Regardless of whether this spring’s hype horse, Puissance De Lune, makes it to the $3 million Cox Plate at Moonee Valley on October 26 and/or the $6 million Melbourne Cup at Flemington on November 5 – let alone wins one or both – the story of the grey import and those involved in his campaign is the stuff of folklore that Victoria’s spring racing carnival throws up each year.
There’s the megarich owner, Gerry Ryan, who bought Puissance De Lune, almost under sufferance, to win a country cup.
There’s the extroverted jockey, Glen Boss, who is Melbourne’s reigning champion years after cheating death in a track fall. He went on to win three Melbourne Cups on the great Makybe Diva and two Cox Plates, one on Makybe Diva and the other on So You Think, the star of Melbourne’s spring in 2010, and five-time group 1 winner in Europe.
There’s the workaholic country trainer, Darren Weir, who, early in his career, more than once earned the wrath of the stewards (racing’s police) and was suspended and fined, but now sits among Australia’s elite as a group 1 winner and reigning Victorian (statewide) champion.
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Of course, there’s Puissance De Lune himself, bought for just over $100,000 in France in the year that country won a second straight Melbourne Cup and at a time when Australians were (and still are) paying well into seven figures for animals less talented.
With all that comes the surf and turf aspect, with Puissance De Lune being trained away from the madding crowd of horses at Weir’s busy Ballarat stables, at a satellite yard in Warrnambool, where he does his main work on the beach, among the dunes and in the water at Lady Bay.
And there is the patient defeat of injury, that constant adversary of trainers and owners everywhere. In this case it was confronted swiftly with arthroscopic surgery on fetlock bone chips, and patiently with measured and confined rehab on a treadmill at Ballarat and then in the freedom of sand and water at Warrnambool.
The story, too, will not end with running in the plate and/or the Cup. For it is to future springs, as well as this one, that the entrepreneurial Ryan is looking – to the breeding barn, in fact, where he already has his 2010 Melbourne Cup winner Americain standing.
(Americain, owned with wife Val and another Melbourne couple, Kevin and Colleen Bamford, and trained by Frenchman Alain de Royer-Dupré at Chantilly, was the first of the successive French winners, with Dunaden in 2011 the other.)
That Ryan already has a 3200-metre stallion is the reason for dual targets, with the emphasis at this stage on the shorter race, the 2040-metre Cox Plate.
The 62-year-old owner of the caravan maker Jayco and a raft of other businesses, explains: “He’s still got his nuts and he’s got the potential for stud. If we get a group 1 win (at 1600-2000 metres) it just helps his profile as a stallion.”
That profile already is impressive, with Puissance De Lune described as extraordinarily well bred, being by Shamardal (United States), one of the best stallions in the world, from a mare whose dam (Serena’s Sister) is a sister to the great American race mare Serena’s Song, who had 11 group 1 wins among her 18 successes in the mid-1990s.
Ryan, an investor in the breeding game as well as in racing, has Americain as a shuttler already, covering mares at Swettenham Stud, Nagambie, in the Victorian spring and at the famous Calumet Farm in Kentucky in the US season. He rates Americain the best horse he has owned, but of this spring’s boom runner he says: “This is the second-best with the potential to do better.”
Initially, Ryan didn’t want Puissance De Lune, a winner of one of four starts in France. He says: “Rob [Roulston, bloodstock agent and now chairman of Racing Victoria] rang me up and said, ‘I’ve got another horse for you’. I said, ‘I’ve got enough horses’.” Then Ryan asked Roulston, “Could it win a Bendigo Cup?”
As Puissance De Lune was going to the barrier for the P.B. Lawrence Stakes at Caulfield on August 17 – his first-up win over 1400 metres this campaign, which fuelled even more hype on the grey – Ryan recalls: “I went up there [Bendigo] a few years back with three horses and didn’t do any good and the next day in the paper they bagged me, ‘No luck for Jayco supremo’ …
“Anyway, I said, ‘We’ve got to get a Bendigo Cup horse, because I grew up in Bendigo, selling newspapers’.”
Jayco, which has almost 50 per cent of the Australian caravan market, has sponsored the race since 2009.
Ryan says he realised during the build-up to Bendigo late last year that Puissance De Lune was more than he had bargained for when Roulston bid €90,000 at Deauville in 2011, a figure that was then worth about $A120,000.
“Then, after the Bendigo Cup [which it won by eight lengths], we said, ‘Well, we might have a Melbourne Cup runner’.”
Just 10 days later, after a five-length romp in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes (2600 metres) on the final day of the Flemington carnival, Boss couldn’t hold in his enthusiasm and said it would win the Cup.
Now, after the Lawrence win and a strong second in the group 1 Makybe Diva Stakes (1600 metres) at Flemington three weeks later, he is Melbourne Cup favourite and high in the betting for the Cox Plate.
And Ryan is loving the ride, which is saying something considering his other action-packed interests, such as: his recent Tour de France successes with the Orica-GreenEDGE cycle team, which he set up and has bankrolled for a reported $60 million; his investments in wine (the Mitchelton winery), in the worldwide puppetry success story Walking with Dinosaurs and in the new stage show King Kong; and his other sporting involvements, from AFL (St Kilda) to the NRL (Melbourne Storm) to basketball (the national women’s team, the Opals – one of the world’s best).
Ryan’s racing manager, Deane Lester, says that his boss had probably 100 racehorses, with up to 25 in work with several trainers, particularly Weir, Robbie Griffiths and Robert Kingston.
He also has a large team of broodmares on his 220-hectare Limerick Lane Stud, and part-owns another stallion, the miler Dash For Cash, at Swettenham Stud, just across the Goulburn River.
Hard work and perseverance have made Ryan a rich man, but there have been hurdles.
“I sold out [of horses] in the recession going back in the late ’80s,” he says. “I was flyblown like the rest and the horses had to go. I didn’t have horses for, you know, another five or six years …”
How does he treat his racing and breeding interests? “With the number of broodmares, it is a business. All the businesses I’m in, it’s about fun – caravans, show business, wine and horses are fun. That’s what I enjoy, and the people side.”
Trainer Darren Weir describes Ryan as “the best owner” with a “that’s what I pay you to do” attitude.
“Every now and then he just says, ‘I’d like to, if we could, head to this race’. He said [with Puissance De Lune], ‘Head towards the Cox Plate, if it doesn’t work out, change the route on the way and go to the Melbourne Cup’.”
Jockey Glen Boss, who admits to being the “Minister for Rash Statements”, seems to think the Plate and/or the Cup are the horse’s to lose.
Ryan, responding to a comment that he wasn’t of the Boss school of hype, says: “You’ve got one extreme, you’ve got the trainer who doesn’t tell you too much; and Bossy’s the other way.
“The trainer knows not to tell me too much. I get very excited very easily, but very disappointed [laughter] … I leave it to them.”
Weir, who fulfilled his part of the Puissance De Lune deal with the Bendigo Cup win last November, would love to win the greatest race of all this November, having finished second to Boss’ darling, Makybe Diva, with the unheralded stayer She’s Archie in 2003.
His young foreman at Warrnambool, Mitch Freedman, has been entrusted with the day-to-day work with now six-year-old Puissance De Lune, whose switch from Ballarat to the beach not long after Weir took him over came because, as a bull, he became loud and excited and wouldn’t settle at the trainer’s busy stables. Furthermore, the beach, the dunes and the salt water are comforting training tools.
The trainer also listens to Boss, as the man with race and trial responsibility; and to Lester as Ryan’s racing manager; as well as to Ryan, who pays the bills and has always had half a dozen horses with him over the past 10 or dozen years.
Weir doesn’t see Ryan’s Cox Plate goal as secondary to his own Cup ambition, rather as the first of two tough and lofty targets that depend on lead-in results.
“The plan is to do both, but Gerry’s a realist,” he says.
For more stories on Spring Racing Carnival 2013, visit theweeklyreview.com.au
