Katie Walsh feels more pressure in pinhooking than Grand National

Jockey who rode the Aintree favourite needs to make it pay in the volatile futures market for untested horses


Greg Wood at Newmarket

The Guardian,co,uk , Tuesday 16 April 2013    

Less than a fortnight ago Katie Walsh was riding the favourite in the world's most famous horse race. Ten days later she is out of the spotlight but still under pressure and still in demand. In the paddocks around Tattersalls' auction ring here a steady stream of possible buyers wants to inspect one or all of the four two-year-olds that Walsh will sell at this week's Craven Breeze-Up Sales. The Grand National was for the fun of it. Now Walsh is back at work.

The public knows her as a jockey but in her day job Walsh is a "pinhooker", a trader in the volatile futures market that is young, untested thoroughbreds. Pinhookers buy horses as foals or yearlings, then sell them on as two-year-olds, often at a breeze-up sale, which gives potential buyers a chance to see them gallop before bidding.

The Craven Sale, held during the first meeting of the season here, is the strongest breeze-up of the year, and the profit – if any – on Walsh's consignment will form a significant part of her annual income. She rode all four in their breezes on the nearby Rowley Mile racecourse on Tuesday morning, and now, after nearly a year in her care, the ring is about to determine her reward.

"It's a different sort of pressure from riding in the National," she says. "In the National anything can happen and it's the fairytale stuff but this is a business I want to be doing for many years to come and I won't be riding in the National every year."

Two serious contenders for the season's first Classics on the Rowley Mile in early May were both bought at this sale last year, and the prices paid for Rosdhu Queen, last year's Cheveley Park Stakes winner, and Moohaajim, the runner-up in the Middle Park Stakes, demonstrate the potential for profit and loss in pinhooking. Rosdhu Queen cost €120,000 (£103,000) as a foal but sold for only £65,000 as a two-year-old while Moohaajim, who cost 40,000gns as a yearling, was sold on a year later for 200,000gns.

Walsh hopes to sell three colts – by Bahamian Bounty, Mastercraftsman and Sky Mesa – and a filly by Dutch Art. The latter stallion was also the sire of Caspar Netscher, a dual Group Two winner as a juvenile and the German 2,000 Guineas winner in 2012, who was in Walsh's second consignment of horses to the Craven Sale in 2011.

"He really put me on the map," she says. "Everyone is hoping to get a good one and for me to get him so early on was definitely a big help. You want to fall in love with them the first day that you see them, because you're the one that's going to be looking after them and trying to improve them. Some horses, you look at them and think, 'Oh God, I think he could fly.'

"It's just something within you, I suppose, that makes you want them. But just because you fall in love with them, it doesn't mean you can spend all your budget on them, you have to spread it out because there's so much can go wrong."

Caspar Netscher was in the first crop of Dutch Art, and the fact that none of his sire's offspring had been tested on the track helped to ensure that Walsh bought him for 25,000gns as a yearling, before selling him on for 65,000gns a year later.

"That helped to keep the price down," she says, "and it was a good twist, a good way to start. I just liked him, I thought he was a nice ball of a horse, he had a very good pedigree as well, and he was very correct. It's much harder to buy them [by Dutch Art] now, partly because Caspar was so successful but also because there were a good few others [in the crop] as well."

Walsh's horses are stabled at the yard where Ted, her father, trains Seabass, her partner at Aintree, and a string of horses running both over jumps and on the Flat. As yet, though, she has resisted the temptation to keep any of her purchases at home.

"In an ideal world, we could probably have hung onto Caspar," she says. "It's the same for a lot of them, you might want to hang on to them if you could, but that's not the business I'm in.

"I'm in business to buy them, then bring them back and sell them. People have to get trust in you as well, and if you start keeping them at home, they'll be saying, you only keep the good ones at home and want us to buy everything else. So you have to let the good ones go as well, it makes sense and it builds your reputation."

If potential guaranteed results, the trade would not exist, and Walsh is happy to play the percentages and keep selling from year to year.

"There's a lot of money invested in them and everyone's looking to make a turn," she says. "They're not all going to make a turn but you'd hope that one or two will, so you can go again next year.

"They're not all going to be stars, and you just don't know how they'll turn out. I knew when I had Caspar that he was a nice horse and would win a maiden, but I couldn't have told you that he was going to win a Mill Reef and a Gimcrack, and anybody who does tell you something like that is lying, because you don't know. I don't ride a bumper winner and say, this is going to win a Gold Cup."

In all about 170 horses will go through the ring at Tattersalls' over the next two days, each one as fresh and full of promise as the new season. "You just don't know what's going to happen," Walsh says. "You might think you've got interest and then it gets a bit cold. You want someone to love them as much as you do. Or two people, ideally. Sure, I'm sitting here now, hoping and dreaming, but it might not be this way in another two days."