LEXINGTON, KY–You may have seen in the news last week how they've just realised that a Mondrian masterpiece has been hanging the wrong way round for 77 years. That's just a year longer than Willie Browne has been accumulating his own perspectives on life and, when he looks at the filly he has brought to the Breeders' Cup, he pretty much knows that same, upside-down feeling. Because his long quest for the secrets of equine potential–which has so often brought him to this same town, wearing a very different hat–has now produced perhaps its deepest puzzle yet.
Browne, who processes as many as 90 breeze-up pinhooks through his Mocklershill nursery every year, seldom finds himself with more than two or three left over to send onto the racetrack himself. Among all the young horses to have passed through his hands, however, including many who went on to prove elite performers, none has shown him more talent than Spirit Gal (Fr) (Invincible Spirit {Ire}). So where does it come from?
“I trained this filly's mother,” he mused, after supervising her jaunt round the Keeneland training track on Tuesday morning. “And it wouldn't be doing a disservice to say she was as bad a racemare as I've ever had. She hadn't the mind for the job: she was a box-walker, she travelled bad to the races. So I said to Chuck, 'Listen, there's no future in this one.'”
“Chuck” is Charles E. Fipke, the Canadian geologist who had diamond strikes at the Breeders' Cup with Forever Unbridled (Unbridled's Song) in the 2017 Distaff and Perfect Shirl (Perfect Soul {Ire}) in the 2011 Filly and Mare Turf. Browne can't remember quite how or when they met. But it was at least 20 years ago, and in this same town, while Browne was engaged his own brand of prospecting–as a pioneer in a trade he had more or less patented in Europe. And for a long time now Fipke has been sending Browne young stock, typically out of his mares over the water, to be broken and then prepared either for sale or training.
“Chuck being Chuck, he said, 'Okay, I'll send her to Sir Mark Prescott,'” Browne remembers of Awesome Gal (Ire). “Which he duly did. But Sir Mark ran her up to two miles with the same result, nothing. So I kind of lost contact with the filly then. But not alone did Chuck keep her, he put a 120 grand cover on her. Then I got a phone call in January this year, asking me would I take two fillies up from France. When they arrived, I looked at their breeding and thought: 'Here we go again!'”
Browne pauses and shakes his head. “But right from the get-go this filly was special,” he says. “All those years trying to figure things out, looking at pedigrees, how does it all work. And it's a filly out of that mare has turned out quicker than any breeze-up horse I've ever had. Now, listen, she goes back well. The mare has a good pedigree, she's by Galileo (Ire). But it's strange, all the same.”
It's true: Awesome Gal (Ire) has a striking shape to her pedigree, replicating Urban Sea's dam Allegretta (GB) (Lombard {Ger}) as close as 3 x 3. Full credit to Fipke, then, for rolling the dice on such a purposeful cover for this dismal runner.
Soon after their arrival, even so, Browne received an email instructing him to prepare both Awesome Gal's daughter and the No Nay Never filly who had accompanied her from France for the Goffs UK Breeze-Up Sale at Doncaster.
“Well, the way Spirit Gal was training at home, I knew what was going to happen,” Browne recalls. “Sure enough, she was third-fastest in the breeze and everyone was all over her. She'd have topped the sale by a mile.”
As it was, she had to be scratched. Seldom has a touch of sore shins proved such a blessing.
“I was disappointed of course,” Browne says. “I wasn't going to get my commission. But to keep me happy Chuck said, 'Listen, you can train this if you want.' He'd often have said that before, without me taking up the offer. Joseph [O'Brien] trains most of them [in Europe] now, and he had John Oxx before, plus a few with Sir Mark. But I said, 'Yes, this filly I will keep!'”
As a rule, the only horses that keep things ticking over at Browne's Co. Tipperary base through the summer will be mediocre types that have for one reason or another missed their sales slot.
“I'd have maybe two or three winners every year but they'd be rated 65 or so,” Browne explains. “You do well to win one of those low-grade handicaps every year, it's so competitive in Ireland. But while it might sound contradictory, I wouldn't want to be seen doing too well at this. People would say this fella's keeping the best and selling the worst. I hope people know me well enough to know that would never be the case, but human nature being what it is, there would be a bit of that.”
But the exception has, in any case, arrived in another's service.
“We knew she was good after the breeze-up, so after her little break we started to train her and it has all just continued on from there,” Browne says. “I used to get Seamie Heffernan in to sit on her. He's such a good judge, if he likes something you can sit up and take notice. She was fourth on her first run and then has just improved and improved. It was a good class of race she won in Dundalk [7f Listed] last time. Fillies don't normally beat the colts and she hammered the one that went on to win the [G3] Killavullan S.”
That was none other than Ballydoyle's one-time GI Juvenile Turf contender Cairo (Quality Road). There's no denying that Secret Gal matches her dashing style with plenty of substance, then, and those who assume that trainers need tiers of “punchbags” to work a horse up the grades must accept that this one has thrived for her solitary regime.
“She trains on her own,” Browne confirms. “I've become a bit American, train her on the clock. But she's very forward-going. People might normally train in pairs, but you'd never do that for the breeze. Yes, you do your initial preparation in groups, but once they start breezing, they all do it on their own. And she's so forward-going that doesn't need help. She'd use herself too much, with other horses. But not alone is she quick, she stays to a good level.”
There are, admittedly, new factors this time. For one thing she must gel with her local jockey, Ricardo Santana, Jr., and the hectic style of racing round the sharp inner track may demand versatility.
“There are a lot of ifs and buts,” Browne acknowledges. “We're in a bit of a quandary, in that she has a reputation as frontrunner back home. But it's a different ball game here. Going to the bend as quick as they will, you'd be using a lot of petrol to lead them there. So ideally you'd maybe look to break well and then just tuck in. But she should travel. And, you know, if she does everything right, she could hang around.”
While the many trainers who shop annually from Mocklershill are grateful that Browne has never deployed his mastery in meaningful competition, he does claim more satisfaction in winning a small race with a moderate horse than in the celebrated pinhooks that have made him the doyen of the sector. (First consignor to sell a seven-figure breezer in Europe? Willie Browne. Second consignor to sell a seven-figure breezer in Europe? Willie Browne.)
So you can imagine how he feels to be bringing Spirit Gal, last month his first ever starter in a stakes race, to a challenge as momentous as the GI Juvenile Fillies' Turf on Friday.
“I was here for the September Sale, not having a clue this was going to happen,” he says. “And I walked out there [out of the sales barns to view the track] and thought to myself, 'Damn, this side will always be different.'”
His tone is poignantly laced with the implication that “different” might equally read “better”. But then he can comfort himself that few trainers in Europe have saddled as many good horses in their time. And the system continues to function smoothly: subsequent 'TDN Rising Star' Sakheer (Ire) (Zoffany {Ire}), picked up right here last year after failing to meet his September reserve at $65,000, was sold on to Oliver St Lawrence for €550,000 at Arqana in May and has since proved himself among the best of the crop with his G2 Mill Reef S. success for KHK Racing and Roger Varian. From the previous cycle, Light Infantry (Fr) (Fast Company {Ire}) has earned his passage to Australia after consecutive runner-up finishes in Group 1 company this summer. He was found for just €25,000 as an Arqana October yearling, and sold to Blandford for £82,000 at the Goffs UK Breeze-Up.
Browne is proud of the expertise of those fellow horsemen who have helped the breeze-up sector in Europe achieve spectacular maturity. And he should be assured of a reciprocal goodwill, among the countless trainers indebted to his academy, now that he has a belated opportunity to slay a giant or two with his tiny residue of part-time ammunition. He is too immune to self-indulgence, however, to dwell pointlessly on what might have been.
“The problem we had, in '77, was there were three families at home: my father, myself and my brother Michael,” he says with a shrug. “My father did moderately okay, always had his few winners. But we weren't making any kind of money to sustain three families. We had to do something different, and that's why we started what we started. But listen, at this stage of my life, it is kind of a fairy story. I got the full-sister up from France last week. She's not as pretty. But who knows? That's the thing. You never know. I hope I don't let anyone down on Friday. Where we fit in here, I don't know. But she has brought us here, at least, and we'll take that.”
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