We had a highly successful day Wednesday 20th November  at the New Zealand Bloodstock Ready To Run Sale. The sale itself was very successful with many high priced lots and this was no surprise, given the buoyancy in the Global Racing market at the present time, particularly in Australia and with a strong buying bench from Hong Kong  – the sale average of NZ$175k was up 11% on the 2023 figureAs always we like to buy to budget and with a very high focus on “physical type” and so we needed to be thinking very much outside the square in terms of the lots we identified – one of the things about the Ready to Run sale is that it is very popular with the Asian market, in particular Hong Kong and also with the closure of Singapore, the Malaysian trainers were very active as well – however these markets tend not to buy Fillies and focus on Colts in the main and so our focus was to be on the Fillly options – in the end we identified four Fillies from day one of the sale – two of these failed their Vet inspections and one we had identified in particular, that we thought would meet our budget, was the Swiss Ace Filly out of an El Roca mare and with a great Vet report and a budget of $80,000 to buy her, we managed to secure her for $70,000 and so “mission accomplished”

Interesting to note that Mark Walker and I have been going through the catalogue for at least the past four weeks and time and time again as we would review and consider the options, Mark would keep coming back to this Filly, saying to me how well she had breezed up and how he thought she would be the one to make our budget. I joined Mark at the sales grounds yesterday morning where we inspected all of the horses on his and David’s list and as the Swiss Ace Filly paraded for us Mark kept commenting to me “this is a lovely Filly”

Mark has sent through the following comments. “John, as you know, you and I have been talking about this Filly for a few  weeks now, as I had identified her earlier in the piece as having the right physical characteristics to make a lovely racehorse – her breeze up at Te Rapa four weeks ago was first class and when we inspected her at the sales grounds this morning, I certainly wasn’t disappointed with what I saw. She is a lovely physical type with a great walk, is of  good medium size and demonstrated a very pleasant temperament. I think she will be the sort of Filly that could come into work at the stables very soon, trial late summer and have a race day start or two as a two year-old, but she’s got all the scope in the world to develop into a lovely three-year-old type”

David Ellis also comments as follows “John, congratulations on securing this lovely Swiss Ace Filly today within your budget – Mark and I were very impressed with her breeze up and how she paraded for us today at inspections. I think she will definitely run as an autumn two year old and has plenty of scope to be a successful three year old as well.”

On the pedigree front, Swiss Ace, in my view, is an underrated Sire, but with 366 winners (including 19 Stakes winners) from just over 500 runners, he can certainly leave a quality race horse. The dam is by El Roca and is a a half sister to the Stakes winner, Ichiban. Swiss Ace is the Sire of Niance, who won the Group 3 How Now Stakes at Caulfield last Saturday and who has now fashioned a record of 6 wins from 10 starts

Click HERE to see the link to the Sales page – here you will be able to see her breeze up clip – she breezed up in 10.74 secs and as you will see, she has a beautiful galloping action

Here below is her pedigree