From the sale ring to a trainer's ticket for Magic Millions’ Ros Buerckner

For the last eight years at sale time, the lively woman that is Roslyn Buerckner can be found on the far-left corner of the Magic Millions sale ring. As expected of big-sale bid spotters, she can holler with the best of them.

Ros’ corner of the auditorium will often include Yulong and Widden Stud, Newgate Farm and Boomer Bloodstock, and four times a year she watches their nods and waves at the popular Gold Coast complex.

“I love bid spotting,” she said, speaking to TDN AusNZ this week. “It’s such a great way to keep in touch with so many people from the industry, and it’s a rush, especially on those big lots. I’ll often have these huge buyers all within a table of each other, and the pressure is on because they all want to be on the right leg.”

Ros has been with Magic Millions for 16 years, starting off in the sale ring with a shovel and a good attitude. Now, alongside her bid spotting, she is also a licensed Queensland trainer.

Last weekend, the new trainer had her first winner when the 5-year-old gelding Remunerative (Star Witness) won the Gayndah Cup over 1400 metres. It was a close contest, Remunerative surviving a protest and a 0.1l photo finish, but he became his trainer’s first winner from four horses to the track.

“I’m currently sitting on a 25 per cent winning strike rate,” Ros said. “I’m pretty happy with that.”

The Wonder horse

Remunerative hasn’t been long with Ros and her husband, horseman Sean Hollands. The couple, operating as River High Ranch, picked up the horse at the Magic Millions Online May Sale for just $4000 this year.

The gelding was previously with Gillian Heinrich on the Gold Coast and he hadn’t been without his problems, but time and plenty of attention brought him to a win last weekend at just the second time of asking for his new owners.

By Star Witness, Remunerative is bred on a cross that Ros particularly likes.

The horse is from the Testa Rossa mare Worth Every Penny, and this is the family of Braari (USA) (Gulch {USA}) that features the G1 Hollywood Futurity S. winner and later stallion, Stormello (USA).

When Ros pored through the catalogue looking for something like him, she was able to see past the red writing that declared Remunerative had had arthroscopic surgery for bone chips, and that he was under veterinary care for damage to his eyes, sustained in his final start for Heinrich at Ipswich.

“He got clods in both eyes in that race, so it looked like he’d stopped running,” Ros said. “But we watched all his replays and it looked to us like he had plenty of ability, and we thought he would definitely be a horse that would suit the country Cups meetings.”

In the Queensland surrounds of River High Ranch, which is sat on the banks of the Mary River outside of Pioneer’s Rest north of the Sunshine Coast, Remunerative had to learn about rural life.

“He was such a city boy,” Ros said. “He’d let the alpacas eat his feed and then the sheep discovered they could get under his fence to eat it too, and he’d just stand there and watch them from the corner. It was like he didn’t know what to do.

“He’s getting there now, but we call him ‘Wade the Wonder Horse’ because I wonder what he’d do if I did this, and I wonder why he’s like this or like that.”

Remunerative is one of four horses in work for Ros, but he’ll forever be her first winner and that’s something a trainer rarely forgets.

“We squealed the house down,” she said. “I’m pretty sure everyone went from watching the race at the track to watching these two clowns carrying on, but it was just amazing.”

Ros will admit that she can hardly pronounce her racehorse’s name. She stumbles over it every time, even now that he’s a winner, but the horse has given her a rare thrill and the details of the day weren’t lost on her.

“On the day of the race, it was 40 days until I turn 40,” she said. “Plus it was the 40th anniversary of the Gayndah Cup, which is one of the oldest racecourses in the state, I think. So there were a couple of little things that stamped the occasion.

“There’s also the fact that Gayndah is the orange capital of Queensland, and I was born and raised in Orange in the central west of New South Wales. It was like it was all coming together.”

We’ll win the Cup

In her eight years bid spotting with Magic Millions, Ros has banked a lot of experience and ambition.

At one point, she considered chasing a career in auctioneering, unfussy about the fact that so few women have staked a claim in that field. But adversity doesn’t bother this woman, and last weekend’s good win by Remunerative came on an important day.

“I was really thrilled to get my first winner on a day when Gai Waterhouse got her 150th Group 1 win,” Ros said. “That was a real thrill, actually, because Sean and I are both really driven. We set a goal and we go for it, and we’re going to win the Melbourne Cup.”

Climbing from a humble country Cup in Queensland to the elite staying race of Australia isn’t a tall tale for Ros; it’s an ambition. She doesn’t talk about it with the absurd rambling of a dreamer, either.

“My grandfather was George Warrener, and I was brought up listening to all his stories of the Melbourne Cup,” she said. “He was obsessed with the race, and his whole life ambition was to have a runner and have a winner of the Melbourne Cup, and he bred a lot of stayers.

“He used to talk about the old ways of training them and how you’d put the miles into their legs, and it could be galloping them over the farm or sorting the cattle with them, all the things they used to do with them in the old days. It was all about getting them fresh in the head and getting them to stay.”

Ros and Sean have written down the Cup as a lifelong goal and they intend to get there, and the romance of the big race is that it is filled with stories like theirs.

“It’s on the cards,” she said. “We’ll win it one day. We’ll be one of those stories where the kids have been riding the horse in the paddock the day before, and he’ll be the longest shot in the race and he’ll just fly home. You’ll see.”

The other side of the fence

Outside of training and bid spotting, Ros has a full-time job as a venue officer, managing the Maryborough Showgrounds and Equestrian Park. Her and Sean have four children between them (and no television), and they grow miniature cattle at River High Ranch.

When Ros took out a trainer’s ticket in Queensland this year, it’s fair to say her rubber band was already stretched pretty tight.

“I decided that I had a spare four minutes each week, so I figured why not be a racehorse trainer as well?” she said.

In fact, the reality was a bit more disciplined. At the 2021 Magic Millions 2YOs In Training Sale last October, the couple breezed up a three-horse draft under their own banner for the first time.

“Part of getting our own horses to that Sale was that I needed a trainer’s licence to work them on the track,” Ros said. “So that is what actually started the whole process of me getting my license, and it was finally approved in January.”

Of that breeze-up draft, two of the horses belonged to Ros and Sean outright. They were a Spieth colt and another by The Mission.

The latter, now named The Veresdale, was a horse they had bought for just $1000 through the Magic Millions Online platform earlier in the year, and they sold him at the breeze-up event for $32,500 to Mishani Enterprises.

The Spieth youngster fared similarly. He had cost the couple just $1600 through Magic Millions Online and they sold him for $15,000 at the breeze-ups to Andrew Dale Racing.

Gallery: Some of River High Ranch's breeze-up draft at the 2021 Magic Millions 2YOs In Training Sale, images courtesy of Magic Millions

“Looking back now, the whole Sale process was incredibly stressful,” Ros said. “There were so many things to worry about, like what if they didn’t have the right x-rays or the breeze-up wasn’t the right time, or if the sire wasn’t in fashion?

“I can tell you that I found it extremely stressful to be on the other side of selling horses, to be a vendor. Oh my gosh, I don’t know how they don’t all have grey hair and heart attacks at every sale.”

What it did do, however, was offer Ros, a long-time bid spotter, an insight into what goes on across the floor below her during sales.

“It was good to see that other side because now I know what goes into that one moment in the sale ring and it was scary, and I don’t get scared very often. I’ve got a whole new level of respect for everything that goes into selling a horse now.”

Ros has no plans to hit the sale ring again as a vendor. Instead, she has been busy as a buyer, purchasing horses in the last three editions of Magic Millions Online. She is continually on the scout for country Cups horses, both publicly and privately.

Remunerative, meanwhile, may head to an Eagle Farm mile event in a fortnight’s time, but he’ll always have the Gayndah Cup to his name. The trophy is at home at River High Ranch, full of oranges.