Beers, bibles and bidding from under a grandstand: What’s the Magic Millions really like?

One of the most successful racehorse buyers in the country is hiding in a narrow passage underneath a temporary grandstand.

She is wearing bright red lipstick and colourful clothes, but right now she is trying to make herself invisible as she enters a bidding war for a filly that has caught her eye.

“I change from year to year,” laughs Denise Martin, the boss of racehorse syndication goliath Star Thoroughbreds, as she explains her approach to bidding at the Magic Millions yearlings sales. “This year I thought, ‘I’ll wait and bid from the table’. But we missed out on two [horses] early on day one, so I said to my team, ‘Back to our spot, which is here’.”

Martin never locks eyes on the auctioneer, let alone the horse she’s trying to buy. She hears every $10,000 increment on the filly circling the elevated sales ring that rises above the 107 tables in the ballroom-like setting of the Gold Coast sales venue. As a registered bidder, Martin has one of the tables, but still she vacates her seat for the key couple of minutes when business is at hand.

With a subtle nod, she triggers her representative to up the ante again. A bid-spotter bellows to acknowledge Martin’s instruction. A further rival offer takes over. Who? She wouldn’t know. She is up against someone who is also bidding from the shadows.

Regardless of whether Martin’s behaviour is mere superstition or plain smart, it works. The hammer drops, and she shuffles from underneath the grandstand as the winning bidder, paying $210,000 for the filly.

The Magic Millions auditorium where more than 1000 horses will be sold this week.Credit: Luke Marsden

Which goes to show that while the public face of Australia’s highest-profile horse sale basks in the Gold Coast sun, with cocktail parties, a polo match, a beach race along the golden sands, much of the real business of the Magic Millions happens in the shadows.

“I think some buyers like to put on a show and want people to see their bidding,” says 76-year-old auctioneer David Chester, who was selling horses at the first Magic Millions sale in 1986 and has the honour of knocking down the first 15 lots each day.

“[The setting] helps the trainers to get owners and they all have a few grogs. They think, ‘I’m not going to buy a horse’. By the end of the day they’ve bought three.

“But others want to keep it very low-key. Some want to hide. They think, ‘If I’m bidding on it and am a really good judge, it must be a good horse and the opposition will keep bidding’. It’s great theatre.”

And it’s rich theatre, too, with the Magic Millions on track to trade $250 million worth of yearlings by the end of the week, highlighted by a $2.6m filly on day two, the most ever paid for a horse on the holiday strip. Long before The Everest became an Australian racing phenomenon, the Magic Millions was leading the way in outside-the-box thinking.

Gai Waterhouse watches on during the Magic Millions sales this week.Credit: Luke Marsden

On a parcel of land adjacent to the Gold Coast racetrack, potential buyers walk around with their bibles: the sales catalogue. It’s more than 1000 pages long and as thick as an old-fashioned Yellow Pages. Each book has a name territorially scribbled on the side, lest someone accidentally picks it up and sees the private, handwritten notes alongside a buyer’s favoured horses. Each horse has a lot number and a page with a detailed pedigree. This is a complex business and each buyer has a slightly different way of reading the same set of data.

“We basically get a minute-and-a-half to two minutes to do a huge job on each yearling, which the breeders have been working on for almost two-and-a-half years, from the mating to the foaling down and then finally bringing it to the sale,” Magic Millions managing director Barry Bowditch says.

Pressure?

“Absolutely there is,” Bowditch replies.

Inside the sales complex, horses spin around in circles while parading as members of the audience suck back Coronas with lime and line up to pile prawns on their buffet plates. The atmosphere is relaxed, but the pace of buying and selling is relentless. Grown men wearing thongs spend more money on horses than first home-buyers would spend on a house in Sydney. There is the constant buzz of auctioneer noise and chatter, at least until a high-priced yearling enters when, suddenly, the room goes quiet, the audience engrossed.

“The first sale we were in was a circus tent,” Chester says. “They hadn’t built this shed.

“We were the people who invented the ringside dining, which is now costing us a lot of money and [Magic Millions owner] Gerry [Harvey] is getting pissed off it’s costing us too much money! Now other companies are copying what we do.”

Another key component of the Magic Millions is lucrative Saturday race day that follows. Only horses sold at a Magic Millions sales can enter.

Henry Field, from the Newgate Farm stud, will have three runners in the $2 million two-year-old race on Saturday. He is one of the biggest power players in the complex and he is selling, as well as buying, trying to find the next colt that will turn into a licence-to-print-money stallion.

Ego?

“For us, buying and selling horses, we do it every day, every week, every month, every year,” he says. “You can’t afford to have ego. You’ve got to keep batting away and stay level, trying to delineate between the big, shiny colts, and the horses that are actually runners.

“In this business it’s easy for people to get carried away, but ego and hubris is the kiss of death.”

Which is why sometimes it pays not to be seen - no matter how obscure the hiding place might be.

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