castle, Summerhill and Hartford are national treasures.

These farms are deep in horse country, just outside Mooi River, a slow village with a little railway station, left behind after the Anglo-Boer War. There are more churches per capita than anywhere else. Old families and a bit of old money still abound. To get there you drive in over rolling hills, past storied battlegrounds, you glimpse the ramparts of the Giant to the west, and there it is, 3000 acres of some of the best stock raising dirt in the world, cascading lakes and the slightest suggestion of Eden. It doesn’t really need a sales pitch: you learn soon enough what this place is about.

At the same time, it strikes you immediately as the most idyllic place on the planet to live, but this isn’t the owners’ private world. It is a place of business, the centre of operations. The private world is at Umvumvu, high up on the Giant’s road, and adjacent to the Summerhill complex of farms. “Farm” doesn’t quite seem the right noun for this place though. Yes it is a farm, but it also has the air of a Zulu elder’s kraal overlooking the Mooi River and its surrounding valleys, more about aesthetics than bushels to the acre, more a place of peace and beauty than of industry. Places with class have space, the farm doesn’t intrude on the land, and it doesn’t want to use all of it, as is often the way on stud and agistment properties.

One thinks of meadows rather than paddocks, of copses and coverts. In high summer, the meadows are green and sweet, the swards thick: kikuyu, some rye grass, white and strawberry clover interspersed with oats. Creamy butterflies ride the summer winds. Fish eagles cry, that most African of sounds, and barbets cackle away in the ironwood trees. There is always birdsong here. Wild ducks are everywhere, on the dams and the lakes, and the stream is still and pregnant with the rain, until the breeze whips around and sends ripples skimming towards the glowering ramparts of the Drakensberg. Wedged-tailed fish eagles swoop down from there and occasionally snatch a trout in their talons, disturbing a clutch of reed buck. Jackals hunt for duck eggs along the riverbanks. A thrush has sculpted the neatest of nests, like a teardrop done in leaves and a bit of mud, in an acacia in the courtyard.

Mrs Goss would shoot me if she knew I was telling this story. It’s her private world, and Mr Goss always says it became hers when the project went past the budget for the third time. But our readers want to know our personalities, and Umvumvu is like her, languid, understated, private and quietly purposeful. She has never been a demonstrative lady, yet you know she’s hopelessly in love with this place, not for its flashiness, because it’s not that way, but for its ethnic elegance, the way it fits into the natural world. When the Gosses first arrived here, our Zulus had never put one brick on top of another, yet here they’ve crafted a homestead unique in its African style and character, which gazes out onto a World Heritage site. By contrast, the Drakensberg is stark and spectacular, stretching away for 90 kilometres to Sani Pass, and if you stand at the summit of Giant’s Castle, you think of a French nobleman’s chateau presiding over the Somme.

Mrs Goss loves trees, this is her botanical garden, and particularly those that are true to Africa. They’re a second family to her, and she tends to them like she does her cattle, a herd of Ngunis that turn every view through a picture window into a work of art.

Down below, stretching from its verges to the floor of the valleys, is the home of the champion breeders. This is the life’s work of generations of Summerhill families, and we all know what it means to be part of it. On Saturday, we’ll bid another consignment of the farm’s hand-made yearlings farewell. They’ve had the benefit of one of the finest upbringings known to man. Some of them will be departing their birth-place forever; others, we like to think more fortunate, will eventually find their way “home”. Either way, it’s a fair bet they’ll be writing their own piece of Summerhill’s future history.

Enquiries :
Tarryn Liebenberg 27 (0) 83 787 1982
or email tarryn@summerhill.co.za
www.summerhill.co.za

SUMMERHILL STUD : THE JEWEL OF AFRICA

Click above to read article and view photos
in Breeding&Racing’s electronic publication…

Article published in BREEDING&RACING
Issue 103, March/April 2012
Author Gary Knowles

On a recent trip to South Africa, Breeding&Racing editor-in-chief Gary Knowles visited Africa’s leading thoroughbred property, Summerhill, one of the world’s great stud farms.

It would be nice to write about this African equine landmark by employing the standard reporting approach of who, what, when, how and why, but that’s just not possible.

Entering Summerhill - founded in 1879 by the one-time Deputy Prime Minister of the Old Colony of Natal - there is a flooding of emotions, an unsettling sense of ‘sliding doors’, of never having been here, but never having left.

It is the fall of light, shadows on the nearby Drakensburg mountain ranges, the birdsong and the smells; listening to the linguistic clicks of Zulu men as they handle mares and foals combine to shake me from my reverie that 21 years in Australia have rendered me a non-African. I might have affected a lilt and twang to my accent but, like it or not, roots are roots.

And, besides, this journey is a homecoming in more ways than one.

Nearly 30 years ago Summerhill’s principals Mick and Cheryl Goss patiently bore the brunt of a young man’s unbridled enthusiasm about all things thoroughbred, providing encouragement and a seat outside their stables at sales. It was a vantage point from which I enviously ogled their battalions of year-old horses.

The reference to battalions is apt, because KwaZulu-Natal is scattered with the remnants of some astonishing military history, including mighty battles between the British and the Zulus, and then - in the lead-up to apartheid’s fall - when virtual black-on-black civil war ebbed and flowed in the valleys dotted with African villages.

With sufficient means and global connections to have made a handsome life anywhere in the world, the Goss family chose to stay in South Africa.

“Embracing the African National Congress was easy,” reveals Goss of what was then a looming change to black majority rule. “We grew up in their heartland and we knew which way they were going to go; that’s what gave us our faith in the future.”

It appears on the surface to have been a prescient decision. Mick Goss is no Johnny-come-lately white farmer with a patrician attitude. Although trained as a lawyer, he grew up in far-flung trading posts of Transkei’s Wild Coast, running barefoot with little Zulu umfaans as his playmates, one of who, serendipitously, became one of South Africa’s future rulers.

In a country where most whites struggle to get by with a smattering of pidgin English when conversing with black Africans, it is astonishing to listen to Goss chatter away in Zulu as though it were his mother tongue. In many ways it is. It clearly makes an enormous difference that to the vast majority of his staff he is not some outsider, but a fellow African with a deep affection for their culture and the land they all share.

“They are without question the greatest horsemen I have ever seen,” declares Goss of the Zulus. “I don’t know what it is about the relationship they share with horses, but I can tell you I have never seen a horse try to hurt a Zulu, and neither have I ever seen a Zulu mistreat a horse.”

Geography

Situated at Mooi River, just over two hours to the west of Durban on South Africa’s east coast, Summerhill lies in a region that is atypical of most people’s perception of Africa. It is a green canvas with pockets that appear very English, blanketed in lush, verdant pastures, and home to the pukka landed gentry whose young sons play polo still.

Summerhill skirts the northern reaches of the majestic ‘Midlands Meander’ a leisurely drive that starts near Howick’s famous falls and wends its way through myriad little towns’ restaurants, organic stalls, colonial book-shops, bric-a-brac stores and shabby-chic hideaways.

Long known as the ‘last bastion of the British Empire’ due to its very English history, this part of the former Natal colony is famous for two of the African continent’s finest schools: Hilton College and Michaelhouse. Fierce rugby rivals, their derbies attract cult-like followings where running rugby is the norm, and where students are as likely to be from London or Lagos as they are from a farm near the Limpopo.

Here, apparently, breeding is everything. And it’s catching.

Summerhill Stud was recently crowned Champion South African Breeder - its 7th consecutive championship following record-breaking feats in previous seasons. In 2005 the record books were re-written as the stud claimed the Breeder’s Premiership by a record margin. In 2006 their previous record was eclipsed five weeks before the season’s close, and this was followed by record-breaking margins in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2010, Summerhill’s record earnings for the Championship were more than double its closest rival.

The property consists of over 3,000 acres of fully fenced secure paddocks, where all pastures and cropland is maintained on strictly organic principles. In addition, there is a carefully monitored complementary grazing program to control parasites, and paddocks are sewn with a mixture of 11 grass species selected for optimal equine nutrition and growth.

Boasting internationally trained staff across separate divisions that include foaling, yearling, ready to race, stallion and broodmares, Summerhill has 320 stables and a yearling and stallion walker. There are also two 1400m turf gallops, two 1600m sand tracks and a 2400m turf track.

With round-the-clock supervision, Summerhill is a registered quarantine facility, with on-site veterinary care, a foaling unit and a surgery unit.

Mick Goss’ family have had a life-long love affair with racing, his grandfather having owned St Pauls, winner of the 1946 Durban July Handicap, South Africa’s most famous race, run over 2200m at Greyville in Durban.

Although his father also enjoyed the industry, business interests had to come first. As a result it was left to genetics to ensure that Mick and his brother Pat would resume the family’s love affair with the turf. Initially involved in 1979 as a legal advisor to the syndicate that purchased the original property (Hartford House was just a neighbour at that point), the Goss boys took the bit by their teeth and gradually increased their shareholding in Summerhill to the point they became majority owners. In the late 80s Mick Goss assumed total control by buying his brother out.

International Connections

Despite its African setting, Summerhill Stud has a surprisingly international clientele… besides playing host to a sizeable proportion of the breeding stock of its own nation’s top owners, more than a third of the farm’s resident horse population belong to customers in the United Kingdom, the USA, the UAE, Australia, France, Japan, Germany, Ireland and Hong Kong.

For a man who has achieved so much in his own back yard, it is ironic that Mick Goss had to travel halfway across the world to find perhaps his best buy.

Goss is a frequent visitor to Australia’s sales, with his regular team of Annet Becker and Tarryn Liebenberg, in search of prospects for Summerhill’s Ready To Run operation. And it was at Inglis’ 2009 Melbourne Premier Sale that a Galileo filly caught their eye from the Kia Ora Stud draft.

Picked up for the relatively modest sum of $65,000, Igugu’s victory in last January’s Gr1 J&B Met at Kenilworth in Cape Town was the icing on the cake. Along the way the 4 year old mare took her record to 10 wins. These included 2011’s Gr1 Vodacom Durban July over 2200m and Gr1 Woolavington 2000 over 2000m (both at Greyville in Durban), Gr1 SA Fillies Classic over 1800m, Gr2 South African Oaks over 2450m at Turffonetin, Gr2 Ipi Tombe Challenge over 1600m, Gr2 Gauteng Fillies Guineas over 1600m, and 2010’s Gr3 Johannesburg Spring Challenge over 1450m (all at Turffontein in Johannesburg) and 2 runners-up (including 2010’s Gr1 Cape Fillies Guineas over 1600m at Kenilworth) from 12 starts.

Igugu’s Horse of the Year title and her place at the top of the earnings table for 2011 (in excess of R5 million) follow on the heels of 2010’s biggest earner, Pierre Jourdan, and Imbongi’s status in the same year as the earnings Victor Ludorum at Dubai’s Racing Carnival.

It is deeply satisfying for Goss that Igugu was on-sold at the annual Ready To Run Sale, whose 2012 Summer edition was recently held at Summerhill’s Centre Of Management Excellence. With the support of other industry bodies, Summerhill has continued to champion the Ready To Run and they, along with a strong and diverse South African buying bench, were again very active at last month’s Inglis Melbourne Premier Sale despite facing an exchange rate where every dollar cost the equivalent of eight rand in South African currency.

Al Maktoum School Of Management Excellence

As part of Summerhill’s “ongoing commitment to education and training”, the stud recently completed their 40th International Scholarship with the return of two of their young Zulu staff from the USA and the UK.

The doors of the on-site Al Maktoum School of Management Excellence opened at Summerhill in May 2011. It is already regarded by many as the finest educational facility of its kind in the world.

At 2011’s Melbourne Premier, Goss excitedly shared the news on the upcoming opening with Breeding&Racing. It sounded, in theory, like a fine idea, however it’s not until one has experienced this faculty in the flesh that one can appreciate the extent of the vision that lies behind it.

Housed in a very special building with majestic views of the farm, the school may be brand new, yet it exudes a presence of ingrained gravitas, its lecture hall’s leather-bound airline seats a curiously satisfying addition to this acoustically designed African setting.

“Africa demands that you give something back,” exclaims an infectiously enthusiastic Goss about this local undertaking which has gone globally viral, and which attracts the crème of the world thoroughbred fraternity as guest lecturers.

Stallion Power

Summerhill’s farm is home to arguably Africa’s most formidable band of young sire talent, and includes among its stallion owners the leading studs in Australia, Japan, the United States, Dubai and South Africa.

Great stallions make great farms, and Summerhill was blessed in its early days to have stood Northern Guest, an impeccably bred son of Northern Dancer out of the celebrated blue hen Sex Appeal.

His imposing list of progeny, whose earnings eclipsed R50 million, included the Gr1 winners Senor Santa, Travel North, Spook And Diesel, Northern Princess, Imperious Sue, Unaware, Angus and Mystery Guest. And, with the benefit of hindsight, why wouldn’t he have scaled breeding’s Everest, given he’s a full-brother to champion duo El Gran Senor and Try My Best?

Goss, with complete understatement says: “We owe it all to him. Northern Guest lies behind everything you see here today.”

Of course, since those halcyon days Summerhill has been associated with many, many outstanding stallions, and their current line-up is no exception.

Following the sad loss of exciting young Medicean sire-son Bankable earlier this year, Summerhill currently has 11 stallions on its books. Reflecting a nice cross-section of sirelines, but with an inevitable nod to the ubiquitous Northern Dancer and Mr Prospector lines, they include: Admire Man (Sunday Silence), A.P. Arrow (A.P. Indy), Brave Tin Soldier (Storm Cat), Kahal (Machiavellian), Malhub (Kingmambo), Muhtafal (Mr Prospector), Mullins Bay (Machiavellian), Ravishing (Jet Master), Solskjaer (Danehill), Visionaire (Grand Slam) and Way West (Danehill).

It’s a collection of sire-power that annually attracts many of the crème of South Africa’s mare crop.

Mick Goss is a showman. Beyond the open smile and charisma, though, lies awareness that that while this game is about horses, it’s the people who own them that influence outcomes.

In what is almost an antithesis to the quip that claims accountants know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, Goss has this to say: “We started out on a handshake, and that’s still the way we do business. We’ve never forgotten, transactions build turnovers, but relationships build value.”

Hartford House

In reading this you may be tempted to shrug this off as ‘just another stud farm’, but that’d be a million miles from the truth. Summerhill Stud is actually a combination of Summerhill and Hartford Studs, the latter an adjoining property with one of the most beautiful houses in the Province.

Timelessly elegant and graceful, Hartford House has quickly risen to become one of South Africa’s leading boutique hotels, following extensive renovations and the continued epicurean rise of its award-winning restaurant.

A member of Chaine des Rotisseurs, one would naturally expect that Hartford House would have fine dining, yet it’s a surprise to discover that its restaurant is now among South Africa’s Top 10 under the tutelage and watchful eye of young chef Jackie Cameron. Summerhill is almost certainly the only stud farm anywhere on earth with a restaurant of this calibre.

For anyone who’s ever watched Out Of Africa, and wondered at Karen Blixen’s opening words: “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills”, Hartford House evokes a sense of the ‘old Africa’ nostalgia.

In any event, what’s not to like about an evening Pimms on the sandstone balcony listening to the whinny of a nearby colt-foal and the snort of his dam?

Hartford House’s own expressed raison d’etre captures its nuance best:

“[It is] The journey’s exclamation point, a retreat from the hubbub where you make sense of a fast life and its senseless details. This is where we learn to redress ourselves on a first name basis.

There are too many luxury hotels in the world offering the same: a chocolate on the pillow, canned romance, and cuisine called “haut” because it’s spelled in French. Hartford stands apart for its integrity. Its architecture, views, dining, sounds, smells, its racehorses and its people are all exhilarating surprises, unique to this Zululand, this culture, to Africa. Yes, you come here to be pampered, but at Hartford luxury is the journey, not the destination.

The truth is, Hartford just happened. A home, and a grand one at that, which grew into a hotel. A community looks to it as its watering hole, its nexus of entertainment, its fountain of gossip. In so many ways, it’s gained and regained inspiration from the cultures it celebrates. It is life’s exception, a place at the same time comfortable beyond dreams, yet innocent of pretence.”

www.breedingracing.com

GARY KNOWLES : THOROUGHBRED JOURNALIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

Mick Goss with Gary, Marita, Madison, Georgia and Chelsea Knowles
(Photo : Annet Becker)

GARY KNOWLES
Breeding & Racing’s Editor-In-Chief

One of the world’s best known thoroughbred journalists is Breeding & Racing’s editor-in-chief, Gary Knowles, whom South Africans can proudly claim as one of our own sons. Twenty-one years since Gary’s voice was last heard calling the races at Turffontein, yet he’s never lost his affinities for this country, thank the Lord, and makes the pilgrimage back most years. We caught up with him, his wife Marita, and his daughters Madison, Georgia and Chelsea at Summerhill a couple of weeks ago :

“As a seventeen or eighteen-year-old I used to hang around the sales with Mick and Cheryl waiting for the horses to be sold, and I used to bug them no end. They were extremely gracious in their hospitality and looking after me. They really encouraged my interest in the industry. I’d gone to school with a chap called Gary Gorton, whose family raced one of the best horses in the Eastern Cape, a wonderful mare called Blue Nile, and I got smuggled out of Woodridge College to go and watch her race one day. She was trained by the late Stanley Greeff, and that was really one of the turning points in my interest in racing. My mother was dating a chap in Johannesburg and he had a very good friend who was an Advocate at chambers in Joburg. One day, they took me along to be their “runner” to set their bets for them and I ended up hearing a race-caller for the first time on course at Newmarket and that was when the bug really bit. I then latched onto Alison Mackenzie at Phase Four who was producing South African Racehorse and got all the publications and read them cover-to-cover. With Mick and Cheryl’s enthusiasm and encouragement, I became completely infected and then I was hooked. After emigrating to New Zealand in 1987, after my return, I was lucky enough to become a race-caller where I called with Graeme Hawkins and Peter Duffield at the four clubs (Turffontein, Newmarket, Gosforth Park and the Vaal), as well as being Media Relations Officer for Newmarket Club.

My fondest memory is being told I had to call the Germiston November Handicap for SABC TV Sport when a patch couldn’t be taken from Radio South Africa. The problem was the field was already half-loaded and I hadn’t studied the colours. Somehow the call just worked out okay with Mill Hill getting home by a nose from I Try.

In 1991 I emigrated to Australia, where I had to start all over again. After spending a year or so at the Canberra Racing Club working in a clerical role, that led me to an opportunity in Sydney where I landed up working with Racetrack Magazine, where I was for about three years. I then had a year down in Melbourne as marketing manager for Murana Stud, which at that stage was owned by Norm Carlyon, Chairman of Moonee Valley Race Club, home of the weight-for-age Gr1 Cox Plate.

About twelve years ago, I joined the staff at Breeding & Racing which was also running the New South Wales Jockey Club calendar, and I’ve been with them ever since. I’ve spent the last four years as editor-in-chief there, as well as running the Daily News, one of the world’s most widely read thoroughbred news columns.

It’s been wonderful to come out again to Summerhill and see Mick again, whom I was lucky enough to see earlier this year at the Gold Coast sales. Coming back has really reminded me of just how integral relationships are to this industry, it took me back to the very early days of that enthusiasm and encouragement that Mick and Cheryl showed me, and it’s a rewarding experience to look back at over thirty years and to realise that those embryonic beginnings are what have made me what I am in the industry today, and it’s just been super to be here again.”

Gary’s young daughters also wanted to say how much they enjoyed their visit to Summerhill and Hartford, and here are their thoughts….

“Hi I am Georgia Knowles, and I’m speaking about how today we had an awesome day. I loved it when we saw all the foals when we had a drive around. The School Of Excellence was amazing, and I found it very fascinating, and everything we did today would definitely be an achievement to my life really, to what I do at school. It shows me what way to do stuff as in the way I do it. Thank you.”

“Hi I am Madison Knowles, and this is really a nice place, and the horses are amazing, and my favourite horse would probably have to be Brave Tin Soldier. Seeing the foals was awesome, and the tour is really awesome as well. Thank you.”

“Hi, I am Chelsea, and I had a great day today. It’s been awesome seeing the horses, and it’s been a really great drive and seeing all the foals, and it’s been a really lovely time. I am so lucky to be here. Thank you.”

Published courtesy of Gary Knowles and Family

SUMMERHILL NEWSLETTER : DECEMBER 2011

Click above to watch Ready To Run Graduates, Igugu and Pierre Jourdan,
finish “one-two” in the 2011 Vodacom Durban July (Grade 1)
(Image : John Lewis - Footage : SABC 3)

“Let’s get our chins up for a big one.”

Mick Goss
Summerhill Stud CEOGood Morning,

Given the racing man’s hereditary obsession with the irretrievable past, and allowing for the fallibility of memory, it may prove too much for us to recreate it just as it was. We all know that the “good old days” were never quite as good as we’d have ourselves believe, but we cannot remember a more fulfilling breeding season, punctuated by a patronage of our stallions which exceeded all-comers among recent years, an outstanding crop of foals (which probably explains the stallion bookings) and an excellent conception rate. Top that with an extraordinary Emperors Palace Ready To Run Sale in November, and we’d have to be feeling bullish. Remember, this is 2011!

Let us explain why. We all know the world’s been in turmoil, but these numbers tell us that at Summerhill, we have a clientele whose enterprise, far-sightedness and guts exceeds everything we could wish for. People have put their heads down, knowing that when the market is frightened in one direction, you should be looking for opportunities in the other. They obviously read Warren Buffet. The broodmare demographics in the country, according to some stats I saw in the Cape a week ago, suggest that we have just over half the number of broodmares in circulation we had a decade ago, which means half the foal crop. We also know that racing needs a critical mass in the way of competitors to make the totes work, and it looks like we’re headed for a hefty shortfall in the way of available stock come 2014, when next year’s foals reach the market. We’ve not seen financial times as tough as these in most of our lifetimes, but South Africans are not unaccustomed to financial turbulence, and the art of knowing when to swim against the tide has worked for us just about every time we’ve pursued it.

Besides the numbers, there’s cause for further hope in the work being done at intergovernmental level in fixing our protocols for the facilitation of exports. Whatever prosperity the South African breeding and racing communities have enjoyed in the past decade, will pale in comparison with what we can achieve if we can get our horses to foreign destinations more expeditiously, with less fuss and less expense to our customers abroad. This could be a game-changer, but while we’re waiting for May next year when the IOC reviews the rules, we must turn our hopes to our expectations for next year’s sales.

Those who follow the industry closely will know that Bloodstock South Africa has for decades been the dominant agent for the sale of our horses. There’ve done us well in a laagered environment, with one shortcoming. Unlike the rest of the world, producers have had to carry the risk on their sales for as long as the buyer hasn’t settled, and the newly formed Cape Thoroughbred Sales brings some relief in this respect. While competition is a healthy aspect of any industry if BSA is to retain the loyalty of its vendors, it will have to find a solution to this problem to maintain its share of the turn, and we have to encourage its custodians to search long and hard, and quickly. Meanwhile though, CTS has embarked on an ambitious programme to showcase its sale at the end of January, and that, together with BSA’s National Sale (which has the benefit of an April date) should have the impact, with the cash that will flow back to breeders, of restoring the integrity and the value of our broodmare bands. Balance sheets will once again look like they should do, bankers will be more amenable and the breeding game will be back with a bang. There is a new energy in the marketing environment, and the pros are bringing their “A” game.

For some years now, Summerhill has been on many a travellers “to do” list at this time of year. Somehow though, despite the apparent constraints of the world economy, we’ve seen more people from more diverse places, than ever before. When Summerhill pumps, Hartford pumps, too, and vice versa. Judging by the number of Brits, Germans, French and Belgians among them, it’s obvious residents of the Eurozone have at last discovered the meaning of “value”, while the Aussies and the Mauritians have no such problems. Go to the blog (www.summerhill.co.za) for a peek.

Talking of Mauritians, Cheryl and I attended the International Jockeys Challenge earlier in the month, squeezed in between business in Jo’burg and Cape Town. There’s no free lunch here though, as we’re busy drumming up custom for the second Ready To Run (22^nd February). The response from Mauritius tells us they remember the outcome of this year’s Vodacom Durban July, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see French the dominant lingo at Hartford the evening before. The old saying “If you snooze, you lose,” still applies. You won’t meet a more fervent bunch of racing aficionados anywhere, so book early if you want to join. Remember Imbongi, Bold Ellinore, Emperor Napoleon, Amphitheatre and Vangelis were all “left-overs” on the farm, and they all made millionaires of their owners, if they weren’t already.

Can you believe it, 2012 is upon us. Most of us would probably want to put a line through 2011, so why don’t we do that?

All the best for the festivities, and let’s get our chins up for a “big one”.

Mick & Cheryl Goss
SUMMERHILL STUD & HARTFORD HOUSE

www.summerhill.co.za