How an ‘exotic’ young foreigner took breeding world by storm
Kirsten Rausing tells Marcus Armytage how she has come to be responsible for some of the sport’s greatest racehorses
When Alpinista won the Prix de l’arc de Triomphe last month, it was widely regarded as the pinnacle of a lifetime of living and breathing the breeding of thoroughbreds for her owner, Kirsten Rausing.
Rausing remains one of the few female stud owners and when she first arrived in Newmarket 42 years ago was regarded as “exotic” by the locals because she was “young, female and foreign”. It was not long until she had bred the champion two-year-old of 1984, Kala Dancer, and the 1985 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes winner, Petoski.
The Arc, therefore, was one of a mountain range of pinnacles in a career which she built without significant family support, in which she has stood almost alone for women in what remains a male-dominated industry.
She has been good for the thoroughbred, she has been good for racing, and the popularity of Alpinista’s victory in the Paris mud was as much to do with the mare’s owner-breeder as it was the trainer, Sir Mark Prescott, and jockey, Luke Morris.
Rausing, 70, was brought up in Sweden. She learnt English by “osmosis”, lapping up Dick Francis and Agatha Christie novels. Her grandfather was the industrialist Ruben Rausing, who created Tetra Pak. Her father, Gad, was a good horseman and pentathlete as well as a world-renowned archaeologist.
At school, she evented, and while her rivals rode pricey Swedish warmbloods, the only horses the schoolgirl could afford were £300 clapped-out racehorses for which the knackerman was her only competitor.
It led her to begin exploring their pedigrees and she borrowed old sales catalogues. In her teens, her grandfather had started breeding gun dogs, then dairy cattle and bought two fillies out of training, one which had not run and the other which had run 53 times without winning. Remarkably, a filly (Simone) out of the unraced mare won the Danish Sceptre Stakes in 1971 and the stud built up.
“A few years later, my grandfather moved to Italy and told me to get rid of all 18 mares and the stallion,” she remembers. “I was 16 and pleaded with him to let me run the stud for two or three years to get down the losses.
“He gave me a year to get the losses down to nil. I got them down by 90 per cent. I ran it for nine years. While I was at university, the main difficulty was sitting up at night [watching pregnant mares about to foal] trying to write a thesis on econometrics. But by that stage I had my sights on travelling west.”
She arrived in Ireland on an Aer Turas DC3 Dakota converted in a Heath Robinson way to carry horses with some of her mares. She could see the sky through cracks in the plane’s aluminium skin and, despite wearing a Swedish army sheepskin coat, at one stage she had to embrace one of the mares to warm up. At the end of the runway in Dublin was Cloghran Stud (now a part of the airport), where the stables were sound-proof against the engine noise of aircraft. “I knew then I’d come to the right place,” she recalls.
‘I was in charge of 14 men, all of them older than me, with no teeth who spoke unintelligible Irish. We had 100 mares and the resident vet was an hour away. It was a baptism of fire’
The next day, she encountered Capt Tim Rogers, who had almost single-handedly reinvented the modern thoroughbred breeding industry, at Airlie Stud in Lucan, Co Dublin. It was an inauspicious start. He refused to have a mare from Sweden on the place and asked Rausing to sit in his office while he sorted it out.
“He had a wonderful shouting match on the telephone,” she recalls. “I had to sit and wait. I wanted the ground to open up. Now I understand he was way ahead of his time – his concern was biosecurity.
“He caught me reading his boards with a list of 120 mares and which stallions they were going to. I said it was interesting that by sending one mare to a certain stallion he was nearly recreating the mating that produced soand-so. He asked how I knew his mare’s pedigrees. I knew about 100 of the 120 and he told me to come back tomorrow and he’d show me the stallions.”
It was the start of a lasting friendship. Rausing went back for spells during the holidays. Breeding in Sweden lacked a frisson for her and she realised that if she was to do it professionally she would have to leave home. She ended up running Baroda Stud for Rogers. “I was in charge of 14 men, all of them older than me, with no teeth who spoke unintelligible Irish. The banks were on strike, so we paid them with IOUS which they could exchange in the pubs. We were on our own with 100 mares with the resident vet an hour away but uncontactable. It was a baptism of fire. People were outspoken; I was a young girl who ‘knew nothing and understood less’. Then I became keen to start a little something of my own.”
Land prices in Ireland were four times what they were in Britain so she put in an offer on Lanwades Stud, Newmarket, which was accepted. “I ran down to the bank with my part of my inheritance
from my grandfather. They asked what my collateral was and when I said ‘two mares’, they burst out laughing and said ‘this isn’t Ireland’. But they agreed on the condition that the stud was the collateral.”
And she was on her way. Lanwades is now 1,000 acres and, thanks to her first stallion Niniski, who no one else wanted to stand and proved to be a much better stallion than racehorse, she was able to add St Simon Stud and later added Staffordstown in Ireland.
This century, with the prizemoney won by Alborada, two-time winner of the Champion Stakes, she set up a philanthropic arm, the Alborada Trust, which has already provided funding for veterinary and medical research around the world to the tune of £30million.
When she started, she was the only woman owning and running a stud in Newmarket. “There were a few women trainers through the country but I was helped by the fact that I was so foreign, so exotic, not educated in this country, people couldn’t slot me into any bracket. Tim Rogers taught me independence – he sent me on some difficult tasks like collecting nomination fees from people who didn’t pay.
“The number of small independent studs standing stallions has dwindled alarmingly since I started. There are the behemoths of Darley, Shadwell and Juddmonte, but now it’s Cheveley Park, the National Stud and myself remaining as smaller stud farms in Newmarket. But I’m glad Sheikha Hissa was allowed to take over Shadwell when Sheikh Hamdan died – that’s another woman in charge.
“The challenge for me is to compete with the big, big boys. They have unlimited funding, there is no bottom line, and they have numerous advisers. For me, the challenge is as cerebral as it is practical. I need to work it out, what works in a pedigree and how to run it on an economically viable basis. I sell the colts [yearlings] and some fillies. They have to pay for the fillies in training, most often they do. This year, Alpinista and Sandrine have been very helpful in paying the training fees of their colleagues. You have less good years, this is a good one.”
There are, concedes Rausing, a lot more women in racing than there were when she started. “There are many more in the press and on television which makes them much more visible,” she says. “There are now world-class female jockeys. When I started there was no such thing as a professional female jockey.
“I’ve been doing things in the political side of the industry as a chair of various breeding federations. Inevitably, I encounter some misogyny from various parts of the world. To my mind, women are making great progress in racing and breeding, they are at the top of many organisations. But nothing is so good it can’t be improved.”