BY Mick Sharkie – @TheSharkTweet
22 hours ago Horse Racing
Trainer Shawn Mathrick (left) (Pic: Vince Caligiuri, Getty)
When Shawn Mathrick goes shopping for horses he’s not looking for the perfect yearling or an impeccable form card, far from it.
Mathrick goes looking for faults.
The Cranbourne trainer has more second hand horses in his stable than shiny new ones but that’s just the way he likes it; for Mathrick, a horse out of form is just a problem to solve.
“I watch people go to these tried horse sales and pay overs for horses that are never going to return that spend,” he said.
“I’m always thinking about what I can get out of a horse, whether it’s one win or five wins, then I work out what I want to pay for them.
Sunday’s Sale maiden winner Tall Tale is the latest and almost textbook example of a Mathrick fixer-upper. Formerly trained by Frankie Stockdale, Tall Tale was unable to run a place in his first six starts before Stockdale threw out a Hail Mary to his colleague.
“People will ring me up with badly behaved horses, bucker’s, biters, rogues, and ask me to get them right,” Mathrick said.
“Tall Tale wasn’t like that, he was just giving Frankie a hard time. He rang me up one day and said ‘I can’t get this thing going, do you want to have a crack?’ they’re the sort of horses that I like to try and get going.”
“I thought he might be bleeding, he’d sometimes have this weird pinky looking mucus after a swim and he’d had a throat op (sic) early in his career. I dried him out and he started working really well, I thought, this bugger can gallop.”
Tall Tale duly saluted on Sunday at its first start for Mathrick, whose confidence may have been reflected in the betting ring where the horse was backed from $6 into $5, although double figures were available in early markets.
But Mathrick insists that results like Tall Tale aren’t a fluke and said that searching for little nuggets of gold amongst tried stock takes time and patience, as well as an understanding of form.
“Usually if a horse has been city class but then drops off there is a problem somewhere,” he said.
“I love to get my hands on them and grab their tendons, back muscle, joints, everywhere I can. If I can’t find a problem I don’t buy them because I’m looking for something I can fix.
“I rode before I walked so I understand the horse like that. But other blokes can read form, others look at times, there’s lots of ways to work it out.”
And G1Xchange.com gives Mathrick and other value hunters another avenue to source their stock. Now, as well as tried horse dispersal auctions, Mathrick can bid to buy a horse that takes his fancy direct from the owners at any time he likes.
He just can’t believe that early adopters haven’t seen the value in one of his own horses.
“How come no one has bid on Adirondack? Don’t they want to win a Darwin Cup?” he said.