Phoenix Dividends Boost Quinn

Year after year, Yorkshire trainers unearth elite runners despite relatively limited budgets. Yet while the top owners will sometimes snap up the odd maiden winner, with their wares advertised, even the most sustained improvement thereafter tends not to be rewarded at the next round of sales. Many owners, agents and managers appear to be under the impression that when you leave Newmarket Heath, you fall off the end of the world. Perhaps they are members of the Flat Earth Society.

How gratifying, then, that John Quinn's latest diamond sifted from the rubble—a G2 Queen Mary S. winner found in Book III for just 20,000gns—should for once have prompted a vote not just of thanks, but of confidence. Phoenix Thoroughbreds, who bought into Signora Cabello (Ire) (Camacho {GB}) just before her Royal Ascot success last summer, not only went to 900,000gns to buy out their partners back at Tattersalls last autumn (returning her to Malton until she joins their expanding broodmare band). They also took the logical next step. If this is what Quinn could do in the basement of the market, why not try his skills a level or two higher?

After 25 years with a licence Quinn remains perfectly aware that a handful of yearlings, however well bred, is still only a handful—and hardly likely to transform his brand overnight. Nonetheless it is a boost to the whole yard to receive one or two youngsters of different calibre. A Frankel (GB) filly out of GI Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Turf and G1 Irish Oaks runner-up L'Ancresse (Ire) (Darshaan {GB}), for instance, purchased for €480,000 at Deauville straight after Signora Cabello had pulled four lengths clear of the colts when a close second to Pretty Pollyanna (GB) (Oasis Dream {GB}) in the G1 Prix Morny.

“She's a beauty,” says Quinn. “If there's ever one that came our way that might be a good 3-year-old, that could be her.”

Then there was a €135,000 Kodiac (GB) colt from the same sale, out of a half-sister to the dam of champion Wootton Bassett (GB) (Iffraaj {GB}). At Doncaster, moreover, Dermot Farrington told Quinn and his son Sean, who sieves the catalogues, to let him know if there was anything they particularly liked. And there was: an Exceed And Excel (Aus) filly. Sure enough, Farrington signed the docket at £70,000. From the same Goffs UK catalogue, Phoenix sent up a £125,000 colt by Signora Cabello's sire. And just the other day Farrington offered him a 180,000gns Gutaifan (Ire) filly out of the mare whose first cover, by Gutaifan's sire Dark Angel (Ire), had produced the lightning Battaash (Ire).

“I said I'd try and find a box for her,” Quinn says wryly. “To be fair, the filly winning at Ascot was fantastic for all of us. Because as a trainer you need something to happen, you always need that next horse to come along. I couldn't say she'd win the Queen Mary, because there were 22 runners and all beauties. But I told them I felt she was a very decent filly.”

He is immensely grateful that Phoenix have followed through, while acknowledging that it's just one encouraging turn of the wheel in a career of long attrition.

“It's a great help to us,” he says. “Because we knew that unless somebody jumps out of the woodwork, we can't afford the Galileos and Shamardals. And I think the North is deemed nearly a different country, when it comes to people sending their bluebloods up here. But a lot of the lads up here have done really well, and you are now seeing more of the big owners sending horses North, which is great.”

The Exceed And Excel filly at Doncaster was always going to make their shortlist, as a full-sister to a juvenile who had already won three races for William Haggas in Queen Of Bermuda (Ire). Because Quinn remembers a call from Sean when they were at Tattersalls 18 months ago.

“It was Book III, I had bought plenty of yearlings and hadn't as many sold as I would have liked,” he says. “And then Sean is on the phone saying that there are these two fillies I must come and look at. Sean's a big help to me, a big pedigree man. So I went down. One turned out to be Queen Of Bermuda, and the other was Signora Cabello. Unbelievable.”

Quinn agreed to take one last punt, and they went with the one of the pair that had a little more substance. So the other filly slipped by at 17,000gns, only to be pinhooked at the breeze-ups to join Haggas for 230,000gns.

The Quinns will be back on the breeze-up circuit next week, being no less adept at picking out value in that market. Having found G2 Superlative S. winner Red Duke (Hard Spun) for £140,000 at Doncaster in 2011, three years later they famously turned up a subsequent Group 1 winner in Ascot's bargain basement for £50,000 in The Wow Signal (Ire) (Starspangledbanner {Aus}).

Quinn rewinds to a drink with Eddie O'Leary at the Cheltenham Festival. Gigginstown were having a tough week until no less a horse than dual Grand National winner Tiger Roll (Ire) (Authorized {Ire}) registered the first of his four Festival scores in the Triumph Hurdle, with two Quinn runners behind.

“In life, you need a bit of luck, don't you?” Quinn reflects. “I've known Eddie years. We were in a little members' bar on the ground level, and he said, 'I have a Starspangledbanner going to Ascot and, though he's crooked in front, I think he's a very good horse.' I watched the breeze on the telly and he did go really well, and Sean was down there and said he was a fine horse, not correct in front but he had good knees, which are very important.”

Quinn rang O'Leary, only to be dismayed by the reserve. But O'Leary offered to keep a leg, and then stalwart patron Ross Harmon stepped in. The following month, The Wow Signal bolted up at Ayr by nine lengths and 11, and the third horse came out and won at Goodwood a fortnight later. Suddenly the phone was hot and The Wow Signal was transferred to the Al Shaqab silks in time for his G2 Coventry S. success.

“Then in the Prix Morny he beat two champions in Hootenanny (Quality Road) and Ervedya (Fr) (Siyouni {Fr}) on soft ground,” Quinn says. “Yet it had been like flint at Ascot. He was phenomenal, probably the best we've had. But he ran no race when favourite for the Lagardere, and wasn't ever really right again. It just felt like the engine had been taken out.”

Sadly The Wow Signal's stud career proved equally fleeting, as he died a year ago of laminitis. Nonetheless Quinn believes in the sustainability of the breeze-up model, having even won a Grade 2 juvenile hurdle a couple of seasons ago with one Arqana graduate. But he cautions that the breeze-up market's increasing obsession with times may end up working against everyone's interests.

“Last year we bought half a dozen from the breeze-up sales,” he says. “And two or three of them had very sore shins shortly afterwards. We didn't get as good a run with them as in other years. Of course these are things you can get, that just happen. But I do think that the lads' hands are getting forced by the clock. A lot of us now are beginning to realize that it's just one aspect. You've got to move with the times a bit, but you've also got to put your own bit of 'feel' into it. We've all bought the ones that have broken the clock but have not been the best racehorses. So you just want a see one that moves well and gallops out.”

Having learned the ropes under Jimmy FitzGerald, alongside Richard Fahey among others, Quinn was for a long time one of the leading dual-licence trainers in the land. In recent years, however, his emphasis has shifted away from jumping—and he has duly achieved a personal best, in terms of domestic prizemoney, in each of the past three Flat campaigns. Partly, of course, it is a matter of sheer economic necessity, with greater trading opportunities overseas.

“Because by the time you've paid your staff and your overheads—and without beating the drum, the prizemoney is derisory—you need to be turning them over to keep the show going,” Quinn explains. “The margins are getting tighter all the time. Everything has gone up: hay, straw, diesel.

“But we've been very lucky over the years. When we've needed it most, a good one has come along. When the recession hit, it was very sticky. We went from 58 horses to 38 as quickly as one could snap your fingers. I'd lost my two best horses, and I said: 'I think I'm in a bit of trouble here.' Then we got an order for a fun horse. We'd seen Countrywide Flame (GB) (Haafhd {GB}) win at Hamilton, and went over to Kevin [Ryan]'s to have a look. He wasn't very big, but Kevin said he's very sound. And he superseded everything we thought.”

In fact Countrywide Flame ran all winter before winning the Triumph Hurdle, and proceeded to finish second in the Cesarewitch before making the frame in the Champion Hurdle itself. “As a 5-year-old!” Quinn exclaims. “I thought, 'I have a right horse.' But then he got a bone degenerating disease, and eventually we had to put him to sleep. But he came along when we needed him, and it's been the same with the other good ones.”

Happily, Signora Cabello is back to keep the Quinn team—spread between his base in the hamlet of Settrington, and rented boxes at the historic Highfield yard that housed six Classic winners—in lights this season. She is all set to resume in a listed race at Bath on Friday.

“I think she'd had enough come the Cheveley Park,” Quinn says. “Obviously she was prepped for the sale, and then when she came back I gave her another month off. She's training nicely now and hopefully she'll be lucky for them this year. I think she'll make a very good broodmare, as she has a very good pedigree and a very good mind. She does have that offset knee, but moves very straight through it. I hope she's trained on: one never knows, but she has that good mind and while I wouldn't say she's grown massively, she's certainly strengthened up.”

On his office wall hangs a circled target, as therapy for trainers. Steps one and two, on the adjacent instructions, are to line up and bang the forehead at the indicated area. Step three? “Repeat step two as necessary or until unconscious.” Yet for all the frustrations of his calling, Quinn not only retains the zeal of the lad who led up Mister Donovan at Cheltenham in 1982—the first Festival winner owned by J.P. McManus—but finds his antennae ever sharpened by experience.

“You only begin to know a bit about horses as you get older,” he suggests. “There's so much to learn. Because one thing I am sure about in this game, no-one has ever written the book: how to buy them, how to train them, everything. If you did it would just blow up, blow the nose off you. Yes, you do get pigeonholed: you're up North, you can train this not that. You know what I mean. So you have to keep producing the good one, to stay in the mix.”

He is grateful that his family is similarly immersed in the business. It would, he says, be “a lonely old furrow” otherwise. But when you remark on the myopia of so many professionals about the North, he shrugs.

“You only ever need one,” he says. “One good one. So you just never know.”