Most of us follow only one horse race a year, yet New Zealand is a world leader in the horseflesh industry. JAMES GARDINER goes behind the scenes.
I'm trapped in a circular wooden fortress. Doors are bolted shut. Walls too high to scale. Snorting and panting in front of me is a beast weighing maybe half a tonne.
The fact the animal is worth maybe several million dollars is no comfort; that comes only from the fact that he is not interested in me but in the other horse in the room, a female, who has shown how pleased she is to see him by urinating at his feet.
Why am I here? To find out about the increasingly marginalised New Zealand racing industry - the so-called Sport of Kings that most of us fairly much ignore apart from one race on the first Tuesday each November, the Melbourne Cup.
In three days, around 5 pm our time, Kiwis and Aussies -apart from the 100,000 at the Flemington racetrack - will crowd around television sets glued to the big race, hoping the office sweepstake or the splurge at the betting shop will deliver some extra cash. It'll all be over in about 3m 20s, until next year.
But what is interesting is that about half those 24 horses vying for the $A3.4 million stake put up by the Victorian Racing Club and Fosters beer will have been born on this side of the Tasman.
And based on results - 15 of the past 26 winners - one of them will probably win.
That helps ensure that every February, some of the world's richest racehorse owners and most successful trainers come to Auckland to buy as yearlings the best of the foals that will be born 11 1/2 months after the encounter in the wooden enclosure.
Yet despite the fatter chequebooks of Australia and Asia carrying off the cream of the bloodlines on offer at Karaka year after year, NZ retains a reputation for producing some of the best longer distance runners.
The stunning repeat victory by the 6-year-old NZ mare Sunline in last Saturday's $A2 million Cox Plate will do nothing to detract from that.
Peter Vela, chairman of NZ Bloodstock, which runs the Karaka sale, is hoping that success and that of Happyanunoit in the US will ensure an even bigger sale than this year's record $80 million spendup.
"What breeds good horses," Vela says, "is climate, pasture, management, horsemanship. I firmly believe we're the best in the world at it. And the best value for money."
The racing and breeding industry contributes $260 million a year to the national economy and directly employs 25,000.
About 2000 horses, worth $110 million, are sold for export each year, 60 per cent of them going to Australia.
It's not hard to see why. Of Australasia's top 10 prizemoney earners, six were New Zealand-bred, including the top three - Sunline, who has topped $6 million, Octagonal and Super Impose.
Purists say a race like the Cox Plate is a far truer guide to the class of the horses because they carry set weights that vary only according to age and gender.
In handicap races, the best-performed horses carry the most weight and are often unable to win because of it.
Sprinters are Australia's forte and our horses don't fetch high prices if they are seen as being born for speed. But from a mile (1600m) up, we're there.
Michael Martin, chief executive of the 2800-member Thoroughbred Breeders Association, says the other factor in New Zealand's favour is our traditional agricultural base.
"Overseas, thoroughbred breeding is a pretty elitist game. Here, once you get south of the Bombay Hills, everybody's got a horse in the back paddock."
Martin, who with partner Susan Archer bred Sunline, says New Zealand breeders produce nearly 5000 foals a year, a quarter of what Australia produces but close to England (5200) and Ireland (7700) and ahead of France (3850).
That means job opportunities - young New Zealanders good with horses can pick up work anywhere - and foreign exchange earnings.
The only blot on the landscape is the declining domestic interest in racing, leading to lower stakes and smaller fields.
As the car tyres scrunch on the gravel behind the gate of the well-signposted Windsor Park Stud at Kaipaki, just out of Cambridge, a warm spring sun bursts through dark clouds. This is where it all begins.
Kapstaad Way, the current favourite for next week's Melbourne Cup, was born and bred here and sold at the yearling sales in 1996. So was the 1997 winner, Might and Power.
Owner and studmaster Nelson Schick is regarded as among the best in the business. He's not as famous or prosperous as the other big Cambridge-based breeder, Sir Patrick Hogan, but he's certainly well on the way.
Schick believes New Zealand has, especially in the Waikato, the world's best breeding grounds.
"It's not just the green grass," Schick says. "You can buy a balanced diet in a bag anywhere. What you can't buy is the humidity, the ambient temperature."
A cooler climate means foals are always moving - racing each other, fighting, competing, from the minute they pluck up courage to stray a little from mother and meet the other tykes in the paddock.
"You go to Australia in springtime and it's lovely, but if you go and see them after they've been through a hot summer, all they can do is stand round under a tree."
Humidity is also important. In cooler, less humid, climates horses - like humans - tend to have more solid bones and be more active, Schick says.
And bone structure is the fundamental of a strong racehorse. Everything starts from the skeleton. If it has the right structure, it can have a lot of body weight on it."
For that reason Ireland, the traditional breeding ground for England's racehorses, parts of South America and New Zealand have the edge in raising strong horses that have the stamina to run races of 2000m and beyond.
The edge we have over Ireland and England is that it is warm enough for young horses to be outside - and active - all year.
Schick, aged 53, began his business with the sire Silver Dream and built it on the success of Star Way, one of New Zealand's top 10 sires. Today the stud, spread over three farms, has eight stallions and about 100 broodmares.
For $10,000 plus GST, Star Way still does the business at the ripe old age of 23, though horse breeding and buying is a little like the fashion industry, always looking for something new, and his offspring don't command the prices they once did.
Stud fees range from around $4000 to $7000 for younger horses who might have a good racing record but whose progeny are yet to prove themselves, to $20,000 to $22,000 for the proven champions with offspring who have won big races and are often producing winners themselves.
The use of "shuttle" stallions is a relatively recent development. Sires from Ireland (usually) or Japan will serve between 60 and 120 mares here between late August and the end of December, then be flown home to do the same thing all over again between February and July.
On the other side of Cambridge, 64-year-old Jeanette Broome runs a much more modest operation of about 10 broodmares.
She also has had major league success - she bred Jezabeel, winner of the Auckland and Melbourne Cups in 1998.
"You don't specifically set out to breed a Melbourne Cup winner," she says, "but you do have certain bloodlines in certain mares that have a tendency to throw staying horses, so you don't purposely put them to a staying stallion because you're trying to infuse a little bit of speed."
Broome achieved something she believes was unique by also breeding Seagram, the horse that as a 10-year-old in 1991 won the Northern Hemisphere equivalent of the Melbourne Cup, the English Grand National Steeplechase.
That win meant little for New Zealand breeding, as jumps races have limited support or prizemoney in Australasia, but it gave Broome one of her biggest thrills.
Another of her mares, Eartha, is a half sister to Jezabeel and this season had her first foal, a filly sired by Kapstaad Way's sire, Kapstaad.
Broome says breeding is a lot about luck. You know your bloodlines and try to get the right matches. If the foal grows into a promising-looking yearling, you might get a good price for it.
Then the owner's patience and finances come into play. Staying races are won by four, five and six-year-olds who generally haven't been raced often in their youth.
For new owners that can be tough. They are paying training, grazing and medical fees with no prospect of getting anything back until the horse races.
Schick: "Everybody wants to have a Melbourne Cup winner, but they don't want to wait. "
Which sort of brings us back to the serving barn, where Casual Lies (stud fee $6000; early success as sire of So Casual, winner of the $350,000 New Zealand Derby ) is doing his best to make sweet music with broodmare Pass The Stars, daughter of Star Way.
If this works, the result will strut its stuff at Karaka in February 2003, and perhaps make someone somewhere a fortune.
Racing: Success breeds more winners
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