Michael de Broglio

“Master Sabina’s win for me in the Summer Cup was a dream come true. Nothing to do with the R1,2 million stake for first prize or the betting money won, but for me it was a dream that started many years ago.” Although out of the country, Michael kindly found the time to chat to us about his homebred, Master Sabina and the long road it has taken to get them into the winner’s enclosure at Turffontein.

Beginner’s Luck

Michael’s first horse was Sabina Park, a Sportsworld filly out of Batimamselle, which he bought for R55k from Varsfontein’s 2002 National Yearling Sales draft. “I had started playing golf and had become friendly with Alec Hogg. I approached him and said I wanted to buy a horse and what was the best way to go about it. He said ‘go to David Ferraris, he is the best trainer in my opinion.’ I bid on quite a few that I got knocked out on and it got to a point in the day where I was thinking ‘this is silly and I’m going to end up losing’, but I carried on, probably just because my mom and Alec were there. Ormond was sitting behind his son when Sabina Park was led in and he said ‘Here’s one to go for. Sportsworlds are early types, they run early which is good for a first time owner.’ And that was it. I bid on her, did my job and off I went. From costing R55k, once she started running, she won R600k in about a three week spell, winning her first three races. It was so exciting.”

“Sabina Park was a champion. She was very underrated, because she had a lot of bad luck with injuries and so on and then the flu season came and cut down racing when she was at the real peak of her career. She had every disaster under the sun before her and I don’t think she was ever rated as good as she was. It’s interesting that both her and Promisefrommyheart were from the same crop at Varsfontein, they both ended up the top of their generation, they both ended up going back there and now Master Of My Fate is standing at stud there.”

They often say that beginner’s luck is the strongest, but Michael muses that you could also say it’s a curse. “The costs are astronomical, so if my first two had been disasters, one might view the whole thing differently, but good horses help feed the addiction. You end up making emotional decisions and not rational, logical decisions. Mind you, if you were being rational and logical, you probably wouldn’t be in racing!”

Home bred

Having bred Master Sabina himself, particularly from his star mare made it all the more special. “It’s a whole story, really. Back in 2003, Jimmy Lithgow did a programme for Tellytrack. It was a three part programme on owning a racehorse and they decided to follow a few people through the process. Colin Gordon at the RA gave them my name as one of the subjects. They filmed the whole story and the final quote Jimmy chose was me saying that I’m going to breed with her and hopefully she’ll have children I’ll be very proud of. I look back and think of all those things and everyone told me sell the horse, breeding is such a disaster, horses run into poles and die (which one foal has done – a Jet Master as well by the way. He was called Memento and he lasted about a week). They tell you all those stories, but the truth is it can be done by a small owner, and you can have a tremendous amount of satisfaction.”

Strong mares

“I suppose my strong belief is you’ve got to do it with good girls, to me it’s about the mothers and I believe in horses and in humans that hard working successful mothers will produce successful progeny. Absolutely you need the boy, but to me the mother’s more important. I’m not detracting from Jet Master, but with Promisefrommyheart no longer around, Sabina Park is the best of her generation alive in SA. Good mothers produce good children. Not all of them are going to be good of course, but I have two Gr1 winners and they have each produced a Gr1 winner. I have another 5 or 6 mares and not one has produced anything special. They’re not bad, MR 85 – 90 and that’s what they’ve produced. That’s genetics. We saw it with Australia – by a Derby winner out of an Oaks winner. How can you say afterwards ‘what a shock?’ That’s exactly what it was supposed to do. Of course, it’s pity they can’t produce 8 of them!”

How to breed a champion

“I can’t say I looked it up on any computer programme, I’ve just always believe in sending good mares to good sires. I read an article 2 years ago in the New York Times that a family only breeds on the basis of top girls – keeping their top girls and keeping the girls of their top girls to keep breeding with. That’s pretty much what I like to do and I believe in sending your best to the best. I’d been breeding to Jet Master and one year, for some reason, I got three contracts. The Devines continued to send me three every year after that. I must admit, although Sabina Park would have gone to him in any event, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to pay 3 times what his stud fee was at the time, but I didn’t know how to say no. Of course, looking back I wish I’d had more!”

“I know some people see it as being random and that anything can happen, but to me, it’s important how strong the mother is. Sabina Park won the SA Oaks and my horse Festive Occasion also won the Oaks. They were my two best girl horses and they both produced Gr1 winners for me (Do You Remember and Master Sabina). It’s not a surprise to me that a top mare who’s run in the Summer Cup will produce a horse that goes on to win it. With Master Sabina, the only surprise was that it took so long.”

Luck

“Sabina Park may well have been the best horse I ever owned, but also the unluckiest. Like his mother, Master Sabina has also been somewhat unlucky. He missed a lot of his 3yo career because of injury. Then he ran 0.25 lengths second to Yorker in the Summer Cup. He ran three wide, had to fight his way through traffic and was lunging at Yorker at the end, but because he didn’t win, none of that matters. Then he started haemoconcentrating and in the Met he never even took part and that was it. Nobody cares beyond the result.”

“At the time I had a website for Master Sabina and I remember reading a comment from that lawyer guy who once posed naked on a sports car. It was something along the lines of “can you believe this guy still has a website for this has-been horse”. I was quite hurt. It’s frustrating in horse racing that sometimes you know what you’ve got and what the excuses are, but nobody accepts it because the result isn’t there and you can’t explain differently because it sounds like the ramblings of a madman.”

“We were left out of the July and he was second favourite ahead of last year’s Summer Cup when he did a tendon. Of course, for all those stories, everyone else has their stories as well. The one advantage of being with Geoff is that Master Sabina had been with Louis The King and Yorker for 2 or 3 years, and when he says a horse is in the same class, then I know.”

Comeback

After a year off, Master Sabina made his comeback. “Geoff said we should run in the Victory Moon. I said no way, I said we both know better than this MR. What happens if he does well? We’ll need every advantage after being off so long.” Master Sabina made a very creditable return to the track, finishing just over 4 lengths off St Tropez at the end of October.

The Summer Cup

“I’m currently abroad, so I wasn’t at the track on Saturday, but I still struggled to sleep, woke up at 5am and had an upset stomach – all the things I normally have on big race days. Eventually I decided I wouldn’t be able to focus, so I booked a golf day, but I was back and forth with Whatsapp and watched on the internet.”

“Strangely enough, the video feed from SA broke up at 600m. I got to watch the build-up, all the singing, the concert, etc and with 600m to go, it froze and I couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t believe it. Then the messages started coming through and one minute you’ve won and the next you think it’s going to be snatched away from you, so perhaps it’s just as well I wasn’t there. I’m a very emotional guy and don’t know how I’d have handled sitting there with an objection like that.”

“We won narrowly, but when you get the victory, you take it. You have to have it every now and then in racing, just to make sure the losses are 20% of your money and not 80%! My wife says I made a mistake not being there, but I still got 80% of the satisfaction of the win and the fact that I wasn’t there doesn’t change anything. I was terribly excited and very happy. I think winning the big races is important in terms of owning horses – your non horse racing friends only want to know did you win the Summer Cup, Met or July – those are the only ones that count to other people. I’m not going to explain that they’re won on handicap terms, etc.”

Future plans?

“No matter how hard Geoff tried, the horse could not have been at his best on Saturday. If you take into consideration that the horse has only had one run in a year, it’s a remarkable training feat and it tells you that the horse still has 3 or 4 lengths to come.”

“If you said to me the injury will stand up, then I would say you could choose your target, but it hardly ever does. Geoff wants to truck down for J&B Met. It’s a prestigious race and I would love to have a runner, but the tracks are very heavy and with his injury, Master Sabina can’t work there, so we’d have to truck down. A MR105 is not going to win, so it really depends on how much they can improve him. Is he capable of running to a MR112 / 113 in another province after being trucked down? I don’t have great belief in that type of thing, but by the time Met comes I’ll probably convince myself why he has a chance.”

“I think the real target is the President’s Challenge in April and possibly the July, but it’s so hard. One can’t say let’s not race in anything and just target a specific race – the tendon could go in a training gallop and then we wouldn’t have anything. Either way, for me it’s just a long story that’s had a happy ending. Even if he never wins another race, I’ll be very happy.”