The Kerry footballer, the $10m horse and the sale of the century

A decade ago, McGuire left the Kerry panel after the 2014 National League. Gooch was out, and expectation in the Kingdom lower than low. That September, Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s troops won No 37 against the head against Donegal. McGuire watched from Kentucky, missed the rush. You can’t have regrets, he says. 

Ten years on, the rush of success was here. At the Inglis Easter Yearling Sales at Warwick Farm in western Sydney last month, there were 500 prized thoroughbred horses, but the world was watching only one sale.

The first surviving offspring of unbeaten wonder mare Winx was under the gavel. Horse whisperers and town criers, ten deep, ringed the auditorium. Traffic backed up for miles around the western suburbs. In the midst of it all, Brian McGuire stands still and waits, his craft and graft done as American businessman John Stewart and purple-haired Sydney grandmother Debbie Kepitis went to war to bag the big one.

McGuire is part of Coolmore’s flourishing Australian operation for sales and bloodstock, and one of a group of key operatives who brought the prized filly to the sales ring. That involved a little more than walking her into a horse box.

“The team did a phenomenal job in in prepping her, which essentially means training her up for the sale. You're taking the foal out of the field maybe 10 weeks before the actual sale and you're just gradually building them up. It's just like throwing somebody into pre-training in the gym for the GAA season, adding a bit of condition,” he explained.

“That’s a 10 to 12 week process, and the horses arrive down a week before the sales to give potential buyers chances to get there, see the horses, get the vettings and everything sorted. We are managing that whole process and you're carrying it all the way through and trying to work out who may be a potential customer, or who’s talking the talk. You're there to give them as much information as you can to help them make a decision.” 

Pre-game is an intense couple of days. It didn’t help that on the weekend before sale day, Sydney experienced spectacular thunderstorms that yielded 240 millimetres of rain in 36 hours. It lost them a couple of valuable days of viewings.

Potential clients are looking for as many reasons not to buy as to buy. Come Sunday, some were already feeling they hadn’t a necessary window to do their due diligence. It’s as easy spook a client as a foal. The sales were delayed two hours on Monday to squeeze in a final couple of hours of vetting and viewing. It only served to heighten the sense of anticipation. A process that takes three to four years – from mating to pregnancy to rearing – might all come down to thirty seconds and a hunch on sales day.

And that's not all. “All of a sudden, a child might run around the corner and scare the horse and it might take off and a client could get it into their head that the horse is a little bit scattered and will pull the plug. So the moment there is huge. It's massive, it's massive. It can make or break a lot of people.” 

There were audible gasps when the foal of Winks went for a world record $10 million Australian dollars at the Inglis Easter Sales. Estimates had propositioned the yearling at five or six million, but ten million left everyone feeling like they were watching history in real time. It was a spectacular result for McGuire and the Coolmore team, led down under by John Magnier’s son, Tom.

“Of course, it has given everyone a huge lift. Coolmore catalogued 39 horses on the day, four withdrew, so 35 horses were for sale. We sold 32 of them and we had six horses sell for over seven figures. We were leading vendors at the sale, we sold for an aggregate of A$27.5 million.

“It’s a massive reflection on the calibre of bloodstock John Magnier has actually pumped into Australia. It’s a relatively new farm for Coolmore, only set up in 1996. But they put a massive investment in. (John) Magnier doesn't do anything by half. He's put the money in, he's bought the best blood stock. He's bought the best mares. He's gone 10 out of 10 on everything. He's a phenomenal man. I don’t think he ever sleeps. He was so ahead of his time. It started off with one stallion really, Danehill who turned into an absolute global phenomenon, the whole thing took off and the farm just gradually built and built."

Listowel’s McGuire played three seasons with Kerry, was involved in the 2011 All-Ireland final loss to Dublin and defended in the League with Kerry up to 2014, the final year he had an opportunity to J1 in the US.

“I was mad keen to spend a couple of months in Kentucky. The opportunity came up to go there and I was humming and hawing at the time after the league, going into the championship. I was thinking it might be a good time to jump ship and go over because Gooch had just done his knee for Crokes on the run in to the All-Ireland. "They ended up winning the whole thing in the end anyway but I have no regrets. 

"I came to Australia in 2016 for a couple of weeks, but eventually I said to my girlfriend (now wife), ‘will we give it 6 months and see how we get on?’ She was happy to do it and here we are years later. My mother’s still waiting at the airport I’d say.” 

McGuire held senior roles with Aquis Farm, Annabel Neasham Racing and Ciaron Maher Racing, as well as time spent with Kildare man Dermot Farrington and Gai Waterhouse Racing. He then went out on his own as an independent bloodstock agent, sourcing weanlings, yearlings and mares for a wide array of clients.

“I was buying a couple of foals, and mares. We had good success. We bought a foal for A$600,000 in May 2022 and we sold her in April 2023 for A$1.8 million, she topped Easter sales. That's called pin hooking. It's like buying shares, really. So you're buying a horse at one stage of their life and just flipping them on at a later stage and hoping to make a profit. But then Tom Magnier eventually asked me to join the team and we went on from there.

“I get clients to visit the farm, use the stallions, identify the horses that we have to purchase at sales. I am essentially trying to help the farm, help the blood stock side of it. Then when we go to the sales, I’m helping to get the horses sold and everything like that, and just try and create a list basically for the Magnier family and for the clients of Coolmore. The Winx filly for instance, was owned by three people. So I’m a client liaison or client manager then as well for people at the firm. I’m essentially a go-to for people at the farm.” 

Coolmore’s operations span three continents and a couple of hemispheres across two seasons.

“Ironically, the northern hemisphere season starts on Valentine's Day almost each year, because a mare generally carries a pregnancy for 11 months. So you are aiming for a January 1 foal. It’s the same as the underage GAA model. You always want a Kerry minor to have a January birthday.

“Some shuttle stallions that are in America or even Europe would go to South America and stallions from America and even Europe would come down to Australia then as well. They'd land, say, middle to late August and they'd start covering the mares down here from the first of September. Again, mares go for 11 months and a horse's birthday in Australia then is deemed to be August 1st. 

"So take a busy stallion - say for instance, the likes of Wootton Bassett, who's a phenomenon that Coolmore purchased for a lot of money two or three years ago. As an ‘outcross’ he was upgrading his mare, so to speak, so mares that were, we’ll say, middle of the road horses, he was bringing them up. It would be like throwing David Clifford into Kildare in the hope of beating the Dubs. You are trying to inject a little bit of something special.” 

So what makes a David Clifford-type stallion?

“The golden traits are performance and pedigree really. You look at physique as well. It’s like trying to pick five footballers. Well, this is my short list of 10 lads and I'll say right, well, that fella’s father is an Olympic runner, his mother played camogie. The next fella then you’d say 'well he used to be a sub so we won’t go for him', and that’s kind of how we do it with the horses too. Some people will go with a hunch but John Magnier's mantra is performance, pedigree and physique. The three P’s is what we call it.” 

Winx had it all. And the expectation is that her offspring will too.

“It's not just that she's a commodity, it's the fact that she's a collector's item. So you know, it's so rare, that she came to the marketplace. It was a once in the lifetime thing. The previous records for the yearling filly to go to auction in Australia was A$2.6 million and the previous record for a colt out of Black Caviar, was A$5 million.

“There was talk and rumours that the foal was going beat the A$2.6m and she obviously smashed it. She made double it. It goes back to performance. Period. She had the pedigree. She was out of Winx. She was by a stallion called Pierro, who we stand here at Coolmore, a brilliant horse who won the Triple Crown as a 2 year old.” 

Winx was a racing phenomenon Down Under, a superstar and global sensation with 33 consecutive wins. “She’s done so much for racing in Australia,” McGuire says. “She just created a following. She created a vibe. She just uplifted everything. When she went to stud, she came to Coolmore. She was owned by three individuals, one of which was Woppitt Bloodstock, headed by Debbie Kepitis and her family. They bought the others out. 

"When Winx retired from racing, she came here to Coolmore as well, like with all Debbie’s other mares. Unfortunately her first foal died. So this was the Winx filly’s first live foal and the ownership made the decision to put her to public auction to let the public decide what she was worth.” 

And when the gavel went down? Better than an All-Ireland medal? “How would I know!? But it was a hair-standing-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment. Something we might all experience just the once in a lifetime.” 

Not that he’s lost any grá for Gaelic football. He’s hooked up with Kerry’s Jack Barry in Sydney and both will be tuned into Ennis on Sunday.

“I was playing quite a bit but then I stopped around the time COVID hit. I’d love to be doing it more. Jack's here now at the moment in Sydney, my brother as well. David Culhane from Ballylongford, and Tipp’s Colin Riordan too. The level down here is a lot better than people expect.

“The GAA in Melbourne have their own facility which is great and it was only 20 minutes away or something like that. The Sydney location is in Ingleburn, which would be about 45-50 minutes away. They rent out one of the Aussie Rules teams pitches so they always have first refusal. So if it rains and they tear the place up, they can say to the GAA lads ‘not this weekend maybe next weekend’.

“It’s only a rental one like, they should be able to kind of come together and sort it out but it's probably difficult to get the land.” 

Maybe they should call Magnier.