'I tell everyone who moans at me that if it’s good enough for Aidan O’Brien, it’s good enough for me' - meet the bricklaying breeder

Good Morning Bloodstockis Martin Stevens' daily morning email and presented online as a sample. 

Here, Martin takes a dive into the remarkable tale of Rock N Roll Pinkie and Funky Town Pinkie, owned and bred by a brickie who loves to boogie. Subscribers can get more great insight from Martin every Monday to Friday.

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Part of the fun of being a pedigree aficionado is spotting the more unusual examples of breeding. Like a twitcher catching a glimpse of a capercaillie, or a stamp collector coming across a misprinted Penny Black, there is a thrill in unearthing something rare.

Some fine recent examples include Punchestown cross-country chase scorer Subset, by Dubai Millennium’s once-raced full-brother Dahjee, and the popular Oaksey Chase winner Hewick, by far the best jumper by Lockinge Stakes hero Virtual.

Rock N Roll Pinkie, a three-year-old filly sent out by Ivan Furtado to break her maiden in a low-grade long-distance handicap at Wetherby on Sunday. takes the biscuit though.

She and her full-sister Funky Town Pinkie are the only winners of any kind by Sun Central, a Listed-winning Galileo half-brother to George Washington who has covered small books of mares at James and Amelia Gray’s Elusive Bloodstock in Lincolnshire, and furthermore the siblings are out of Maggie Pink, a prolific winner by Derby third Beat All, a useful but ultimately inconsequential sire.

For good measure, Maggie Pink’s own dam Top Notch, who helped disprove the theory of nominative determinism by being beaten out of sight on all her seven starts, was by the Champion Hurdle victor Alderbrook out of Gaygo Lady, an honourable fourth to Acclimatise in the Nassau Stakes for Barry Hills in the early 1980s.

This is a pedigree about as far removed from orthodox breeding as you can get, so you won’t be surprised to learn that the man who engineered it is a little out of the ordinary, too.

Step forward Derbyshire-born and based bricklayer Tony Bult, still working on building sites alongside much younger colleagues and tearing up the dance floor every weekend at the tender age of 78.

The story of how he came to own Maggie Pink and later breed from her starts unconventionally and gets more potty as it goes on, so strap yourselves in.

“I’d owned a few racehorses before, and bought my kids ponies to ride, keeping them in a rented field nearby,” he says. “I always liked the ponies to have a bit of breeding. I probably shouldn’t have put them up on thoroughbreds but they survived it, they’re still here.

“One day – don’t ask me why, it was just a complete whim – I thought I’d look in my local classified ads magazine, the Pink Edition, to see if there were any cheap horses for sale.

“I found a two-year-old and went to look at him but I didn’t think he had the right bone structure for racing, he didn’t look strong enough. Just as I was about to leave I asked if they had anything else on the farm, and they said they had three foals, so I had a look and this one filly stood out. She was like a princess, and we agreed a price of £775 for her.”

The bonny bay filly went home with Tony, who then hand reared her intensively for two years, standing with her when she was feeding every day in all weathers, so that the greedy show jumper that shared the field with her wouldn’t pinch all the hay.

She was eventually named Maggie Pink, in a nod to the pink magazine from which she was sourced, and sent to be broken and trained by Mick Appleby. She made her debut at three, but was too weak at the finish in her first five races, and so went to a farm near Leicester for a break to graze in lusher pastures than she had been granted in her youth.

A much stronger Maggie Pink won at Kempton on her comeback later that season, and went on to win another eight races from 60 starts over six seasons. Usually a fast starter who broke on the B of the Bang, her finest moments came in victories in Class 3 handicaps at Chester and Newbury and another all-the-way success at Newmarket.

“She was a flying machine out of the stalls, I don’t think anything beat her out of the traps for two years or so,” recalls Tony. “When it came to retiring her, I said to my lad Thomas, do you want to breed from her or cash out and sell her?

“Without a second thought, he said we should breed from her, as she’d been such a good little mare for us, and to be fair she was entitled to breed something good as she was rated 96 at her peak and was undoubtedly very hardy.”

Tony confesses now that he was “very inexperienced” in the conventional methods of stallion selection, but he drew on his previous work in breeding dogs and seeing the negative effects of close inbreeding in the canine realm, and resolved to find a match for Maggie Pink that was as genetically different from her as he could find.

“All thoroughbreds are inbred if you go back far enough, anyway, but with Beat All being by Dynaformer and coming from the Roberto line, and Alderbrook being by Ardross, her pedigree was free of Sadler’s Wells,” he explains. “So I decided I’d like to send her to a stallion by his best son Galileo, and because I don’t do computers I told Thomas to find one who had a pedigree as far away from hers as possible.”

Sun Central, available at a chickenfeed fee at Elusive Bloodstock, was the chosen one, and Maggie Pink visited him in 2018 and 2019.

The first result was the four-year-old filly Funky Town Pinkie, who was retained and sent out by Furtado to win a couple of handicaps at Southwell over the winter, and the second was Rock N Roll Pinkie, who is operating at a low level at the moment but is still lightly raced and so could have significant improvement in her.

Ivan Furtado: trainer of Funky Town Pinkie and Rock N Roll PinkieCredit: Laura Green

“Funnily enough the two foals are exactly like their mother, they ping out of the gates too,” says Tony. “They’re lovely horses. Actually I say that, but Funky Town and Maggie Pink are right nasty things, especially Funky Town. She was awful to me and my friend as a youngster, she’d look at you, pin her ears back and then try and level you. Rock N Roll is a sweetie pie, though, and they’re all ever so genuine in their races.”

Tony’s friend is Peter Appleyard, who raised the sisters on some land he owns nearby, and has been rewarded for his care with a leg in them.

“Peter does all the rearing and does an outstanding job with them, he puts his heart and soul into it and is really diligent,” says Tony. “He just calls me up and tells me what he needs – feed, straw or whatever – and I take it over.”

The pals don’t always see eye to eye on mating plans, though.

“Pete always says why are you using Sun Central, he's no good, and I say I didn’t know that when I first used him,” continues Tony. “I just liked him, I thought he was all class to look at, certainly the finest horse I’ve ever seen. I’m not saying he’s the best sire ever, but he wasn’t bad on the track himself and he was even thought of as a Melbourne Cup horse at one point.

“I just wanted the Galileo connection, and Sun Central being by the same sire as Frankel isn't a bad thing, is it? I tell everyone who moans at me that if it’s good enough for Aidan O’Brien, then it’s good enough for me, and that shuts ‘em up a bit.

“Yeah, I’ve taken plenty of stick for the mating but the way I look at it, if you send a 90-odd rated mare to a stallion with that breeding you’ve got to have a realistic chance of breeding something good.”

After a few fallow years in which she wasn't mated and lost a foal, Maggie Pink visited Sun Central again on Sunday. The supremely well bred but scarcely used stallion was taken out of mothballs for the service; it was his first cover in three years.

That’s not to say he’s been standing idle. He’s an important cog in the machinery for James and Amelia Gray, teasing and bouncing mares, and his arrival at Elusive Bloodstock a decade ago helped put the stud on the map.

It should also be remembered that his two winners have come from just 20 named foals, most of whom won’t have been out of mares nearly as able as Maggie Pink. It just goes to show what even the lowest profile sires can do when given a fair crack of the whip.

So fingers crossed we get to welcome a third Sun Central-Maggie Pink foal into the Return of Mares next year. Tony had better start thinking of a lively moniker for him or her, to match Funky Town Pinkie and Rock N Roll Pinkie.

“There’s a bit of a story behind those names,” Tony says with a grin. “I like going to my local pubs every weekend and although I’m not a heavy drinker I have a few beers and I get a bit animated and start dancing a lot. Just disco dancing and that sort of crap. Why not when you’ve been working all week?

“Anyway I thought I’d call the horses something to do with the dancing, and names that I could use to cheer them home. So I’ve been singing ‘won’t you take me to Funky Town’ when she won, and ‘I love Rock N Roll’ at the end of the other one's races.”

Remember, Tony is just two years off entering his ninth decade.

“It must be genetics,” he shrugs. “I’m still bricklaying, keeping up the pace with young blokes on the sites, and I’m still getting the going rate, as they pay you on your ability.

“Like everyone, I need to unwind after a week at work so I still go out clubbing, or dancing about to a bit of live music. I think my kids are a bit embarrassed, and I embarrass myself sometimes, but if I didn’t do it I’d be sat at home twiddling my thumbs.”

The story of how Maggie Pink was bought for buttons out of a local magazine, kept at home and later produced two winning fillies from an overlooked sire has echoes of that other blue-collar hero Dream Alliance, the homegrown, locally owned Welsh National winner whose death was announced at the weekend.

“Yeah, I suppose there are similarities,” says Tony when the idea is put to him. “I used to have Maggie Pink here in the back garden for a while, trashing my lawns. At least she got rid of all my moles for a bit, they didn’t much like her running around on top of them.

“It’s weird how it’s all happened, a lot of improbables have come together. You wouldn’t think a working-class person like me could breed and raise a horse that makes a bit of a mark by winning at the top tracks like Newmarket and Newbury.

“I don’t know how I scrape the training fees together for Funky Town and Rock N Roll really, but somehow I manage to finance it. Maggie helped a bit as she won quite a lot of prize-money, and though I lost on her overall, it wasn’t too much.

“I just love what I’m doing, so I find the money somehow. There you go.”

Stirring stuff. All the aristocratic offspring of Galileo, Frankel and Dubawi that regularly mop up Pattern races are awesome, of course, but it is often those idiosyncratically bred winners that have the more fascinating human interest stories behind them.

What do you think?

Share your thoughts with other Good Morning Bloodstock readers by emailing gmb@racingpost.com

Must-read story

“We would have a big involvement at Tally-Ho in the sense that Roger O'Callaghan guided us for a number of years at foal and yearling sales,” says Sean Davis about his and Gary Halpin’s recently launched breeze-up outfit GS Bloodstock.

Pedigree pick

Final Check is a beautifully bred newcomer who could perhaps fly a little under the radar when she runs in the seven-furlong three-year-old maiden at Gowran Park on Wednesday (4.50).

The John O’Donoghue-trained filly is by Expert Eye out of the US Grade 3-winning Dynaformer mare Stupendous Miss, making her a half-sister to three Pattern winners – Do It All, Mrs Fitzherbert and Tales Of Grimm – plus Listed-placed Moll Davis.

Final Check has been retained to race by Anthony Rogers, whose Airlie Stud bred her. No wonder, as she makes not only an exciting racing prospect but also a mouthwatering future broodmare.

Did you miss Good Morning Bloodstock Live?

Martin Stevens talked to Watership Down Stud's Simon Marsh about Too Darn Hot’s first two-year-olds, the operation’s history and mating plans for its outstanding broodmares in Good Morning Bloodstock Live. You can find it on Instagram @rpbloodstock or YouTube @racingpostbloodstock4646

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