A self pronounced hobby breeder that has managed to produce the world’s best sprinter, a pair of Champion 3YO Colts and numerous Group I winners, Rick Jamieson rarely gives interviews as such, but we managed to get the next best thing with his Gilgai Farm Stud Manager Kelly Skillecorn as our guest this week on Breednet’s Tara Talks Racing podcast.
Black Caviar, All Too Hard, Jameka, Masked Crusader, The Quarterback and Ole Kirk are just some of the names synonymous with Gilgai Farm and the last name in that group is an exciting young sire, who is now the leading two year-old sire in the country following the Magic Millions 2YO Classic win of O’Ole, a filly also bred and sold by Gilgai Farm.
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“She did everything right and she was as you know, a very good physical,” said Kelly Skillecorn.
“She had a great temperament, which is unusual for that mare as she is by Sepoy and they could be hot and she’s very hot, but these Ole Kirk's aren’t like that.
“The feedback we get from Mick Malone (North Bloodstock) and those guys have got a lot of them is that they all have great temperaments and I'm sure that holds them in good stead.”
Ole Kirk was the second highest priced yearling at Inglis Premier in 2019 when fetching $675,000 for Gilgai Farm and is the first foal of Naturale, an unraced sister to Black Caviar.
Naturale was the sixth foal from blue hen Helsinge(died in 2017), who is pivotal to much of the Gilgai Farm breeding operation with Jamieson aspiring to have 40 of her descendants, but for now he has just seven and it’s not always been smooth sailing for this most revered of female families.
When Naturale was born, she had offset knees and was a bit pigeon toed, so the decision was taken to go down the path of surgical intervention to straighten her legs, but the move proved disastrous and nearly cost the filly her life.
“Everything that could go wrong did,” revealed Skillecorn.
“She ended up with osteomyelitis and as a result had half of her pedal bone taken out and when recovering from that at the vet hospital she had issues with her other front leg. A screw was inserted into that knee and then she got a golden staph infection in that.
“Eventually she recovered enough to be sent over to Swettenham Stud in the care of John Hurley (their chief vet) and finally after more than a year she came back, but John doubted she would ever be able to carry a foal.”
Naturale missed in her first season at stud to Wandjina and then went in foal to Written Tycoon with Ole Kirk the result of the mating.
He was born on September 9 and was a big strong healthy foal, but then as can happen, things started to go awry.
“He was going really well and then he got to about May and started getting active knees and started developing what we call valgus knees and one in particular was laying in,” said Skillecorn.
“We had Angus Adkins (renowned vet) come out here and he said, I think we’ve got to look at putting a screw in this horse’s knee’ and I was like ‘I'm not going to do that’.”
The alternative was to restrict the growth of the colt to allow the knees to settle naturally, so Ole Kirk spent three months in a small yard and emerged with sale presentable legs.
“He’s still got one valgus knee and if you go and look at him at a stallion parade, you can see he’s still got a knee that lays in and he had that at the sale, but he had two people that really wanted to buy him and one of them was Neil Werrett,” Skillecorn recalled.
“He came to the stables every night of the sale, about 4:30 and looked at him.
“So I said to Rick, ‘You know we're in good shape here and he has good X-rays.”
Neil Werrett ultimately bought the colt and sent him to John Hawkes, but had to work hard to do so with the underbidder being Apollo Ng, who was keen to secure the horse for Hong Kong.
“It was one of those sliding doors moments, if Apollo had bought him he would have been gelded and gone to Hong Kong and we would have missed out on having this exciting young stallion,” Skillecorn mused.
The second foal from Naturale, a filly by Not a Single Doubt, produced another fascinating sale story, albeit very different to that of Ole Kirk.
“She was tiny, an absolute dot of a thing and Rick offered her to John Hawkes to train given he had bought the colt the year before, but he turned her down,” said Skillecorn.
“He said. ‘You know, these little tiny things, they win a race, but they don't win the big races,’ so we ended up taking her to Magic Millions as I thought she’s not going to grow and this will just look worse as time goes on.”
At the sales, the filly from Naturale was standing out for all the wrong reasons.
“There were actually people laughing at her because she was so small and Rick started getting the shits about people laughing at this filly out of his family he loves, so much so that that the night before she is going to get sold, he rings me at 8pm and says ‘I wanna pull her out.’
“I said, what are you talking about? You can't pull her out. There's people here to buy her and he said ‘I don't care, pull her out’.
“So there I am at 4 in the morning getting this horse off the complex on the day of the sale. I rang Rob Petith, who had a truck and we took her to Julian Blaxland’s place and that’s where she stayed.
“Eight months go past and JB keeps ringing and asking what are we doing with the filly and we decide to get her broken in and Greg Bennett tells us he has a big opinion of her.
“I’m thinking yeah sure… all breakers have a big opinion until race day, but Rick says let’s give her a chance and send her down to Peter Moody.
“He gives her a few gallops and in January says this thing goes good, so she lines up on debut in the Listed Talindert and runs second… she’s Gimmie Par.”
Gimmie Par retired lightly raced as a Group III winner with two wins and three placings from nine starts and $300,000 plus in prizemoney and her stud career is now just beginning with the arrival of her first foal last spring, a filly by Written By and she is back in foal to him again.
“There's a well known Irish agent that lives in New York that buys for the Yoshida family and he rang me up and said, we want to buy Gimmie Par, she’s a half-sister to the Champion 3YO Colt and a Group winner,” said Skillecorn.
“I tell them Rick is not going to sell her and they say we’ll start at $5million!
“So I go back to Rick and tell him, this guy is serious, they really want to buy her and they're talking 5 million already.
“And he said, ‘Tell them they can buy one of my sons before they buy her.”
The next foal of Naturale we should be keeping an eye out for is unraced two year-old Written Tycoon filly Float On, who was retained and is in work with Team Hawkes.
“I don't know how much she's done, it’s not like the like some of the trainers flooding you with information all the time, but I mean, I know she hasn't done anything wrong,” Skillecorn added.
“She's a gorgeous specimen and probably the nicest foal the mare has put on the ground so far.”
If you want to hear more from Kelly Skillecorn, do listen to our podcast which features even more fascinating stories from behind the scenes at Gilgai Farm and we go through their Inglis Easter yearlings, it’s just gold!
