O'Kelly Keeps The Show On The Road

Even in the midst of a pandemic, the show must go on for the breeders and pinhookers preparing to bring their investments to the yearling sales later this year. While lockdowns and heightened border controls threatened to put a damper on cross-continent inspections, Tattersalls auctioneer John O'Kelly wasn't about to leave his clients high and dry. With the familiar territory of hotel reservations and restaurant dining out of the question, O'Kelly devised an adventurous alterative: a campervan journey.

Last week, O'Kelly set out from his home in Belgium in a rented campervan and spent five days driving between some 20 stud farms in France and Germany, where he camped out between a busy schedule of inspecting yearlings and sitting in traffic jams.

“I go around to France and Germany every year on behalf of Tattersalls looking at yearlings,” O'Kelly explained. “Clearly this year, the hotels and restaurants were closed so I had to make a decision. We have plenty of clients out there that we appreciate enormously who had nominated horses for our sales and they needed to be seen, so I thought, 'let's see if we can do it.'”

O'Kelly had to gather special paperwork to cross the borders, including a letter from Tattersalls and invitations from each of the farms he was to visit. “We had to explain that it was work that required us to be there, not something that could be done from a distance,” he said.

O'Kelly's journey began with a 4 1/2 drive from his home about an hour outside Brussels to Deauville, where he spent two days before making the seven-hour trip to Munich. Traffic jams en route to Berlin threw a bit of a wrench in his plans-“I probably sat in traffic for about eight hours in my campervan, but I couldn't really get up and make a cup of tea,” he said-and once finished there it was on to Hamburg. O'Kelly inspected 155 yearlings over the five days.

“People [at the farms] were absolutely charming,” he said. “I rang people and said, 'I'm going to be up there, would you mind if I parked in your yard?' I just needed water and an electric plug point. They very kindly welcomed me with open arms. So I drove into the farms, parked my van, said hello to people and kept my distance from the other people. To be honest my wife cooked my food for me before I left, so I heated my food and saw the horses either before or after.”

While O'Kelly and the campervan have since parted ways, his journey isn't over yet. Earlier this week he made the journey by car from Belgium to Ireland, where he will spend 14 days in quarantine in Dublin before continuing on his inspections. O'Kelly said he is still wary of air travel and is treating social distancing with the utmost seriousness.

“I'm treating it as if I have it [coronavirus],” he said. “Going from farm to farm to farm, I could carry something from one farm to another so we've got to be responsible.”

O'Kelly said breeders across Europe have expressed similar concerns about the health of the market, but he said there is also a prevailing sense of perseverance.

“Everybody is concerned about the virus and its effects,” he said. “The breeders have gone to the trouble and bred their horses and they're ready to sell, but they're concerned about where the market is going to be. But as one very wise gentleman said to me during the week, 'there's no point in being doom and gloom. The American stock market is picking up again, people are reinvesting for the future.' This is a blip and it will get better. Now whether it will get better immediately for the yearling sales this year, who knows. But it will get better, and I thought that was a very positive attitude to take. People will be inventive and they will pull together and find a way around it. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel, but right now everyone is looking for a little flicker to shine.”

An Irish-born, Belgium-based auctioneer camping out in France and Germany to inspect yearlings certainly indicates how small and close-knit the bloodstock world is, and while on the phone with a Kentucky-based reporter O'Kelly was keen to remember recently departed friends Gerry Dilger and Cris Caldwell.

“Gerry had many, many huge admirers in Ireland and was very helpful to many people,” he said. “Cris and I used to exchange little ideas about what we were doing as auctioneers and I always appreciated that. I learned something every time.”