The prestigious Inglis Easter Yearling Sale will take centre stage at Riverside Stables, Warwick Farm on April 5 and 6 and Marsh Racing will be in attendance, with Stephen and bloodstock agent Dylan Johnson on the ground and looking to add further firepower to the stable from this stunning catalogue.

“Our aim is always to have the stable improving year on year, and the way we do that is to have good horses running in good races. Key to this is securing top new talent to join the stable each season, and purchasing from a sale such as the Inglis Easter sale is really important” says Stephen.

Utilising both online resources and time on the ground looking at physical talent has been the plan of attack for this sale.

“Dylan and I will arrive on Friday and waste no time getting around inspecting lots we are interested in. Using the superb online platform that Inglis have, we have been able to meticulously go through the pedigrees and videos lot by lot to narrow down a short list of about 150 yearlings we will look to inspect”.

With a catalogue of this calibre and a sale with this much popularity, competition is expected to be very strong, but this isn’t deterring the team from the belief that they can come away with some nice purchases.

“We want to build on the strong sale we had at Karaka, where we put our shoulder to the wheel and came away with some lovely horses. Looking at the Inglis Easter catalogue, there are beautiful bloodlines and families represented in just about every lot. We will employ our philosophy of putting a value on each yearling we like and sticking to that, this way our owners know we are getting the very best value for money.”

“We are going to the sale with the aim of securing one top colt and one top filly, but if more present themselves at a value we think is attractive we’ll have no hesitation in putting our hat in the ring”.

The team have also come up with a novel initiative, partnering with the Breast Cancer Foundation in a spinoff of Inglis’ ‘Pink Bonus Scheme’.

“We really liked the ‘Pink Bonus’ initiative Inglis have come up with, where female ownership is rewarded with an opportunity to secure $1million in bonusses. Building on this idea, we are going to the sale to purchase a horse to be owned by an all-female syndicate and we have partnered with the NZ Breast Cancer Foundation to commit 2% of the prizemoney the horse earns to be donated to the foundation. There will also be other perks to being involved, including a champagne lunch and of course having access to our usual high standard of communication! We will be doing everything we can with the horse we buy to return to Australia to have a crack at the races which qualify for the $1 million bonus scheme”.

The theme of this trip is to keep up the momentum and to involve both loyal existing owners and bring on board newcomers to Marsh Racing.

“We have a fantastic, loyal ownership base who are the backbone of the business and we strive to find new opportunities for them. We also know through our experience at past sales that we often have more interested owners than horses available, many of whom are people looking to come on board for the first time. We want to make sure that everyone who wants to be involved with us has the best opportunity of doing so”.

All purchases will be put onto the website under our Purchases Page and we encourage anyone interested in owning a share of the yearlings we buy (no matter how big or small!) to contact Stephen directly on +64 27 228 8889 or email us at marshracing@xtra.co.nz.