FEATURE
W hen the hammer finally fell on Lot 87 at the Inglis Digital Late November Sale in the spring of 2024, trainer Tony McEvoy faced an all- too-familiar problem. His team had bought the horse they wanted, a promising gelding named Half Yours, but they had stretched their budget to breaking point and spent $55,000 more than planned. To make matters worse, they didn’t have a single owner for the horse. It wasn’t the most speculative purchase McEvoy had made – he’d put his neck on the line for more expensive horses before – but convincing owners that a five-year- old gelding with just a handful of starts to his name and little pedigree to speak of was worth a punt proved an unfamiliar challenge. “I genuinely thought we would buy Half Yours for $100,000–$120,000. We had OTI Racing on board to go fifty-fifty to $250,000, but I didn’t think we’d get anywhere near that,” said McEvoy. “Well, he sailed past that. Terry (Henderson, OTI director) couldn’t go any further. Calvin (McEvoy) and Rayan (Moore, racing manager) were so bullish, they wanted him so badly. At $300,000 we weren’t the highest bidder – we put in one more, and thankfully $305,000 bought him. “History will show it was the best $5,000 I’ve ever spent.” The then little-known Half Yours would, of course, go on to become a household name as the 2025 Caulfield Cup and Lexus Melbourne Cup winner. But before he hit those heights, the McEvoys had to put together a group to race the horse. Trainers and syndicators buy horses without owners every season, with major auction houses Inglis and Magic Millions providing short-term finance while trainers and racing managers hurriedly pull together each group. Australia is the home of syndicated horse ownership, so owning a horse in partnership is part of the racing ecosystem – but it’s a relatively modern phenomenon.
“When I was riding work under Colin Hayes at Lindsay Park in the nineties, most horses were owned by one person. If they raced with someone else it would be one or two at most, and most likely they’d be mates,” McEvoy explained. “Today it’s nothing for an owner to race a horse with ten or twenty people, maybe more, and never meet everyone else who’s in the horse during its career. Syndication has made owning a racehorse a completely different experience.” When it came to confirming owners for Half Yours, the McEvoy team relied on the knowledge of their client base to construct a group of like-minded individuals.
“If an owner doesn’t see what you see, it’s hard to get them on board – it’s that simple,” said McEvoy.
“I called Jason Biasin. He’d been a long- time client but had gone through a tough time with the loss of his father and some business challenges. We stuck by each other through those times, and he was starting to get back into ownership. I put the horse to him and he didn’t hesitate. He took 25%. “Neville Smith was a new owner to the stable and had expressed interest in a nice, tried horse if it came along. He took 25% and suddenly we were halfway there. We’d been introduced to Tony G (Guoga) and put the horse to him; he loved what he saw and came in as well.” Guoga is quite a story in his own right. A former member of both the European Parliament and Lithuanian Parliament, Guoga describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, with significant crypto holdings and a successful professional poker career, once playing cards against US President Donald Trump.
Fancy a Gallop? | 61
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