The colt that Bart wanted

When Windsor Park Stud’s marketing manager, the effervescent Michael Moran was supervising Bart Cummings’ viewing of the farm’s draft at the 2008 Karaka Premier Yearling Sale, the wily trainer was showing interest in the stock of first season sire High Chaparral, a champion son of the great Sadler’s Wells, and a likely source of future Melbourne Cup winners.

None had impressed him until a strapping, well balanced colt from the mare Triassic stepped out between the barns. “Now you’re talking,” Cummings said as he circled the colt.

Moran had a special reason to take note of Cummings’s thoughts about the colt, because he bred him.

Cummings stuck firm and paid, through agent and close friend Duncan Ramage, NZ$110,000 for the colt for long-time client and friend Dato Tan Chin Nam – a good result for Moran and his partners, but half what he expected. “John McArdle opened the bidding at $100,000 but his client, who was on the phone, went cold, so he didn’t bid again. At least, we knew the colt was going to the right stable,” Moran said.

The colt, So You Think, has emerged as a superstar, and Cummings, it is said, privately labelled the 3YO as the best horse he has trained since Saintly before Saturday’s outstanding win in the Group 1 Cox Plate (WFA 2040m) at Moonee Valley, the colt is close to realising Cummings’ expectations.

It was jockey Glen Boss who got the most out of Cummings in ascertaining where Cummings places the colt in the scheme of history. “I said to Bart on Saturday night that So You Think could be the best horse he has trained, and he replied ‘you could be right’,” Boss said on radio Sport927 on Sunday.

Cummings said after the Cox Plate that he was impressed with the colt as soon as he saw him. “He has a deep girth and a long rein. Any good judge of a horse couldn’t miss him,” he said. Plenty did.

Moran paid $16,000 for Triassic (b m 1990, Tights (USA)–Astral Row (NZ), by Long Row (GB)) at the 2005 Easter Broodmare Sale, in foal to Danehill’s moderately-performed brother Nuclear Freeze.

“She is a beautiful looking mare who throws great foals, but she has been unlucky at stud. Her progeny have ability, but she hasn’t, until know, left the horse she deserves,” Moran said.

“I bought her because she was a great racehorse. She won the (1994, Group 2) Sir Tristram Classic and should have won the (1994, Group 2) Royal Stakes. She was the ideal mare to bring back to New Zealand to put to a horse like High Chaparral.

”Triassic, now 19, missed to High Chaparral in 2006, she has a yearling colt by Elusive City and she was mated in 2008 to the Danehill son Spartacus.

Moran said the mare, who has been used in the past two years by partners Piper Farm, will return to High Chaparral this season.