Stage is Set For Another Gunther Masterclass

12/20/2024 01:18 PM

In those days, everything on the waterfront was done by hand. John Gunther especially remembers the 120lbs sacks of flour he had to haul onto Russian ships, month after month. But then the one thing he could always do was work. Back in Alberta, on the farm where he was raised, he would shift 10,000 bales of hay every summer.

Yet he has only ever been wiry in build. There has plainly always been some other source of strength. In the Latin phrase, multum in parvo: he condenses “much into little.” Nobody should be surprised, then, if the program he has since developed at Glennwood Farm should have punched so far above weight; nor if its latest project, Crestwood rookie Stage Raider, now does exactly the same.

Back on the Vancouver docks, however, horses were doing him no good at all. Diligent as he was, he could never save any money; not with Exhibition Park right across from the pier.

Growing up, he had always adored horses. Following the death of his father, he'd been brought up by an uncle and aunt out on the prairies. He didn't dare ask for one himself, there wasn't the money, but would gaze longingly at any horse glimpsed when the school bus stopped at other farms.

The daydreaming had to end, though, when he left school and joined the many relatives he had working quayside.

“And I'd go over and blow my pay check every weekend, gambling on those horses,” he recalls. “I just loved racing so much. Until one day I met these stock promoters in a beer parlor, and they talked me into investing. So now I was instead putting all the money I could into this one stock. And it tanked. I lost it all.”

And here's the bit that makes his daughter Tanya chuckle. Because John's reaction to this disaster was not to retreat, chastened or embittered, but to recognize the cue to his fortune.

“Having lost all that money, I thought, I've got to get into this!” he says. “Got to figure this out. So I left the waterfront that I loved and took the Canadian Securities Course.”

“And, actually, this explains my dad to a T,'” says Tanya. “The stock had nose-dived. It was a miserable failure. That would put most people off, right? Not him. It was, 'No, now I got to conquer this thing.'”

John gives a shrug. “Anyway that's how I got into the brokerage business,” he says. “And then I got lucky in the stock market and made some money.”

Pure luck, plainly. Nothing to do with a stubborn persistence, nor self-belief, courage, enterprise, acuity. But whichever of these assets may have contributed to John's rise from longshoreman to corporate financier, a surplus remained to make Glennwood arguably the most influential farm of its size on the Turf today.

From around a couple of dozen mares, across 2018-19 the Gunthers famously produced winners of the U.S. Triple Crown, G1 St James's Palace Stakes and GI Breeders' Cup Classic from the same crop. And now their footprint is expanding again, towards a potentially historic legacy. Glennwood's impact at stud in Europe extends between Justify's champion City Of Troy, to the very promising Without Parole at Newsells Park; and the half-brother to Justify now starting in Kentucky duly demands far more attention than a single stakes success at Ellis Park might imply.

Stage Raider was delivered by Stage Magic (Ghostzapper) 12 days after her sophomore son claimed leadership of his crop in the GI Santa Anita Derby. After Justify proceeded to the Triple Crown, the Gunthers retained his sibling at $950,000 as a yearling–and that looked another smart decision when he won his second start at Keeneland by over 10 lengths, making himself an automatic 'TDN Rising Star.'

“It was quite exciting,” Tanya recalls. “Stage Raider was the talk of the talk of the town after that. Of course, he was by Pioneerof the Nile, who'd sired American Pharoah; and meanwhile his dam had come up with Justify. So you had Triple Crown on both sides of the equation.”

But while Stage Raider followed up in a Belmont allowance, and only failed narrowly to follow up his Ellis success the following year in graded company, he never quite lived up to that early potential. Hence a restrained opening fee of $6,500.

“But the days he put it out there and ran, he showed that he had a lot of talent,” Tanya insists. “On his day, he was very good. And if he had some quirks, he was very game. He didn't mind going inside or between horses, and could fight to the wire. You like to see that type of gutsiness in a racehorse. So it's not just his genes. It's not like he's one of those well-bred horses that never make it. He won almost half a million dollars. You don't do that without talent.

“He's not too big, for a 'Pioneer,' which I like: between 16 and 16.1. He was always really balanced, as a foal and all the way through. That's something we've seen in all our best horses. He's very correct too. So you can breed mares with a lot of different physicals to him.”

Crestwood has carved an astute niche in the fiercely competitive Kentucky stallion market, lately achieving notable traction with Caracaro. “They're good at getting those sorts of horses off the ground, that might not be so obvious,” Tanya says. “They really appreciate pedigree, and the right kind of matings, so we're excited to be working with a great group of guys.”

Stage Raider's appeal, at a budget fee, can only be heightened by the unmissable functionality of the genes now being so expensively recycled by his half-brother.

“Justify is producing horses of all kinds, all over the world: Australia, England, America; dirt, turf; short, long,” Tanya observes. “I haven't seen an American-bred horse do it quite like that, in my experience. And I'd like to think Stage Raider could be a real crossover stallion, too. When Justify went to stud, I remember wondering whether he could get turf horses? I figured yes, because you've got Scat Daddy, Ghostzapper, Pulpit. And here you've got Pioneer/Empire Maker, which we've seen work on different surfaces, and of course still Ghostzapper and Pulpit. So you've got real crossover scenarios there.”

Tanya is also heartened by the impact made by the inexpensive first crop of Thousand Words, corroborating the impression made by other sons of Pioneerof The Nile that his premature loss is being redressed by his legacy as a sire of sires.

But the real lure for breeders will be the nearly mechanical replication of genetic excellence achieved by this extraordinary program. Though his stock has been divided either side of the ocean, potentially diluting his profile, Without Parole has already had a dozen winners from 45 named foals, including one that just missed a Breeders' Cup podium.

“We've been super-pleased how early some of them have been,” Tanya remarks. “I was expecting them to be a little later, and I feel like the consensus is that he's improving the mares. Again, he has that balance, and a good keen mind. He always liked to do the job and wanted to do it well. And while this may sound crazy, sometimes I look at his offspring and see something in their eye, just an expression, that reminds me of him.”

As will now be the case with Stage Raider, the Gunthers' own support has helped to establish Without Parole. That's challenging, when your horizons are broader than your numbers. But Glennwood, by departing from parochial conventions of commercialism, has reliably ended up creating demand for something different. That has required much patience, and no less imagination. John has been going to Tattersalls for 30 years, and in the 1990s sent a filly over to Dermot Weld in Ireland to win a stakes race on debut.

Then, having been present for that astounding exhibition in the G1 Queen Anne Stakes, they shipped a young Lemon Drop Kid mare to England in the hope that she might get to Frankel. Though her first foal by Speightstown had just won a couple of minor races for Shadwell in England, that hardly seemed likely to suffice.

“But that was Frankel's second year, and people were knocking his foals,” John recalls.

“People were saying he wasn't stamping them,” agrees Tanya. “So actually it was a moment where you could get to him, if you were keeping faith. And then the Speightstown went to Dubai and won the [G2] Godolphin Mile, and later the [GI Breeders' Cup] Dirt Mile. Because that was Tamarkuz. So the page proved up, just not at the time we were signing the contract.”

When the resulting colt went to Tattersalls, John set a steep reserve after having allowed a Scat Daddy colt to slip through his grasp at Keeneland a few weeks previously.

“When we took Justify to the ring, we thought for sure we were going to RNA him,” Tanya says. “Because he had failed, like, 10 or 12 vets. He'd had an OCD removed from his stifle. And Dad had a $499,000 reserve so I was like, 'For sure, he's coming home.'”

“And I wanted him to,” John confirms. “That's why I put a high number on him. But then he sells for $500,000.”

So John, determined to avoid a repetition, raised his original 600,000gns reserve on the Frankel colt to 675,000gns. Sure enough, he stalled at 650,000gns. As a result, 10 days after watching Justify win the GI Belmont Stakes, father and daughter were able to watch Without Parole carry their own colors to success at Ascot.

And, of course, there was more to come: Vino Rosso, the only other colt they'd sold alongside Justify in Book 1, came through at four to win the biggest prize in America.

Little wonder if people often ask for their secret. But Tanya, who has always done the matings, has never believed in short cuts: she isn't into nicks or genetic testing or heart scans. (It still tickles her that one predictive service declared Justify to be a sprinter.) Instead she delves deep into family; deep enough, for instance, that you find Without Parole's ninth dam is a sister to Man o' War.

People ask her derisively how genetic material can penetrate six or seven generations? “They just want a silver bullet,” Tanya says. “But there never is one. First of all, you got to keep them alive. That's what I always say. And that's not as easy as people think, who haven't bred their own. Then you have to raise them right, so their bones grow, they're healthy, all of that. And then you've got to get them through prep, without them running through a fence, and finally hope they get into good hands. But yes, obviously before all that is trying to make the match right.”

Nor does that ever reduce to any simple formula.

“I mean, it's like a ball and you look at all sides of it: pedigree, physicality, temperament, distance,” Tanya continues. “You'd kind of have to get in my brain to understand how I look at matings. But you do start to understand your own families, and what they're producing.”

Lessons for us all, then, in the way a generational force has been ignited in the breed. Tanya takes due pride in Justify, but stresses that her own input only paid off because of her father's vision.

“Dad doesn't really have any limitations on his imagination,” she says. “He's always thought out-of-the-box, always set lofty goals. After Justify won the Triple Crown, he said, 'Well, now we have to do it in England.' And I'm like, 'Can we just enjoy it for a minute?!'”

But that, of course, is how a young longshoreman became one of the most respected breeders on the planet.

“My uncles and cousins on the waterfront probably thought I was crazy when I left,” John ponders.

“Probably still do,” his daughter replies.

But nobody should find anything crazy in the idea that Justify's half-brother might now rise in his slipstream.

“The mare's thrown very good physicals all along, so I like to think that Stage Raider will pass that along too,” Tanya says.

“Fingers crossed, he'll end up working for people who can't access Justify's genes. All anyone can ever do is work with these great pedigrees, here and in Europe, and figure out some sort of tapestry, some ways to blend things.

“I mean, you never imagine you could shape the breed or whatever. But it's kind of cool, one horse at a time, to try to do something special; to get the magic to happen again.”

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