Meet the reluctant breeder who owns two dams of Grade 1 winners - and one of them 'is made out of stardust'

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Here, Martin Stevens speaks to Walter Connors, owner of the remarkable broodmare Matnie and breeder of Lawlor’s of Naas Novice Hurdle winner Readin Tommy Wrong – subscribers can get more great insight from Martin every Monday to Friday.

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The owner of the most consistently successful jumps broodmare band at the moment? Walter Connors, who never set out to be a breeder and is better known as a vet and store consignor, could lay claim to that title. 

He bred recent Lawlor’s of Naas Novice Hurdle hero Readin Tommy Wrong and owns the remarkable broodmare Matnie, whose son Caldwell Potter made it five Graded winners from her first five foals when he scored in the Paddy Power Future Champions Novice Hurdle last month, joining siblings French Dynamite, Indiana Jones, Mighty Potter and Brighterdaysahead.

The Sluggara Farm man, who has been at the forefront of importing French foals into Ireland for the last two decades, rejects any suggestion of genius though.

“It’s sheer luck,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve always said to the lads at home that if you can afford to buy the foal, you don’t need to keep the mare. It can cloud your judgement, too. I find myself making excuses for the ones I’ve bred, thinking there might still be updates to come from the siblings, whereas I’m more realistic when I look at other people’s foals.”

Connors isn’t putting his success down to good fortune out of a misplaced sense of modesty. Readin Tommy Wrong’s dam Roque De Cyborg, an unraced High Chaparral half-sister to high-class jumpers Kazal and Quito De La Roque, did rather fall into his lap.  

“Kazal was one of the first horses I bought in France,” he says. “I could barely afford to pay for him at the time, but he turned out well and so I went back to the source to buy his half-brother, and that was Quito De La Roque.

Readin Tommy Wrong with connections after his Grade 1 successCredit: Patrick McCann

“Then I bought another half-brother, Saint Roque, who was Grade 2-placed and looking promising for Paul Nicholls until he broke his neck in a fall. He didn’t die, but obviously it didn’t make him any faster.

“It was obvious that their dam Moody Cloud was a good mare, and the people who had her were retiring, so I bought her from them. She’d been covered by Cut Quartz and she produced a colt from that mating who became Wings Of Icarus, who won a point-to-point for us and we got sold.

“Then we covered her with High Chaparral, the result of which was Roque De Cyborg. She went back to High Chaparral but unfortunately we found her dead in the field one morning when she was in foal. She was 20, though.”

Roque De Cyborg, the only female produce of Moody Cloud, didn’t run but Connors held on to her and broke his own rule about not breeding out of a sense of loyalty to her family.

“To be fair, Moody Cloud was responsible for about 50 per cent of the GDP of the whole place,” he remarks wryly. “I kept her out of sentiment and sent her to Robin Des Champs for her first three covers, ending up with three foals by Presenting. She didn’t get in foal to Robin Des Champs the first time and after that his fertility went into decline, so I thought Presenting was the next best thing at Glenview Stud at the time.  

“She produced winners from those matings but they were a bit limited, and it probably shows that repeating the same mating when you don’t know whether it will work is probably not the most clever thing to do.

“Presenting was clearly a very good stallion but for one reason or another he didn’t nick very well with Roque De Cyborg. She was treading water at that point, but she’d always produced very good-looking foals so I persevered and changed things up by sending her to France.”

Once again, Connors isn’t looking for a standing ovation for that decision, as it was born out of convenience as much as cunning.

He explains: “It was really because of a lifestyle change that she went back to France, as we’d had another child after a long gap since our two girls, and we didn’t think it would be much fun having him in the back seat of the car going off for walk-in covers at 5.30 in the morning.

“She went to Authorized two years in a row and produced Readin Tommy Wrong the first time, and then she went to Doctor Dino. For the past three years she’s been to Saint Des Saints, on the strength of Readin Tommy Wrong being such a cracking foal. 

"Saint Des Saints sired Quito De La Roque, so the mating was staring us in the face. Why wouldn’t you try and make a three-quarters brother or sister to the Grade 1 winner in the family?”  

Readin Tommy Wrong bears an IRE suffix even though he is by the then French-based sire Authorized, and his dam returned to that sire soon after giving birth to him. He is, therefore, a precious score for Ireland in the breeding stakes, when jumps racing has become so dominated by French-breds – although he could just as easily have been another one for France.

“I was speaking to Irish Thoroughbred Marketing at the ITBA National Hunt seminar last week and they expressed a sigh of relief that Readin Tommy Wrong was Irish-bred, but it was only because Roque De Cyborg bagged up a little early,” says Connors. “She was booked to go back to Authorized, and was due to make the journey, but instead she foaled here before going.

“Otherwise she would have been gone, and Readin Tommy Wrong would have been a French-bred. As I said at the seminar, jumps pedigrees are a transient thing these days; there’s so much crossover between Ireland and France.”

Readin Tommy Wrong was retained to race by Connors instead of joining the Sluggara Farm store draft of 2021. He ran second in a Belharbour four-year-old maiden for Pat Doyle before selling privately to Simon Munir and Isaac Souede and moving to Willie Mullins, for whom he is now unbeaten in four starts.

Doctor Dino: the half-sister to Readin Tommy Wrong sold to Henry de BromheadCredit: Haras du Mesnil

“He was always seriously good-looking, and a commercial person would have sent him to the sales, but I just felt that because his siblings by Presenting were only okay he wasn’t going to get on all that well,” says Connors.

“I’m not being derogatory but I think if he had gone to the sales it’s unlikely that Willie Mullins or Gordon Elliott would have bought him, because of the dam’s record. So I thought I’d race him in point-to-points instead, and try to steer him towards owners who’d been lucky after buying from us in the past.”  

The fact that the Doctor Dino half-sister to Readin Tommy Wrong sold to Henry de Bromhead for just €26,000 at last year’s Goffs Arkle Sale, even after her future Grade 1-winning sibling had hosed up in two bumpers, suggests that Connors made the right decision.

“I sold her because I have Readin Tommy Wrong’s full-sister out in France [Trapeze Artist] and a two-year-old Saint Des Saints filly out of their dam, so I have enough fillies from the family to be getting on with,” says Connors. “The Doctor Dino was a little compact, and not as good-looking as Readin Tommy Wrong, but she was perfectly sound.

“But look, you can’t win it all every time, and I’m delighted for Henry and I hope she turns out well for them. She was definitely good value because she’s not exactly by an indiscriminate sire, either. She’s got to have a chance.

“I also think it’s no bad thing to have a family that three or four other people are breeding from, as we all think differently, and it could be their mating that produces a star and gives me a bit of a piggyback at the sales for a couple of years. It puts more diversity into the pedigree, and they might think of a different nick that’ll work, and I can learn from.”

Saint Des Saints: Roque De Cyborg’s two-year-old daughter is by the legendary sireCredit: Haras d’Etreham

Connors says there that he has Roque De Cyborg’s two-year-old daughter by Saint Des Saints, but in fact he might have to relinquish ownership of the filly.

“My daughter Izzy is getting more and more interested in the business, so I’m reconciling it in my own mind that the filly’s no longer mine,” he adds with a chuckle.  

“The dam also has a Saint Des Saints yearling colt, who’s nice but only time will tell. I love going point-to-pointing with them but I have to be a bit realistic as well. You can always tell how badly we’re going by how much we have to send to the sales!

“She’s back in foal to Saint Des Saints and I’d been considering sending her to him again, but now that she has a Grade 1 winner by Authorized it might make sense to use him instead. Obviously I was never going to send her to Turkey, but now that he’s back in Ireland it might be the thing to do.”

Connors bought the budding blue hen Matnie in similar circumstances to Roque De Cyborg, as outlined in Good Morning Bloodstock last year. In a nutshell, he and his man on the ground in France, Seamus Murphy, had bought her sons Mighty Potter and Caldwell Potter out of the field before finding out that their breeder, Remy Cottin, was packing up; and so they secured the source of those attractive foals as well.

“Yes, they were both bought from people who were retiring,” says Connors, before adding with tongue firmly in cheek: “They were both unraced too. I’d better keep that quiet with all this talk of improving the breed.”

Caldwell Potter: Grade 1-winning son of the incredible MatnieCredit: Patrick McCann

Matnie has been nothing short of a phenomenon, producing those five top jumpers French Dynamite, Indiana Jones, Mighty Potter, Caldwell Potter and Brighterdaysahead as her first five foals. What she has achieved is freakish, really.

“Yeah, freak is the word,” says Connors. “I wouldn’t win any table quizzes but I can’t think of another National Hunt mare who has done that in Britain and Ireland before. Artiste Gaye, the dam of Gaye Brief and Gaye Chance, produced five Graded winners of a high standard but that was from 12 foals.  

“I think some mares in Kotkijet’s family were very prolific too, but that was in France. I'm willing to be told differently but I’ve gone back 35 years and not found any others.”

What makes Matnie even more freakish is that she is, apparently, not much to look at. It would have been hard to pick her out as a future matriarch, it seems.

“She’s a very very humble looking mare,” continues Connors. “Seamus told me to look at her Kapgarde filly, as I had her two Martaline horses [Mighty Potter and Caldwell Potter] but I said no, as I thought I was heavily invested enough in an unraced Laveron mare. But that filly was Brighterdaysahead, who topped the Tattersalls Ireland Derby Sale at €310,000.

“What’s really extraordinary is that her first five foals are also by four different sires, but they’re all correct and good-looking, and she’s neither; they can all run, and she couldn’t. Honestly, it’s like she’s made out of stardust or something.

“She’s been lucky in every way, in fact. When we bought her we said we’d leave her in France to foal and cover her there before bringing her home, as there wasn’t a big time gap. Then when she foaled she got a colic but she was only ten minutes away from the clinic, and they saved her.

“That’s the reason she’s not coming home: they said there’s a ten per cent chance of a recurrence, so I’m afraid of putting her on the boat. But I'm happy for her to be a permanent resident of France.”  

There is now the small matter of the three-year-old colt by Doctor Dino out of Matnie. A son of one of the highest achieving and most in-demand jumps sires and a mare who is five out of five Graded winners to foals is not just a likely sale-topper, but potential store-horse record material.

Mighty Potter: late star is another produce of MatnieCredit: CAROLINE NORRIS

Intriguingly, he has no name, whereas a lot of Connors’ younger homebred stock have already been christened. His breeder confirms that he has found himself on the horns of a dilemma regarding the future.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he says with a deep sigh. “I suppose I’ll have to make up my mind in the next month or so. My accountant is saying go to the store sales, but I’d love to run him.

“We come from the racing side of things, and love going to the point-to-points. I can even put up with it when we get beaten.

"The worst of it is usually in these cases you’d turn to your spouse and they’d tell you to get real, but my wife Una actually prefers racing them to me!”

But does the Doctor Dino colt have the physique to match the pedigree, to really ensure that he would fetch a small fortune at the store sales?  

“Yes . . .” replies Connors, sounding almost pained, as he knows that those good looks mean the sensible thing to do would be to put him up for sale this summer.

“He’d command a fair bit of respect in the ring, you’d think," he adds with knowing understatement. "At the moment I think the likelihood is that the head will overrule the heart and he’ll go to the store sales, but it’s not set in stone.”

Matnie also has a two-year-old gelding by Doctor Dino named Here Be Dragons and a yearling colt by No Risk At All named Recognition, the monikers being the work of English teacher Una – who is also a country music fan and kept back the name Readin Tommy Wrong, taken from a line in Kenny Rogers’ hit Coward of the County, for a good one.

Matnie was covered by Saint Des Saints last year but was scanned with twins, which she lost, and so is barren. She returns to that elder statesman of the French National Hunt stallion ranks this year.

This breeding lark is going so well for Connors that you wonder whether he might be tempted to get a fleet of mares and reduce his French pinhooks.

“No no no,” he exclaims. “If I did that I wouldn’t be able to go to France and go to the nice restaurants, and enjoy all the good wine. I’d miss that!  

“I go two or three times a year. Seamus Murphy does a lot of it with me. We always say that the most expensive restaurant in France is the farmer’s kitchen. He’ll give you a very good steak and a bottle of wine and it’s only when you get home you realise that meal cost you about 20 grand because he convinced you to buy some horses.”

Oh well, so be it. Nobody would want to deprive the reluctant breeder Connors of his enjoyable French shopping trips.

But still, after securing two dams of Grade 1 winners on his travels, one of them a broodmare for the ages, he would do well to keep his ears open for any more breeders who are winding down and reducing their herd.

What do you think?

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