Doncaster a Weathervane in Tempestuous Times

DONCASTER, UK–Well, this is the day when perhaps we'll start to know. Only perhaps, mind. Each auction is a market in its own right and, besides, everyone has over recent months become accustomed to such wild fluctuations in outlook that the world can look a very different place between breakfast and dinner, never mind between the opening session of the yearling sales season, at Doncaster on Tuesday, and its conclusion two months hence.

All that said, the opening skirmishes of the Goffs UK Premier Yearling Sale are bound to be treated as a barometer for what lies ahead. During these uniquely challenging times, vendors and consignors will watch the early returns with far more than even their customary trepidation. Equally, the likelihood of “a buyer's market” will not assuage the anxieties of core clients such as trainers, nervously awaiting orders, or pinhookers, who have to gamble on a return of economic confidence as soon as next spring.

So while the whole community has demonstrably been at pains to hold its collective nerve and work together, not least the rival sales companies, it is only when the gavel comes down that we can begin to know whether we have merely been helping each other to rearrange the furniture on the Titanic; or have actually managed to board a serviceable lifeboat, with a functioning motor and plenty of buckets.

For the little it may be worth, the ambience on the sales grounds on the eve of the sale seemed positive. The consensus was that there were more prospectors, relatively speaking, than has been the case at sales staged in other sectors since the lockdown. Nobody was foolhardy enough to be making predictions, and the ongoing fidelity of the Maktoums–perennial mainstays of the industry–is being monitored with more angst than ever.

But perhaps there was something auspicious about the change in the weather: horses had been unloaded over the weekend into a bitter north wind, like a sadistic downpayment of the coming winter. On Monday, they were being displayed in the kind of perfect late-summer weather–high, slow clouds occasionally filtering warm sunshine–that could only be more flattering to cricket on the green than it was to the shimmering flanks of a meticulously groomed yearling.

At the best of times, Henry Beeby approaches the sales season with a candid paranoia about picking up any kind of infection that might compromise his resonance from the rostrum. As a friend said to the Goffs CEO: “You must be delighted: nobody's touching you, everyone's washing their hands the whole time–and nobody thinks you're weird anymore!”

But the pandemic has been a rollercoaster to challenge even Beeby's trademark dynamism.

“An ex-colleague, who has retired, rang me up recently and said: 'I bet you'd like a bit of foot-and-mouth!'” Beeby says. “And I said: 'Well, I'm not sure I'd like it. But yes, by comparison, having seemed an absolute nightmare at the time, foot-and-mouth now seems like the mildest of inconveniences.' When we moved a sale, someone said: 'At least you've given us certainty.' And I replied: 'In the COVID world, there is no such thing as certainty.'”

That clearly extends to the next two days. While it would clearly be unfair to invite public commitment to any specific number, even in private it is presumably difficult for the Goffs management to agree what might pass as a tolerable loss of momentum after the relentless bull run of recent years. In broad brush-strokes, however, Beeby explains that the accountants will be measuring the year against an established “worst-case scenario.”

“I'll be quite open,” Beeby declares. “Our financial year is Apr. 1 to Mar. 31 so, if there could be such a thing, I suppose from that point of view it happened at the right time. It meant we could recalibrate all our budgeting for the year. Rather than base it on the last couple of years, we said: 'What is the worst year we have had, in terms of ring turnover, in recent memory?' In Ireland, it was 2010; in England, 2013. So we worked everything backwards from there: if we can hit those targets, having worked out our costs to a break-even position, then we can just tread water and hopefully move forward again after COVID.”

Beeby remarks that last year's Irish turnover of around €123 million matched almost precisely the business done in 2007, having slumped to €45 million in 2010 after the financial crisis. In other words, a perfect U-shaped recovery had been completed. What the whole global economy is craving now, of course, is a much narrower, steeper “V” revival.

“It does put everything in perspective,” Beeby reflects. “Normally, you're deeply upset if your sale hasn't grown by at least inflation. But now it's a question of leading with the clearance rate, because our primary focus–going into every sale–is to deliver liquidity to the market, to let the vendors sell their horses for a price they can accept.

“The Land Rover Sale was down 36%. In a normal year, that would have me virtually suicidal, though actually, compared to its competitors, it wasn't too bad. But the clearance rate on day one was 84%. Slightly less on the second day, but it was a question of just keeping the wheel turning, keeping the market going, keeping the liquidity, helping people through their cycles. Because of course a yearling is only a yearling once, and same with your 3-year-old store, or your breeze-up horse.

“So what it needs from us, and from our clients, is adaptability, flexibility, reactivity. It's about not being afraid to act quickly, to make quick decisions; but equally to be unafraid of saying: 'No–we need to change it again.'”

And Beeby speaks warmly of how the industry, as a whole, has stepped up to the plate. He is also perfectly aware that a lot of people looked to the sales houses for a lead. He stresses that Goffs and its principal rival Tattersalls already tend to work together, in the interests of their clients, more routinely than people may realise.

“We are competitive, of course we are, but this year in particular it's been a question of putting that to one side and helping each other,” Beeby says. “Because we know we're in it together. There was a period of a week or 10 days when I think I must have spoken more to [Tattersalls chairman] Edmond Mahony than some of my colleagues. We're swimming in a very small pool, most of the clients are mutual clients, and in various categories–be it the breeze-ups, be it stores, be it yearlings–most major vendors sell in all places. So it just makes enormous sense to co-operate and co-ordinate and harmonise.”

The toughest nettle to be grasped, perhaps, was the decision to transfer the Orby and Sportsman's Sales here to Doncaster from Co Kildare.

“The Orby used to be called the Irish National Yearling Sale,” Beeby notes. “It's a major event in Ireland. The modern-day Goffs was set up in 1975 to provide high-class facility in Ireland for Irish breeders, so it was a big decision to move. But aren't we lucky that we had this complex here? First of all, prior to 2007, it wouldn't have been as easy because D.B.S. [Doncaster Bloodstock Sales] was a separate entity; and prior to 2008, we were across the road with 290 stables that weren't to a high enough standard for these horses, and certainly the Orby and Sportsmans. So we're very lucky that we are served by two such high-class sales facilities. And largely people have said: 'That makes sense, let's do it.'”

No market, of course, can sustain perennial growth. Nobody could have anticipated quite what it was that eventually broadsided the bloodstock bonanza, but everyone always knew that cycles are inevitable. In our industry, moreover, too many sectors are too interdependent for the headline figures to show “pure” gain. Many Thoroughbreds are sold many times over: in utero, even, and certainly as foals, yearlings, breezers, horses-in-training, breeding stock. And then everything starts over. But an apparently booming yearling market, for instance, always raises the stakes for the breeze-up sector. In turn, that will often mean that even a corresponding boom in the 2-year-old market is illusory; that margins have remained pretty stable.

Certainly pinhookers here are treading warily. “We have seven months for everything to turn round,” said one. “But we don't even know what things will look like in seven days.”

Another, who had actually come out ahead from the breeze-up sector's delayed calendar, was hoping that these initial yearling exchanges may be particularly cagey, saying: “If they do wait and see, then I'm hopeful I might get one or two early on. But nobody knows what's going to happen. If we had another lockdown of racing, then we're all in trouble. But we're here. That's a start!”

And it is in these times, when the soil seems thinnest, that the seeds of subsequent fortune will often be sown.

“Absolutely,” says Beeby. “There will be great opportunities. These horses were bred in pre-COVID times, when things were going really well, and there are some beautiful horses here.”

As detailed by colleague Kelsey Riley in yesterday's edition, moreover, Premier Sale graduates have been excelling even in the constricted programme contrived after lockdown. As ever, they have been doing so where the emphasis is on speed; but they have been doing so at the highest level, with consecutive wins in both the GI Commonwealth Cup and GII Norfolk S. at Royal Ascot. Already nine graduates of last year's sale have won stakes.

Beeby feels that the bloodstock market, so far as it has been tested, has so far stood up surprisingly well at a time when owners have been deprived of their customary adrenaline at the racetrack; and when prizemoney dividends have made even less sense than usual of the investment demanded of them. That gives him “quiet hope” for the next two days.

“There's going to be a market here,” he says with a shrug. “Quite what it is, remains to be seen. But it's the old cliché. All you can do is your best. We are a very resilient industry. And why is that? It's because for most of us, it's not a job, it's our life; it's what we live and breathe. Even if we wanted to, most of us probably couldn't do anything else. I certainly can't: I've done this for 38 years, don't want to do anything else, and am certainly not qualified to. And I daresay that's true of most of us here. So what do you do? You make hay when the sun shines. You have a good time, you make the most of it. And when things go badly, you knuckle down and make sure you get through it.

“There was a time, before the breeze-up sales, when the previous year we had already turned over £46 million–and this time it stood at zero. But what's been heartening has been the calmness of so many people. There's never really been a sense of panic, which you could have understood. People have said: 'Just give us something to aim for.' And even though sometimes we've had to change even that, there has just been that feeling that we have to keep the wheel turning. People have been prepared to knuckle down and work together, put their normal differences or individual ambitions to one side. That's been refreshing.

“We have to keep trying, to keep as much normality as we can in an incredibly abnormal world. And I suppose someday we'll look back and say: 'Do you remember 2020?'”

He gives a wry grin. He knows how few of us will do so in tones of nostalgia. But even though his father, DBS stalwart Harry, will be missing for the first time since 1964, he will be avidly following proceedings on Beeby's mother's “machine”.

“So the message,” concludes Beeby, “is really to keep calm and carry on.”

The first of 423 lots catalogued over two sessions enters the ring at 10 a.m. on Tuesday.