Behind the scenes breeders: Harry Perks

Cover image courtesy of Sportpix

Breeding stakes winners is no easy task, but over the years Harry Perks has made it look as though it is.

The economics graduate from Flinders University has bred and raced numerous champions dating all the way back to the late 1970s, firstly under Toorak Park Stud and more latterly under the banner of The Toorak Thoroughbred Breeding Trust. He has bred 131 stakes winners and counting, and has been named South Australian Breeder of the Year on 12 of the past 15 occasions.

In 2018, Perks was inducted into the South Australian Racing Hall of Fame in the Associate ranks for his contribution to racing as both an owner and breeder, something which a young student with no family ties to the industry could ever have envisaged when he first began attending race meetings during his time at university.

“One of my good friends at university, his father was the Moorefield track watcher, so I suppose that’s when it all started,” Perks recalled.

“We used to go to the midweek races and when we weren’t playing footie we’d go to the Saturday races as well. Things were a lot different back in those days, because you couldn’t have a bet unless you went to the races.

“That got me a little bit interested, then later on I bought my first horse when I could afford to and we went from there. I was in Port Lincoln working for a while, then I came back to Adelaide and we set up a horse stud in the Adelaide Hills back in the early 1980s.

“It’s one of those things that has just grown over time, it’s a great interest and gives me plenty to think about. It has been a lot of fun.”

The fun started right from the very first horse Perks raced, a filly by the name of Matihi Bay (Manihi), who won multiple races including two as a juvenile.

Having opted to breed from her at the culmination of her racing career, Matihi Bay produced stakes-winning 2-year-old Runaway Night (Always Welcome) with her very first foal, and would later produce blue-hen mare Kiss A Halo (Don’t Say Halo {USA}), the dam of no less than three 2-year-old Group winners - all of whom were bred by Perks - including G1 Blue Diamond S. hero Undoubtedly (Redoute’s Choice).

Perks was off and running as an owner-breeder, and it’s fair to say he hasn’t looked back since. Of his 131 stakes winners, 16 have achieved success at the highest level, which makes the task of identifying his greatest racehorse a little more challenging than most.

There are, however, two which stand out above all others.

“From a colt point of view, it probably has to be Gold Guru - he won three Group 1s and three Group 2s,” Perks said.

Gallery: Perks' two standout horses, images courtesy of Sportpix

“He was Champion Australian 3-Year-Old, he won the Australian Guineas and then went to Sydney and beat Might And Power in the Ranvet Stakes, which was amazing. He then went on to beat Tie The Knot in the AJC Derby and it was a pretty special time.

“The best filly I’ve had is Southern Speed, who won the Caulfield Cup. I remember sitting there in the stand having backed her at good odds, not moving one muscle, but the sweat was still running down my face through the excitement and expectation.

“Racing is the only sport I know where that happens. You have your ups and downs, and boy it’s nice to have the ups because you know the downs are not far away in racing.”

A penny saved is a penny earned

What makes Perks’ success as an owner-breeder even more remarkable is that it hasn’t been achieved by spending fortunes at the sales.

Together with the help of his long-time bloodstock agent Adrian Hancock, whom he is effusive in his praise for, Perks has purchased the dams of some of his highest achieving horses without breaking the bank, with this year’s G1 Toorak H. winner Attrition (Churchill {Ire}), whose dam Queen’s Kiss (French Deputy {USA}) was secured for $54,000, a perfect recent example.

Other countless bargain buys include Khandallah (Kitten’s Joy {USA}), who was purchased for just $35,000 and went on to produce this year’s Listed Adelaide Guineas heroine Party Princess (So You Think {NZ}), as well as the G2 Danehill S. winner and multiple Group 1 placegetter Dalasan, who stood his first season as a stallion at Riverbank Farm in Victoria this year.

Galley: Perks has purchased the dams of some of his highest achieving horses without breaking the bank, images courtesy of The Image Is Everything

While Khandallah had a stakes placing in both the Listed Strutt S. and Listed Tasmanian Oaks to her name, plenty of Perks’ other stakes-producing mares never achieved black type, but almost all of them had proven themselves capable of competing at metropolitan level on the track.

“I tend to like breeding from fillies or mares who are at least city winners that have reasonable pedigrees,” Perks said.

“I don’t normally go out and buy stakes-winning mares, because they’re expensive. Like I say to people, if you win a city race in Melbourne and you’re by a good stallion, then you go to a Group 1 stallion, he can easily improve her. A city-winning mare in Melbourne might be four or five lengths slower than a stakes-winning mare, but that doesn’t mean she can’t produce a very good horse.

“We bred Rebel Raider, who we then stood at stud, and he was out of a stakes-placed mare who could run. She produced a Group 1 winner who won two Derbys, so it’s a funny old game.

“Like I often say, if the best horses always produced the best, the wealthy would own them all. Luckily, it’s not that easy.”

Another philosophy that has served Perks well over the years is breeding like to like, with the former accountant preferring to send sprinting mares to sprinter-miler stallions and staying mares to staying stallions.

As someone who enjoys breeding and racing horses capable of running over a mile and beyond, the dearth of staying stallions in Australia relative to other racing and breeding jurisdictions around the world has prompted Perks to use shuttle stallions from the Northern Hemisphere more and more in recent times, a move which has yielded a huge amount of success. You need only go back as far as The Everest Day this year, when Perks bred three stakes winners across three different states, to find evidence of that trend.

The trio in question - Arctic Glamour (Frosted {USA}), Air Assault (Justify {USA}) and the aforementioned Attrition, are all by shuttle stallions from either America or Europe, and the sires of the latter pair, the Coolmore-based Justify (USA) and Churchill (Ire), are two stallions whom Perks singled out for particular praise.

“They tend to breed more of the staying sort of horse in the Northern Hemisphere and a lot of them are by terrific stallions too,” he said.

“We don’t have as many staying stallions going to stud here in Australia as they do in the north. In Australia a lot of the studs only want to stand sprinting stallions and a lot of people like a quick return, but it doesn’t make sense to me when you look at how many Group 1 2-year-old races there are in Australia compared with how many there are for horses that get over a mile-plus at three and beyond.

“I quite like Justify, and to think he has six Group 1 winners in his first two crops is quite incredible. He’s done a huge job and that horse that won the 2-year-old race in Sydney last Saturday was pretty impressive, a big strong horse just like his sire.

“Then you’ve got Churchill, the sire of Attrition, who was probably the best miler son of Galileo - and what a great stallion he has been! Galileo was one of the world’s best stallions, and you’ve got access to one of his sons that won four Group 1s.”

A perennial dilemma

Attrition, whose full brother will be sold by Mill Park Stud on behalf of Perks at next month’s Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale as Lot 74, is among 41 stakes winners to date that Perks has bred and sold, meaning the property funds manager has chosen to race, either on his own or in partnership with other shareholders, the remaining 90 of his astonishing 131 stakes winners that he has bred.

The dilemma of which horses to keep and which horses to sell is a perennial one for any breeder, and as someone who breeds racehorses as a passion and not a livelihood, Perks is no different.

“It’s like anything, you’ve got to pay the bills and you need a balance - if only you knew which ones to keep 100 per cent of!” he said.

“We have kept a fair few over the years and had a lot of success, but any Group 1 filly that I’ve bred I tend to sell. If you sell a mare for $1.2 million or whatever, which we have done previously, that helps the old cash flow.

“If I keep one to race 100 per cent, it’s normally fillies, and I normally keep around 20 per cent if someone buys a colt off me to keep an interest in some colts.

“If you keep 100 per cent of a filly, it’s pretty easy to keep her, go to stud and say where you want to go.”

Deciding on which stallion to send his band of approximately 30 broodmares to each season is one of Perks’ favourite things about breeding racehorses, as is the incredible opportunities that have come his way as a result of his involvement in the industry.

“I can’t tell my daughters what bloke to marry because they’d produce better offspring, but I can with fillies and mares!” he quipped, before continuing on: “I love the industry and horses are magnificent animals. It has been a pleasure being involved and you meet so many interesting people too.

“Whether it’s going overseas to Ascot and getting into the Royal Enclosure because you deal with Coolmore and Darley, who look after you, or going to the Dubai World Cup and meeting Sheikh Mohammed over there.

“More recently, Andrew Lloyd Webber asked us to go to the opera on the harbour and we had drinks with him, all because we sent mares to Too Darn Hot.

“The little add ons that happen over time, meeting some really interesting and successful people, it’s just great.”

A helping hand

By his own admission, Perks would not have enjoyed anywhere close to the amount of success he has experienced over the past four decades without the help of certain people, most notably his long-term advisor Adrian Hancock and all the team at Mill Park Stud in South Australia.

Having initially set up his own stud farm in the 1980s, where he stood the likes of Group 1-producing stallions Always Welcome and Don’t Say Halo (USA), it wasn’t until the mid 1990s that Perks decided to move all his stock to Mill Park, which is owned and operated by the Watson family.

It was a decision that took both Perks and Mill Park to the next level, with the likes of G1 Champagne S. heroine Go Indy Go (Bernardini {USA}), G1 Victoria Derby winner Warning (Declaration Of War {USA}) and dual Derby hero Rebel Raider just a handful of the elite-level winners bred by Perks and raised on the South Australian property.

“We had a stud up at Macclesfield in the Adelaide Hills and it’s very cold up there in winter - it’s more mud than anything and young horses don’t really want to lie down and grow out on that,” Perks recalled.

“One day a trainer came up to look at some horses and he said, ‘Look, I couldn’t buy anything off this place because foals just don’t grow well here’, so over time we decided to move them down to Mill Park.

“It’s a completely different environment down there. It’s close to Lake Albert and therefore you have the moderating effect of that, and you have sand over limestone so it’s great when it rains. It’s just a much, much better environment for growing young horses and it has worked out very well.

“We’ve had a lot of success with Mill Park and they are extremely good at what they do. The number of good horses to have come off that property is amazing - even people from the Hunter Valley come down to see what they’re doing there!”

The way things are going this season, plenty of people would also be interested in seeing how Perks makes breeding stakes winners seem so easy.