Welcome to the wild and wacky world of corduroy. At the start of Ireland's most expensive bloodstock sale at Goffs, Kill Co Kildare, yesterday, corduroy was all over the place. Only horses were more common. Corduroy, horses, but most important of all money. There was a lot of money.
In the horsey set corduroy may be fashionable, but it's money that really separates the horsey set from the rest of us.
At 1.10 p.m. John Magnier coughed up £2 million for a one-year-old horse. That's a one-year-old horse that has never had a saddle on his back and may end up with the running ability of an asthmatic Orsen Wells.
But £2 million is nothing, really. Last week Magnier splashed out £3.5 million for a one-year-old horse in Newmarket. A few weeks before that, the Coolmore Stud boss paid $6.8 million for another one-year-old in America. It's enough to make the eyes water.
And the thing is that Magnier is the acknowledged world master of making money from horses. No sentimental fool he. It's said the softest parts of him are his teeth, and the man's wealth is very real. It's just that events like yesterday's seem very unreal indeed.
Magnier spent five minutes trading bids with Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum for the £2 million son of Danzig, and such was the vibe that flowed around the Goffs sales ring it would have surprised no one if both men had sprinted for the middle of the ring and indulged in an arm wrestle.
Of course such tussles are usually dismissed as being relatively uncommon, but the all-pervasive feel around Goffs was of a healthily robust hustle. Apparently the prospect of owning a racehorse has never been within the reach of so many.
A total of 690 people registered as new owners in Ireland in 1999. That has already been exceeded this year. The 1999 figure of 300 new syndicates formed has also been surpassed. "We've never had as much interest in racehorse ownership than at the moment," an Irish Horseracing Authority official confirmed yesterday.
And, if all that isn't enough, the outlook looks even brighter if Charlie McCreevy and Joe Walsh get their way and further increase the subsidisation of Irish racing's prize money. Quite why the Ministers should so devoutly wish to provide "a secure financial base" for an already thriving industry by increasing their contribution to prize money from £18 million to an estimated £38 million is unclear, but the horsey set can hardly be expected to turn down the offer.
And subsidisation is what it will be if the Ministers' plans go ahead. The bulk of the money after all will come from the off-course bookmakers' tax. But since Paddy Power, the country's largest bookmaker chain, calculate that no more than 12 per cent of their turnover comes from Irish racing, the product isn't generating the income. Hardly sound economic sense.
The logic seems to be that prize money will eventually filter down the system to all in the industry. But first it has to filter through owners, and who is the most powerful owner of all in Ireland? Why, the one who paid £2 million for a one-year-old horse yesterday.
