David Futter ready to open Yorton Farm for new opportunities

If David Futter was feeling some pressure as he geared up towards a momentous occasion at Yorton Farm, he certainly wasn’t revealing it outwardly.

"I’ve been at this a long time, we keep our feet on the ground," he said with a smile ahead of Thursday’s inaugural boutique event at his farm near Welshpool, to be run in partnership with Goffs UK.

The Yorton Sale will bring together what are now 38 National Hunt stores, either yearlings or two-year-olds. Some were bred there or are by its past and present stallions, from Blue Bresil through to Gentlewave, Norse Dancer and Pether’s Moon.

Meanwhile Futter and his team have been scouring Europe across the last couple of seasons in order to find the sorts of continental pedigrees that will give the sale a little more variety and lustre.

One of particular note looks to be a son of the increasingly popular No Risk At All (lot 11) named Prince des Fichaux. The two-year-old is out of Kapgarde mare Princesse Kap, an outstanding hurdling and chasing mare around Auteuil for Jean-Paul Gallorini and owner Alexandrine Berger, who sold him from her Haras de l’Etoile du Berger at the Osarus Maisons-Laffitte sale last November. He was bought for €50,000 by Richard Venn Bloodstock.

"On pedigree, there are some nice ones," Futter added. "With the No Risk At All, we left him as a colt, he’s out of a multiple graded winner in France and he’s nice. There are different ways of thinking with him, obviously someone could just run him, but if he ran and he won he’d be a very hot prospect as a stallion for the future."

The sale is not only to drum up business for the farm but also to encourage the idea of starting jumpers up at a younger age, as is commonplace in France.

Expanding on the theme, Futter continued: "Obviously it’s the first time we’ve ever done anything like this but the response has been good, I hope. People seem keen to support it.

"As a team at Yorton it’s something we’ve wanted to do probably for two or three years, and it’s timing with everything. The timing was right for us as a team and for Goffs, and I think probably with the way the industry is, it’s probably good timing for everybody.

"We like to think we try to buy a similar stamp of horse but from various stallions. We didn’t really want to fill it full of horses that were all going to make top money, we wanted to do a mix there to attract different people to come in.

"As we all know at these store sales, it’s not always the top ones that go and win the most races, we like to think we’ve selected a bunch of horses that will win races and hopefully be put into training over the next few years."

The Yorton gates open for inspections at 8am with the sale getting under way at 1pm.

Among others of note are a Pether's Moon yearling out of Listed-winning King's Theatre mare Blue Buttons (31) and a Blue Bresil two-year-old (21) out of a sister to Champion Bumper winner Cheltenian. The youngster's brother named Big Bresil was placed in his only point-to-point and sold for £170,000 to Roger Brookhouse at the Goffs UK Aintree Sale.

Lot 29, another Blue Bresil, is out of the winning mare Chocca Wocca, herself a daughter of high-class hurdler Chomba Womba, while there is also a Saddex (26) named Horacio Apple's, unsurprisingly from the exalted family of Apple's Jade and Apple's Shakira.

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