Rosen Made To Measure For The Chief’s Crown

He was tailor-made for both walks of life; raised to be equally at home with the racetrack cavalcade, or the catwalk parade. From the outside, fashion and the Turf perhaps share their most obvious bond in pageant: all those shimmering silks, all those sleek creatures. To Andrew Rosen, however, it's a more internal thing. Outlook, not aspect.

In both cases, he explains, you're adding one plus one and hoping to get four. “Or six, or eight,” he says, smiling. “So, it's all about anticipating the future. In the clothing industry, you're always reading six, nine, 12 months ahead. In the horse industry it's even longer, because it's 11 months from conception to foal, and then a couple of years till they race. So there's always this thing that the future is going to be better than the past. You're going to find a better way to make this dress, or fit that jacket; you're going to find a way to produce a better racehorse. And that's just the way I was brought up, the way my mind works. I always believe that maybe the horses next year are going to run better than they did this year.”

He gives a shrug, another wry smile. “Sometimes they do,” he adds. “Most of the time they don't.”

Rosen inherited an aptitude for both these different worlds from his father Carl, who had turned the small Massachusetts dress company founded by his own father into fashion giant Puritan; and then, incredibly, made Hall of Famer Chris Evert (Swoon's Son) his first ever yearling purchase at Keeneland. His premature death, in 1983, created a challenging test of precocity in his 25-year-old son. In soon breaking out his own brand, however, Rosen would ultimately make the third Rosen generation in the trade the most successful yet. In the meantime, his parallel legacy on the Turf had already brought him to new heights virtually overnight.

Just weeks after losing his father, Rosen went to Claiborne and saw a Danzig colt, bred from Chris Evert's daughter by Secretariat, getting his basic training alongside the other yearlings. It was decided to name him for Rosen's father, who had been known throughout firm and family as “The Chief.”

“I remember looking at this colt with Seth [Hancock] and Roger Laurin, who was training the horses,” he recalls. “First crop of Danzig, a little on the small side but well-balanced. Who could have said, then, what was going to happen the next year? But I soon knew that something was different because Roger, before, was, 'Don't bother me, kid.' And then when Chief's Crown came around, all of a sudden, he was paying lots of attention to me! And actually, Roger and I ended up being amazing friends.

“Roger badly wanted to win the Kentucky Derby, because he should have won with Secretariat. He was the trainer of Meadow Stable when Eddie Neloy had a heart attack and died. Bull Hancock called him and said, 'You have a new job.' He had to give up his public stable to train for the Phipps family, but who wouldn't have done that? And he said, 'Well, okay, as long as my father can train these horses.' And that's how Lucien got to train Secretariat and Riva Ridge.”

In the event, Chief's Crown had to settle for third in the Derby, but it was nonetheless a remarkable and emotional journey for the whole Rosen family, with championship laurels secured in the inaugural GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile.

“Maybe in those days, so soon after Chris Evert, you didn't understand how hard it really was to have a horse of that caliber,” Rosen admits. “But he ran 21 races in two years and won eight Grade Is. That's unthinkable today. My father always wanted a Derby horse so something like Chief's Crown, that would have been the ultimate for him. He'd said to me, 'I don't want you to sell the horses, I think there's something special there.'”

Chief's Crown wins the 1985 Travers S. | Coglianese

Seasoned horsemen immediately recognized the caliber of the young heir, when the time came to syndicate Chief's Crown, and many cherished friendships have been maintained ever since. Rosen still talks most days with John Stuart of Bluegrass Thoroughbred Services, while a round of golf with Roger Laurin and Shug McGaughey identified a lasting successor once his first trainer retired.

“I have a lot of good relationships in the horse business,” Rosen says. “I understand the clothing industry: that's how I make my living. The horse racing, I'm still learning a lot. In both cases, it's what I grew up with, hanging out with my father. I would go with him to the factory or the office, and they're always talking about clothing. Same thing with the horses, though he was more into the gambling. He'd come home after a big day, and I'd be allowed to count the money and tell him how much he'd won. (And he'd give me $100!) So it was something that I just naturally gravitated towards, as I got older.”

Evidently his father made no more valued bequest than the counsel of his friend Miles Rubin, who did everything possible to redress the grievous void in a young man's life. But while plainly inheriting the same, uncommon acumen, Rosen's coolly confident and reflective nature has made him a contrasting if no less natural “chief” than his extrovert father.

“My father and I had a really great relationship,” he says. “Parenting in the '60s and '70s was not the same as today. But we had a connection: I understood how he thought, appreciated what he did, and learned so much from him. He died when he was young, and I was very young. But I'd had the opportunity to work with him, I'd been long exposed to what he did and thought, and that gave me a platform for the future.

“In some ways, I admire people that go off and do things very different from their family. But it felt like my responsibility to take over. I had a feel for the clothing business, and I had a feel for the horses. Everything was there for me, all I had to do was follow in my father's footsteps. And that's what I did, without ever looking back.

“I ask myself now, 'How the hell did I do that?' But my father was sick for a while, so he had prepared me as best as he could. And you're young, and bold, and confident. Sure, that there were things I did right and things I did wrong. But there's nothing I look back on and say, 'Oh, I should have done that differently.' Other than maybe when my mother called me the night before the Preakness and told me to change the jock!” (He couldn't do that, and Chief's Crown lost by a head.)

Going back to our opening premise, the common challenge both on the Turf and in couture is not merely to anticipate the future (i.e. demand) but to shape it, too. Is there perhaps some equivalence between breeding purely to sell and mass-producing cheap threads? Because surely, it's those who keep faith in quality who set standards, and ultimately set trends?

“I'm in the business I'm in because I love the clothing industry,” Rosen replies. “I want to do things that I'm proud of, and that people working for the company are proud of. I want to be able to inspire somebody. I'm not in that end of the clothing business which is just about finding a way to make money. I want to create something meaningful, part of the future of our industry. And I think it's a lot the same with breeding. I'm trying to produce horses that can run on Saturday.

Andrew Rosen | Eclipse Sportswire

“I understand that there's a market for everything. The clothing industry is huge. I focus on one part of it, try to be really good at that. And horseracing is another enormous industry. As many people have tried to own it, and control it, it just doesn't work that way. So, again, I try to focus on what I think works for what I believe in.”

This aspiration has prompted Rosen to develop a transatlantic program that needs to be curated with exceptional skill, given how the competition at that level tends to enjoy apparently infinite resources.

“I always had the relationships in America but had to develop them in Europe as well, because I wanted exposure to bloodlines over there,” he explains. “I always felt that the 2-year-old racing in Europe was much better. It started earlier and, because it was all on the turf and on the straight, it was safer. You could get more runs into a horse, and aid its development that way. The 2-year-old racing there is pretty open and can be competitive for everyone. But then, as the horses get older, I think the big outfits-the Godolphins, the Coolmores, the Juddmontes-have a huge advantage. As the racing heats up for the 3- and 4-year-olds, it's pretty tough to compete.”

On this model, the likes of Icon Project (Empire Maker) and Theyskens' Theory (Bernardini) have thrived Stateside after laying foundations on European grass. With the right material, however, Rosen is also happy to keep campaigning indigenous stock in Europe. Last year, for instance, in partnership with Marc Chan he celebrated Group 1 success with Lezoo (GB) (Zoustar {Aus}) and Prosperous Voyage (Ire) (Zoffany {Ire}).

Prosperous Voyage was actually recommended by trainer Ralph Beckett when her original owners were looking to cash out; while Lezoo was proposed at the Arqana Breeze-Up by another of Rosen's trusted collaborators, Jamie McCalmont.

Rosen told McCalmont that she would bring €300,000 after a breeze like that, and that would be too much. “Jamie looked at me and laughed,” he recalls. “Then Marc saw her and liked her, so we said we'd follow her through. None of us thought we would get her at that price [€110,000]. Then, before she ran first time, Ralph told us that this one wasn't very good. 'Oh well,' I said, 'We have to go through bad ones to get good ones…' So she has been a very pleasant surprise!”

Rosen is hardly alone in recognizing how Beckett has now sealed a place in the European elite, but remains a grateful admirer of Brian Meehan along with Andrew Balding, Roger Charlton and John Gosden. “Although really good horses can overcome everything, it's obviously best if you can have them managed them the right way, put them in the right spots and so on,” he says. “But I'm very lucky that way, and I like having these relationships with a few different people over there. In America, basically all the horses go to Shug first. The American system is very different. But the racing is very different, too. The Americans don't really understand Europe, and the Europeans don't really understand America!

Jamie McCalmont | Fasig-Tipton

“But listen, that kind of polarization creates opportunities. The Americans are strictly focused on dirt racing, yet 60 percent of their major racing is on turf. That's why Europe has benefited from so many of us coming over to support the yearling sales and the secondary market. In the old days you had Gainesway and Claiborne and others bringing those top turf stallions over, and I do believe that we're not far away from that kind of horse working again [in Kentucky]. Peter Brant, a few other people are trying. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because none of them has worked. But it only takes one.”

As things stand, a little over half of Rosen's 30-odd horses in training are based in Europe; while he has 10 broodmares either side of the water, respectively divided between Watership Down and Kilshannig, in Europe; and Claiborne, Gainesway and Merriebelle in America. If you add young stock, you're looking at around 70 to 75 horses. But there's constant refinement: fillies retiring from one division to the other; other horses culled or sold to fund reinvestment.

“My philosophy is that I want to sell enough to cover the overhead of my operation,” Rosen explains. “Generally, I would always sell the colts, and sometimes fillies as well. My intention is for the horseracing to be a business, too. So, I have to do things that are commercially acceptable, and try to make the pieces fit together that way. But I wouldn't think of myself as a commercial breeder. Ultimately, what am I trying to do? Just develop good racehorses so I can have better broodmares. But that process requires me to sell horses, for sure. Because my operation would [otherwise] cost several million a year to run, and there has to be some logic to it.”

“Ultimately, you want your business to get a little bigger, a little better, each year. You're always looking at how to build. So, I am a commercial breeder to the extent that if I ever need to sell something, I want somebody always to be interested in what I have produced.”

As the conversation proceeds, it feels increasingly as though Rosen's twin enthusiasms share the same impetus: a dynamic, empathetic interest in where we find identity, and how we might cultivate it into something better. Maybe that drive traces to his grandfather, a Russian immigrant who was a cutter in a dress factory until launching this remarkable, dynastic engagement with American opportunity.

At one point, for instance, Rosen discusses efforts to preserve the historic identity of the Garment District in New York. He recently started a company where everything is manufactured locally. That's not easy, when Americans today are evidently reluctant to sit at a sewing machine all day, while expecting wages far in excess if those that suffice in other economies. But the quality Rosen seeks can't be produced by robots.

“I understand that this has to be more of a niche, that it's not for everyone,” he says of this domestic venture. “And I know it's never going to come back to what it was in the '60s and '70s. But I do think it's important to have a manufacturing base close to your design, because they go hand-in-hand. The closer they are, the better both are going to be. It's just like the countries that have the best stallions will also have the best horses. But to make these things happen, you need vision, passion, commitment. Without that, and without integrity-well, you won't ever keep something just because you always had it before.”

That last remark applies to us all, in that we all share the same patrimony, the same cumulative bequest from breeders past. But it also applies to Rosen on personal level, in terms of a passion inherited from his father.

“My early days in horseracing were so exciting,” he reflects. “First the Chris Evert times, with my father, and then all of us remembering him with Chief's Crown. There was no way I could not like it. And I have enjoyed it, all the way, with all the highs and lows. The lows haven't scared me, neither have the highs deceived me into thinking it's always going to be that way. I have always just really enjoyed it all: not only the racing and the breeding, and the trading, but above all the people.”

The post Rosen Made To Measure For The Chief’s Crown appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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No Mistaking this Man’s ‘Forte’

Two Grade I winners inside an hour last Saturday: both sold as November weanlings at Keeneland, both through the same consignment. But while their shared provenance at least guarantees that you'll want to drop by the Bluegrass Thoroughbred Services draft this time round, as well, it is not as though Forte (Violence) and War Like Goddess (English Channel) can otherwise elucidate the vagaries of our business.

Because while one made respectable money, the other was more or less given away. War Like Goddess, swept up in the kind of cull essential to a program on the scale of Calumet, mustered a solitary bid beyond her reserve and was lost for $1,200.

“But the guy I sold her to, he couldn't get the grand with Taylor Made next fall!” notes John Stuart. “Which means I'm a better salesman than all those guys!”

His chuckle makes plain the levity of this claim. But there is a more serious point, which he can expand by recalling another filly sold for the same client. In 2013, Stuart topped the Saratoga sale for Brad Kelley with a daughter of Dynaformer at $1,225,000–and, to be fair, she did actually go on to make the podium in a couple of graded stakes for Three Chimneys. In the adjacent stall, however, a Virginia-bred Curlin filly had been almost entirely ignored while her neighbor was shown and vetted.

“Came from Peggy Augustus' Keswick Stud,” Stuart recalls. “And she ended up the lowest-price horse in the sale. Anybody could have played for her at $40,000. If you had enough money to buy lunch at Saratoga, which is expensive, you could probably have gotten in the group of four bidspotters that bought her. They pinhooked her back to Timonium that October and she brought $86,000.”

Not bad, for a flip of barely two months. But the next time this filly came under the hammer she made $6 million as six-time Grade I winner Stellar Wind.

So you never know. War Like Goddess (whose much lamented sire, incidentally, was acquired for Kelley by Stuart) was eventually found by Donato Lanni at the 2-year-old sales, for $30,000, and has so far banked over $1.6 million. Forte, for his part, realized $80,000 as a weanling pinhook, making moderate gains when sold to Repole Stable and St. Elias Stables for $110,000 the following September. But he has now added the GI Breeders' Futurity S. to the GI Hopeful S., and Amy Moore of South Gate Farm is prudently taking her chance to consolidate what remains a young operation. His half-brother by Uncle Mo made $850,000 to Mayberry Farm at the September Sale, while their young dam Queen Caroline (Blame), in foal to Not This Time, sells as Hip 222 at Fasig-Tipton next month.

Forte winning the Claiborne Breeders' Futurity Saturday | Coady

Though not strictly Virginia-bred like Stellar Wind, Forte is as close as you can get. “He was bred by a Virginia breeder–first horse she ever bred–and raised on a Virginia farm,” Stuart says. “And, incidentally, he was the lowest-price horse that the Repole crowd bought last year. Of all those expensive horses, he's the one that has hit.”

If there is a note of pride in his voice, that's fair enough. For Stuart himself was not only raised in Virginia, but on no less iconic a farm than Llangollen. His mother, Tessa (subsequently Dole), who had arrived from England after the war as an aspiring show rider, was taking schoolgirls from nearby Foxcroft out hunting when she met–and was hired by–the farm's celebrated owner.

“Liz Whitney Tippett had gotten the largest settlement in American history when she divorced Jock Whitney because he wouldn't make her Scarlett O'Hara in 'Gone with the Wind',” Stuart says. “And of course she had this 1,000-acre farm in Upperville that was her wedding present from him. So she had everything. And my mother, for 10 years, was the person who knew where all the horses were, what their names were, what they were doing.

“So we lived on the farm, mother did the horse stuff and my father had the evening duty. He would go to the Dulles airport and pick up some young trainer by the name of Whittingham and a rider, Arcaro, that mother had to mount in the fox hunt the next day! Whittingham was too smart for that. But they all came through there, the Aga Khan, everybody.”

Liz was actually Stuart's godmother, but she had evidently lost some of her sunshine by this stage of her life and his family, expanded to three sons, eventually moved on. They remained local in Clarke County, however, his father having been grandson of a Winchester doctor who had practised to 93. (On finally retiring, he received a citation from President Eisenhower in person.)

“We had a feed store in Berryville and sold a bunch of feed and hay to the horses at Charles Town,” Stuart recalls. “And we were lucky to get paid. My father wasn't interested in the horses, he just sold the feed, so it was my mother had to hustle the horses all her life.”

War Like Goddess took the Joe Hirsch Turf Classic over the boys Saturday | Sarah Andrew

Stuart wryly relates a pivotal chapter in family folklore that might have given them all an easier life. His maternal grandfather, a Manchester cotton man, had manufactured typewriter ribbon; but when he died, IBM having decided that they didn't need ribbon anymore, the far-sighted trustees decided to divert his stake to a sounder investment than this passing fad for computer screens.

“Unfortunately they instead decided to make disposable cotton underwear for Englishwomen,” Stuart says, shaking his head. “And that busted the company. But it made my mother work harder in life. She went into the bloodstock business in America, and I got to learn. So something good came out of it…”

Sure enough, his mother took a 20% stake when another Clarke County horseman, Tyson Gilpin, in 1958 founded what Stuart acclaims as the first bloodstock agency in America.

“Say Bull Hancock wouldn't give you a season,” he explains. “And he was tough to get a season off, for a good horse. Then a shareholder could sell it privately and the Stallion Service Bureau was the first to do that for you.”

Even today few would consider the situation adequately improved, but those were certainly tough times for a woman in the horse business. But Tessa made a success of her pioneering role in a pioneering venture for a dozen years or so.

“My mother was independent, really a go-getter in a quiet, English way,” Stuart reflects. “There was no money at the time, and we all had to work as kids. I had to work my way through college. I was 14 when I had my first job at Saratoga, showing for Tyson. That would have been 1964.

“And then I worked for all the Virginia places, because in that era there were still a dozen really good breeders out there. People from all over the world would come in June and start in Charlottesville at the Van Clief farm, work their way up to Middleburg, and look at all the yearlings. So I was lucky, because it's nearly all gone now.”

In the heyday of the Virginian Turf, the Gilpin family had been able to import horses like Teddy (Fr) to Kentmere, but now came serial migrations to Kentucky: the Hancocks left, the stallions left, and the mares followed them.

“State of Virginia didn't do much to help,” says Stuart with a shrug. “They have now, with the Virginia Certified Program, that was a great idea. But the breeding, it's gone everywhere except for Kentucky. I mean, there's breeding everywhere. But if you're not in Kentucky, you're not commercial.”

And, actually, Stuart himself contributed to that revolution.

“When I first came here and put my sign out with my partner Peter Bance from Richmond, Virginia in 1980, the business was evolving,” he explains. “Because, you know, those old hardboots didn't prepare their horses well; didn't show them right. And so a group of us came in. Billy Graves, Fred Seitz. I'd been taught how to groom and show, I'd won a National Pony Club championship. And we also had a little different ethical standard. Some of those hardboots, they were interested in the one-night stand–not a honeymoon!”

Stuart at work | Keeneland photo

Stuart had started in the Bluegrass with a couple of years selling and advertising seasons for Spendthrift, just about the time Seattle Slew arrived. With the commercial market just taking off, it was a promising time to be seeking out new angles and opportunities. For instance, here came the young guy who had bought Meadow Stud back in Virginia, asking Stuart to fill the paddocks that had introduced Secretariat to the world. It so happened that there was a Contagious Equine Metritis scare just then, so Stuart did a deal with a shipping company to take stock for their month of isolation. And this also happened to be the summer that Sheikh Mohammed was sending the market into the stratosphere.

“He came to the summer sale at Keeneland and bought the highest-price filly in history, and the highest-price colt,” Stuart recalls. “And next thing I knew I was meeting six Sallee vans full of horses, Wednesday morning at the Meadow Stud. And then, in September, he bought about 100 more. Well, out of that whole bunch they got one little sprinter, Ajdal.”

But later dealings would prove very fertile, both for the Sheikh's team and Stuart. For example, he sold them G1 1,000 Guineas winner Blue Bunting (another Dynaformer filly bred by Brad Kelley) for $200,000 at Saratoga. And when he sent an Argentinian mare for what proved the final foal-share to Dubai Millennium, the Sheikh asked to buy her after losing his cherished young stallion. Urged to return to the same talent pool, Stuart found another Argentinian mare to send to Rahy and the result was Godolphin stalwart Rio de La Plata.

The South American scouting avenue had first opened through Roy, the son of Fappiano he brought back to syndicate in Kentucky.

“I flew down, didn't have any money, and the horse walked out of the stall,” Stuart recalls. “And he had a look of eagles about him. They wanted $1 million and I said, 'I'll take him.' And though he didn't really work in America, every country I leased him to–Brazil, Argentina, Chile–he was leading sire.”

Then he helped to import Blue Prize (Arg) (Pure Prize) to win the GI Spinster S. twice and the GI Breeders' Cup Distaff for Merriebelle.

“They don't hothouse them like we do,” he says of the South American breed. “And remember that in Argentina they race more like the United States than any country in the world. They run on the dirt, they go around our way, they get after their 2-year-olds. They make horses tough. And so if you're buying the best of the crop, they'll have gone through a lot to get the special one.”

Eclipse champion Chief's Crown | Coglianese

But the turning point was perhaps when Carl Rosen's son Andrew revealed a precocious wisdom in sorting out his father's estate.

“I got really lucky,” Stuart admits. “I was running low on funds, a young, struggling bloodstock agent with two sons. And they had this Danzig colt out of Six Crowns, who was a Secretariat daughter of Chris Evert. And Andrew said, 'If the estate needs some money, I can move this 2-year-old.' This was in June, he was still unraced. By the end of the summer, he was the best 2-year-old in the country: Chief's Crown. And I sold a half-interest in him to Robert Clay for $10 million cash. A half-interest!

“So I had my commission and got myself out of jail, and the horse won the first Breeders' Cup race. And I get to know this 25-year-old, Andrew Rosen. Hell, we've talked about every day ever since.”

Stuart was asked to handle the dispersal of the rest of the Chris Evert family.

“There was one that seemed much the most unlikely to be of merit,” he recalls. “She'd never run, she was huge, she had a tube hanging out of chest. Nijinsky Star. I guess there's been 30 graded stakes winners come through her for Juddmonte.”

Few horsemen can compete with the influence of Stuart's draft at that auction, which also included another mighty matriarch, Toll Booth, sold for John M. Schiff. But perhaps there is one legacy, a very literal one, that means even more to this proud Virginian.

“One of my favorite things in my professional career is that I got to sell the last crop of yearlings for Paul Mellon,” Stuart says. “As a result, I got to know the trustees. And, in his will, he had said: 'If you ever run across a really good charity that takes care of retired horses, then you can support it.' Well, at the time, I was president of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. And, in three different pops, I was able to get them $8 million from the Mellon estate. They gave $4 million to the Brits, too, because he was of course a great anglophile. But what was most important was not so much the money as the old guard saying to themselves, 'If Paul Mellon says we need to do this, then we need to do it.'”

Much of the change Stuart has observed in the business has nourished his own progress. Equally, however, he feels that some old principles are nowadays unduly overlooked.

“Okay, it's a lot more sophisticated now,” he concedes. “In the old days, you'd walk around with your trainer and buy your horses. Now you've got 30, 40 agents backed up with cardio, X-rays, DNA samples, and every other thing. The one thing they don't do much is study the pedigree. Back then, pedigree was the big thing.

“I do remember, as a young consignor, when James Delahooke came along with Guy Harwood, they'd make you walk and walk and walk. And of course he was very good at it. But now it's gone too far the other way. It's all about the physical–and they all follow the same horse.”

Stuart with his son, Sandy | Sue Finley photo

Needless to say, no less than his patrons with War Like Goddess, Stuart knows perfectly well what regret feels like. He sold Army Wife (Declaration of War) for $50,000 as a short yearling, and she has now earned close to seven figures. So none of us ever stops learning. Sure, now that he has tipped 70, Stuart is spending a little more time in Florida in winter and Maine in summer and is relying on his son, Sandy, to run the agency day to day. But it was only in recent years that he started, after due research, assembling a dozen mares of his own.

“And they've been spectacular,” he says. “I probably didn't give more than $50,000 for any of them, but I already have six silver cups for graded stakes. And no, I'm not going to tell you how I pick them!”

Stuart credits his wife, Douglas Wise Stuart, for her contributions to the team, as she painstakingly combs through the race records of every mare offered at the breeding stock sales.

One admitted ingredient, however, is that the mare could run. That, after all, is something he could have learned from his own pedigree.

“My mother died a couple years ago,” Stuart says. “She spent her last 20 years here in Lexington, said the country reminded her more of England than anywhere she'd been in America. Founded the Woodford Hounds here. Nothing fancy about her. Loved her dogs, loved her horses. But she was genuinely loved by those that knew her.”

Maybe she could have bought Llangollen itself, if only those trustees had stuck with IBM. But while Stuart would have been richer that way, the same could hardly be said of the life he has led.

The post No Mistaking this Man’s ‘Forte’ appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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