Racing: Irish dream becomes $1.3m reality

It's crayfish tails in the shell and all the wine you want at the Pencarrow Stud's tent at the 79th National Yearling Sales at Karaka.

This is the hospitality wing of Peter and Philip Vela, former owners of the yearling that just fetched the brothers $1.3 million - the highest price for a filly since 2003, and the top price at this year's sale.

Here, a short walk past lines of loose boxes, excited yearlings whinny, rear and paw the ground in the sale ring.

Punters, most of them male, saunter round in the heat, watching. Then, when a particularly well-bred horse is due in the sales ring, they converge quietly. Most bidding seems to come from the back and in the aisles where small groups of men holding sales books make signals with the deadpan look of practised auction buyers. But look closely and you'll notice that after they have bid $200,000-odd but failed, their fingers are shaking.

Despite a team of youngsters who whip in and scoop it up between lots, the overwhelming smell is of horse manure.

For the Vela brothers, whose own bloodline goes back to Croatia, the 79th National Yearling Sales Series is the culmination of a strategy that started in 1997 when they bought the sales from Wrightsons and injected new life into the complex.

The brothers, whose wealth is estimated at more than $50 million, earned from their fishing and bloodstock businesses, were already heavily involved as racehorse owners. After their mare Ethereal won the Melbourne and Caulfield Cups in 2001, they were keen to have her mated with champion Irish sire Danehill, whose progeny were starting to do well in Australasia.

By then Danehill was about 17, earning about $200,000 a service, and his Irish owners decided he was too old and too valuable to be shuttling backwards and forwards between Ireland and New South Wales, servicing mares.

At that point the disappointed brothers decided to buy 20 Irish broodmares that they would mate with Danehill in Ireland in Southern Hemisphere time, then bring back to New Zealand to foal.

When the mighty stallion was in a playful mood one day, and reared up and broke the stifle bone in his hind leg, it was a tragedy for the bloodstock world. Like Seabiscuit, of movie fame, he was a stallion and far too active to be treated. He was lost to the industry.

The Vela brothers realised they had lined themselves up to win big time. Their Irish mares foaled in quarantine in the spring of 2003 in Cambridge, then moved to the Vela-owned Pencarrow Stud between Cambridge and Hamilton.

On Monday, last year's top-priced $1.1 million yearling, a Danehill-sired colt, won his first race at Avondale. And simultaneously the 18 surviving and saleable yearlings, among the last from Danehill, went on sale.

Chasing them were nearly double the number of overseas buyers who made the trip from Europe last year. About 100 rooms were booked at the Hilton hotel - up from 40 in 2004 - and here at the Pencarrow hospitality tent, the accents are Irish and Australian as well as New Zealand.

London-based millionaire David Richwhite, well known in racing circles during the 80s, sits at a white-clothed table with white-moustached Philip Vela. Later Vela's niece Petrea, 29, introduces Adrian Nicol of Kildare, Country Wicklow, who has already bought seven horses for $3.1 million for an international racing partnership. And he's "not finished yet".

Unlike her father and uncle, who are now based in Geneva, Petrea lives on the Karaka complex and runs the marketing and public relations side of the yearling sales business.

Her sister Victoria and brother Nicholas are working here too. "It's outstanding," she says of the latest big Danehill sale. "It's very exciting to watch horses go through the ring, and when it comes from our family's draft it's even more exciting."

As the weather starts to cool at 4.30 the last yearling prances through the ring, Then the Vela's strategy comes to fruition. Their Danehill filly gets top price for the year - a whopping $1.3 million.