Meet the country’s biggest stud
STALLION’S SEED IS SIRING WINNING RACEHORSES AROUND THE GLOBE
Every stallion has a “tell,” says Bridgette Jablonsky, and, in this moment, in a dimly lit barn at Hanover Shoe Farms in Hanover, Pa., Somebeachsomewhere, the legendary Canadian harness racing champion and international Hall of Fame horse, is telling Jablonsky he is ready to perform.
Somebeachsomewhere’s readiness is never a certainty. He is a finicky and, at times, apathetic lover. To hasten his readiness, Chiptease, a mare in heat, is in the barn, standing idly by as her would-be mate nips at her hindquarters, throws back his head, inhales deeply and, after 10 minutes, starts dancing about on his hoofs.
This is the “tell” that Jablonsky, the farm’s manager and resident veterinarian, was waiting for.
“Don’t blow this,” she says to a groom, who leads the dancing stallion away from Chiptease to a “phantom mare” — basically the equine equivalent of an inflatable sex doll — that he mounts as Jablonsky guides his penis into a customized artificial vagina. The twin-layered rubber gizmo resembles a rubber boot, only bigger, and ends in a point and is filled with hot water to simulate a mare’s temperature. It is loose fitting, because Somebeachsomewhere, or just plain “Beach” as he is popularly known, prefers it that way.
Six thrusts and 60 seconds later, it’s over, an end punctuated by a triumphant whinny out of Beach. Slipping off the phantom mare, he exits the barn into the sunlight beyond, for a post-coital meal of whole oats mixed with vitamin-enriched horse pellets.
“Beach was quick today,” Jablonsky says, beaming. “Some days we have to coax him into it, but he has earned the right to be picky, because he is a special, special horse.
“There may never be a horse as great as him again.”
Not on a racetrack, and not in the breeding shed.
Eight years after retiring from racing, Somebeachsomewhere, a lover with a questionable libido, is Canada’s biggest stud. His seed — packed in ice and shipped hither and yon — is impregnating broodmares across North America, and as far away as Australia and New Zealand, for as much as $30,000 a pop. He has earned his original owners more than four times what he won on the track, while his offspring have been growing up, running fast and winning big in their own right.
“The quality of his semen is terrific,” Jablonsky says. “His semen goes everywhere, everywhere we can get it by overnight courier.”
Nothing in Beach’s pedigree suggested his racing immortality. Certainly nothing in his pedigree suggested he would sire champion sons and daughters. He was a horse of average roots.
Stories abound about his mother, Wheres The Beach, being the slowest mare ever to put on a bridle. His father, Mach Three, was a star in Ontario. The son was born in 2005 and purchased at a yearling auction in Lexington, Ky., by six partners from Truro, N.S. The most soughtafter horses were selling for six figures. Beach sold for $40,000 on day three of the auction, after all the bred-tobe-greats were gone.
“When I saw him, I loved him,” says Brent MacGrath, one of the Truro Six and Beach’s trainer from his racing days.
“The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of him is just his sheer power and strength, I could feel it my hands,” says Paul MacDonell, Beach’s Canadian driver.
“He would walk into the race paddock before a race and just be full of himself, rearing up and saying to the world, ‘Here I am, let me at it.’ He had an aura about him. I’m a little biased, but I would say he is one of the top two, top three horses of all time.”
Beach won 20 of 21 career races — and came second in the race he didn’t win — while earning the Nova Scotians $3.2 million in prize money.
He retired in 2008 at age three, as most great champions do because there is more money to be made as a superstar stud than a trackbound speedster. That year he was named Nova Scotia’s top newsmaker, was in the running for Canada’s athlete of the year award and has since been inducted into two halls of fame and declared the horse of the decade.
He is Howe, Gretzky or Orr, just take your pick, and now he works four days a week for about two hours total, from mid-February until the end of June. It is a workload that has reaped the Truro Six, who retain majority ownership of the horse, about US$12 million (and counting) in stud fees.
“We can never repay him for what he has done for us financially,” MacGrath says.
Barring injury, or a drastic dip in fertility or a drop in his ability to produce speedy sons and daughters, Beach, now 11, could be breeding into his 20s.
“He still has the legs of a three-year-old,” Jablonsky says.
The farmhands refer to Hanover’s veterinarian and breeding chief as the “boss.” At best, the boss measures five feet tall, and subsists at work on a diet of Diet Pepsis and peanut-butter sandwiches. She speaks in a rich Long Island accent and has an apparent capacity — were she not so busy overseeing Hanover’s 1,200 horses — to talk about horses all day.
Beach, as a psychological sketch, requires lengthy discussion.
“He is a funny horse,” Jablonsky says. “You can never really figure him out, he wants to keep you guessing.”
In the beginning, after MacGrath and his wife, Rhonda, dropped him off at Hanover Shoe Farms in November 2008, Beach seemed depressed. Homesick. The breeding farm is in Pennsylvania farm country, just north of the Mason-Dixon Line dividing the (old) North from the (old) South, and just on the outskirts of Hanover.
Green fields, a big paddock, a spacious stall with a copper nameplate touting his past glories, acres of pastureland filled with several hundred fertile mares, none of it seemed to lift Beach’s mood. As a stallion with semen gold to sell, he was a remarkably slow learner.
Most stallions learn how to mount the phantom mare — a pommel-horse-shaped padded wooden block with a canvas cover that, to a male horse, is supposed to look like a female horse from behind — in two training sessions. Beach took a year. Jablonsky resorted to having him mount a live mare — though not breed with the mare — before diverting his penis into the artificial vagina.
“Instead of mounting the phantom mare, he just laid down, very gently, on the floor and ejaculated,” she says, chuckling. “I’d never seen that before. If I had taped it and put it on YouTube, I could have made a lot of money.
“But he put up a good argument for a year that he was going to mount that live mare, and not this piece of wood that we have.”
Some stallions rear and scream and roil about when they mount the phantom mare. To prepare for the rowdies, Jablonsky puts on a helmet. To prepare for Beach, she prepares to wait. Thirty minutes can pass before he decides to perform, often after the mare initially in place to arouse him has been swapped out for another mare.
“You have to switch mares, you have to switch positions, you just have to work with him,” the vet says. “He is not as eager a breeding stallion as he was a racehorse.”
But eagerness doesn’t count in the breeding shed.
Dr. John Egloff is a veterinarian with a sugary cowboy drawl that speaks to his upbringing in Texas ranch country. Egloff owns Vieux Carré Farms just up the road from Hanover, and breeds three or four mares a year to Beach.
“He is tremendously fertile,” he says. “If we have some mare that we are breeding to Somebeach and she doesn’t get in foal — it’s not Somebeach’s fault. It is either my fault or the mare’s.”
Beach’s stud fee is the steepest in the business, between US$20,000 and US$30,000, depending on the year and what the market will bear. Whatever the sum, it doesn’t give Egloff any pause. Beach’s foals have fetched as much as US$355,000 at auction. (The average sale price of a Beach baby is closer to US$75,000; Hanover Shoe Farms, meanwhile, owns a minority stake in the stud and can breed its mares to him at no charge, selling the resulting progeny for princely sums.)
One of Beach’s foals, Sunshine Beach, won US$971,000 at the races. Another, Captain Treacherous, won US$3.15 million and is now a stud at Hanover, just like his old man, only his fee is US$15,000. Twentyone of Beach’s babies, both girls and boys, have earned their owners more than US$400,000.
After Beach finishes with his business, Jablonsky continues with hers. She carries the artificial vagina into a lab off the shed, where she detaches a bag containing Beach’s semen from its tip. She hands the bag to Neil Hanchett. The lab tech examines the sample under a microscope.
The verdict? The sperm’s motility — its ability to swim — is graded at 80 per cent and scores a “B” for velocity. The overall count, measured using a sperm counter, is 12.2 billion, or enough to breed 12 mares through artificial insemination. June is the end of the breeding season, so Beach’s lineup of mates is light, consisting of Ideal Gal (in Delaware), Michelle’s Jackpot (in New Jersey) and Southwest (in Indiana).
Beach’s semen is loaded into three syringes, packed in Styrofoam and ice, and addressed to its ultimate destinations, where the waiting mares will be artificially inseminated at 11 a.m. the next day.
“Beach is going to have sons that are great sires and daughters that are producers of great horses,” she says. “His legacy is going to live on long past him.”