'Unearthing Value Is The Great Challenge' – Meet BBA Ireland's New Agent Adam Potts

DEAUVILLE, France–As of Tuesday morning it's been six days since Adam Potts landed in Deauville, but there's no time to slow down as the newest recruit to the team of bloodstock agents at BBA Ireland. With the Arqana August Sale fast disappearing in the rear-view mirror, attentions now turn to the v.2 Yearling Sale and the catalogue of 189 lots scheduled to go through the ring when bidding gets underway at 11am local time.

For Potts the task until then is simple: to get through as many of the lots as is physically possible. It's a painstaking process but all part of the ethos which has served him so well in his career thus far, with no reason to abandon it after he was headhunted for his new position during the breeze-up sales earlier this year.

“I think looking at as many horses as possible gives you the best chance to unearth value,” Potts explains. “I always think the more horses you see the more you learn. It's a useful exercise even for next year when these yearlings run at two and you see a horse that has won. You can go back on your notes and find that you've either been vindicated in that you liked it or, if you didn't, you can find out why and try to keep training your eye.

“I suppose your eye is an ever-evolving thing and it's a bit like the 10,000-hour rule where they say if you want to master anything, you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it–maybe you have to look at 10,000 horses! It does take time [viewing all of the horses at a sale]. If I go from morning to evening, you can maybe do 150 horses, but you have to keep at it.”

At the current rate Potts will surely take no time to reach that 10,000 figure, if he hasn't already, with last month's Irish Oaks third Purple Lily (Ire) (Calyx {GB}) perhaps the standout name among the horses he's sourced to date. It's a transaction Potts remembers fondly, even if the €17,500 foal he bought didn't do much for his own bank account when selling for €24,000 as a yearling.

“Purple Lily was a funny one,” says Potts. “Although you haven't been rewarded financially, you've been vindicated in what you bought because the end result was that of a very good filly. I remember after we sold her as a yearling, we sat down and discussed where we went wrong and why we shouldn't have bought her. Two years later we were discussing why she was so great!”

One way or another, Potts has certainly shown himself to be a fine judge of a Thoroughbred, with the results of his pinhooking venture with Danny O'Donovan and TDN colleague Brian Sheerin there for all to see. At this year's Goffs UK Doncaster Breeze-up Sale, for example, they offered a Sioux Nation filly who realised £300,000, having been picked up a few months earlier for just €45,000 at the Tattersalls Ireland September Yearling Sale.

Potts was a one-time colleague of Sheerin at the Racing Post, just one step on a journey in racing which has involved a variety of roles and many people to thank along the way.

“It's been with plenty of help and support from a lot of different people over the years,” Potts begins when explaining how he came to be in the position he finds himself in today.

“I spent three or four years with Ken Condon and he's been brilliant. He's a very composed and measured trainer who was always there to give good advice. Michael Magill of Bellewstown Farm Stud has always been a brilliant help as well, from when I was a bit younger. He brought me around the sales when I probably wasn't so sharp on Flat horses. He really trained my eye and made me look at pedigrees in a totally different way to what I did.

“I spent time with other trainers like Emmet Mullins, who was great as well, while my parents [Barry and Suzy] have always been very supportive of me going into bloodstock and making a go of it. They've all been a massive help.”

Suzy was there with him at Leopardstown last month when the Kevin Coleman-trained Latin Fever (Ire) (Equiano {Fr}), the filly he owned along with O'Donovan and Sheerin, defied odds of 80-1 in making a successful racecourse debut. It's been quite the year for the trio on the pinhooking side of things, but that evening at Leopardstown is clearly uppermost in Potts's mind when asked to reflect on his own personal highlights.

“Latin Fever winning at Leopardstown was just a brilliant day,” he sums up. “I'm from Derry which would be a fair trip away from Leopardstown, but growing up I would always have gone to the Irish Champion Stakes and just been in awe of the whole spectacle.

“At that time it would have been beyond my wildest dreams to ever have a winner at Leopardstown, so it was just an amazing thrill to win a race there and to be able to enjoy the day with my friends who were in on the horse and my mum who would have driven me to Leopardstown for all those Champion Stakes as a kid. It was great to be able to share that experience with her, too.”

Explaining what drew him to the filly in the first place, he adds, “Equiano mightn't have made that many people's lists, but I just saw her on the path and she really caught my eye. She just had a lot of qualities that you'd want in a racehorse and her pedigree is actually very good. She's a half-sister to a stakes winner by Markaz and from a deep American pedigree that has always popped up with a good horse.

“I weighed it all up and thought that at a level she'd be well worth chancing. Thankfully, she fell within our budget and the rest is history. Kevin is an excellent trainer and has really made a mark in such a competitive country. Horses are happy in his place and he already had luck with Danny and Brian on other horses-in-training- so it made sense to send her to him when we knew she wasn't getting into any breeze-up sale. It doesn't always go right in this game, but when it does it goes really right and that's the beauty of it. You go through so many hard days to get the euphoric day.”

And did that euphoric day at Leopardstown also involve a return trip to the betting ring, after having cheered on a filly who'd traded at three-figure odds before settling on her SP of 80-1?

“A few of us had to put manners on the bookmakers!” Potts confirms, before telling a story which suggests one of the owners must have returned home from Dublin that night with a sore shoulder–and no doubt a sore head, too.

“They were in the parade ring for the first and Brian hadn't arrived,” he adds. “He had work to finish at home and needed to be persuaded to come, so he got in with his laptop bag just as the jockeys were legged up. He left the track lopsided with the laptop bag weighing him down–it didn't leave his sight that night!”

Latin Fever, having been bought for just €27,000 at the same sale where the team picked up the Sioux Nation filly–since named Khaldiya (Ire)–who starred at Doncaster, has since been sold to continue her racing career in America, with the announcement of her sale coming just a few days after Potts himself had been stateside for the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Select Yearling Sale, one of his first big international assignments in his new role with BBA Ireland.

“It definitely took a bit of adjusting,” he says of that experience. “They had an outstanding bunch of horses, but the yearlings have different conformation traits that you have to hone in on [compared to in Europe]. I thought the standard of the sale there was incredible and the show they put on was something else.

“I worked closely with Michael Donohoe and we came away with a Justify colt. He was bought for $250,000, which by Justify's standards wasn't all that expensive. The sire is obviously exciting, so fingers crossed he can do well.”

Potts barely had a chance to get his feet under the table at home before he was on his way out to Deauville, where BBA Ireland signed for three yearlings–by Frankel, Mehmas and Wootton Bassett–for just shy of €800,000 combined. 

He may be living out of a suitcase of late but don't expect to hear Potts complaining anytime soon, with the chance to travel more said to be just one of the many reasons why the role with BBA Ireland was so attractive to him.

“It didn't take much deliberation to take up the job,” he sums up. “It was very appealing to join a great company, one of the biggest in Ireland for so long, and it was a chance to be able to buy more horses, worldwide as well. I wouldn't have travelled much, so it was a great opportunity to go and travel the world.

“And I'm really looking forward to working with all the other agents, the likes of Michael Donohoe, Patrick Cooper, Eamon Reilly, John Tyrrell and Adrian Nicoll. All of them have bought some fantastic horses over the years and you'd always have looked twice when they bought something.”

After this year similar comments certainly apply to any horses bought by Potts, O'Donovan and Sheerin, especially if it's a King Of Change (GB) filly–the team sold three such juveniles at this year's breeze-up sales for a grand total of over half a million, having sourced them for 67,000gns combined.

It was an impressive feat of navigating choppy waters, an unavoidable challenge in the current climate and one Potts has enjoyed ever since he bought his first horse aged 16.

“The bloodstock game at the moment is probably becoming a bit all or nothing,” he says of the market. “If you tick all the boxes and jump through all the hoops, you can get extremely well paid, more so than ever before. But if you're not, it's probably more difficult than ever. You just have to adapt to that and try to box clever.

“But I've always loved markets, being invested in it and having skin in the game. I've been buying horses since I was 16, so I couldn't see myself ever not being in the game. It's the great challenge to come to a sale and try to unearth value.”