A 'sleeping dragon' awakening as Indonesian owners invest in Tattersalls talent

With racing about to disappear from several Asian jurisdictions, there was welcome news from this month’s Tattersalls July Sale about one emerging nation.

Kusnadi Halim, a leading owner-breeder in Indonesia, was making his first trip to the sales in Britain and ended up leaving with a new stallion.

Sunny Street, bought from Rabbah Bloodstock and the James Tate stable for 95,000gns, was no standout in Europe as an 81-rated winner of one novice race at Chelmsford but contains valuable genes for another country not exactly blessed with such bloodlines.

The three-year-old is a son of Exceed And Excel whose siblings Excellent Sunset and Path Of Thunder did well in America and the Gulf respectively, hailing from a family with smart dirt form through the likes of 1984 Arkansas Derby scorer Althea and Spinster Stakes queen Acoma.

Halim, who has been a buyer at Keeneland since the 1980s, had been looking for some different lines and was accompanied by the experienced veterinarian Dr Anil Prabhu and bloodstock adviser Sennett Ho.

"We looked at various horses and we all had to agree but the final say went to Mr Halim as to whether he liked the horse or not," says Ho.

"We liked Sunny Street’s conformation but the bloodline is the most important thing. Most of the horses in the UK have much better breeding than Indonesia, most have crosses of Northern Dancer, Danzig, Galileo and so on, and you can buy them.

"Primarily all the horses race on the dirt, so that’s a consideration too. We were happy to buy Sunny Street but there was also another one we really wanted later on, lot 445 [an unraced Sea The Stars half-brother to Oaks winner Soul Sister]. 

"Unfortunately he was taken out on the day. He might have gone for a lot of money but because he was unraced we might have got him; we were after the blood not his record."

Sunny Street (right) battles it out with Queen Of Atlantis at Southwell in JanuaryCredit: Gareth Copley/Getty Images

For 5,000gns, the team added a mare by Ulysses, the unraced Epic Effect, who is carrying a foal by Sergei Prokofiev and comes from the Niarchos family of East Of The Moon and Alpha Centauri.

"I’ve been saying to Mr Halim and others I’ve met that in order to grow the thoroughbred population, you need to buy mares in foal," says Ho. "You don’t need the fancy mares, we can’t beat the big farms and buyers, but, to me, it’s like you buy one and you get one free.

"We mostly import horses from Australia as it’s nearby, not so much from the UK. In my understanding, the horses have to go to the Netherlands first before they’re exported to Indonesia. They’ll probably be coming with some warmbloods; Indonesia buys a lot of them from places like the Netherlands and Germany for equestrian sports."

Ho is Singaporean and his domestic business is set to conclude when Kranji closes in October. 

An experienced horseman who served with Sir Michael Stoute and Luca Cumani and has held training licences from the Kentucky Racing Commission, Malayan Racing Association – which regulates racing in Singapore and Malaysia – and Philippines Racing Commission, he frequently visits Indonesia offering horse management services and as an importer of feed.

"We're thinking of coming back for the December Mare Sale," he says. "There are so many mares and you can buy something relatively inexpensively."

He explains that racing in Indonesia began through the arrival of Australian horses and trainers 50 years ago and that the imported thoroughbreds gradually combined with native horses to create local breds. The Indonesian Derby has been staged annually since 1974, at various venues.

"They have their own grades," he says. "Technically they still look like thoroughbreds, although their times aren't as fast.

"To them, it’s a tradition. They’ve been racing for all these years, apart from the Covid year in 2020, and there are more than 30 tracks.

"They’re of very different sizes, some are around 800m [four furlongs] in diameter, the biggest is around 1,600m [mile], spread all over the country. There are villages that have their own small track with local horses."

Ho says that racing encompasses all religions and cultures in Indonesia, a country made up of thousands of islands. He sends a video of a meeting in Aceh, in the far west of Sumatra, where there is clearly a huge attendance at a rural course overlooked by mountains.

"The main track was built by the Australians in 1974 in [capital city] Jakarta itself," he says. "It’s still there but it was taken over by the equestrian competition during the Asian Games in 2018, which took some of the track away. 

"It’s defunct now but they’re coming back to race there. It will be in the same place but the tracks are going to be rebuilt to an international level."

The topography and remote regions mean that a stallion will tend to cover only his owner’s broodmares, or those of breeders in the locality.

"If you want to take a mare to a stallion you might have to travel for three or four days, it takes time and money," says Ho. 

"I’ve spoken to people about what they should look at if they want to improve the racing and I think they should have a national stud farm where they consolidate the stallions and mares for easy access and management.

"There’s opportunity to grow. They’ve got 400,000 horses registered across all breeds. If we say one per cent of the total are thoroughbreds, that would be 4,000.

"Everyone is looking here. People from China want to invest. They always say, 'Indonesia is a sleeping dragon, it has to wake up!'"

Read this next:

A mare in a million whose Irish Oaks anniversary could be marked by a very fitting winner