Bought for the price of a cow: gelding that can’t stop winning trains eyes on Gold Cup
A RACEHORSE bought for £800 – or the price of a cow, according to its owner – might be one of the best investments in racing history.
Shark Hanlon, a former cattle breeder from County Kilkenny, bought Hewick in 2017 from a racehorse merchant in Goresbridge “just five minutes down the road” from where he lived.
But the eight-year-old gelding called Hewick has already repaid his owners a hundred times over in winnings and could add to the tally today in the Cheltenham’gold Cup.
Hewick, which will be ridden by Irish jockey Jordan Gainford, is 16/1 to win the race on the final day of the Cheltenham Festival, behind favourite Galopin Des Champs (15/8) and the reigning champion, A Plus Tard (7/1).
Six years and eight wins after buying the horse, 56-year-old Mr Hanlon still cannot believe his luck.
“At €850, he was some value –the price of a cow!” he said. “There was no one there to buy him on the day, he was a young horse, and I was just lucky to pick him up. I saw the horse and I loved him, and I was lucky to get him.”
The price of racehorses varies between several thousand to tens of millions of pounds, with the record sale at £53.7 million for a thoroughbred stallion in 2000.
Mr Hanlon said he had won around £800,000 with Hewick, with a further £625,000 at stake in the Gold Cup. The gelding claimed two major handicap chase successes in 2022 in the Bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park and the Galway Plate, before going on to American Grand National success at Far Hills, New Jersey, in October.
Mr Hanlon plans to send Hewick to Aintree for the Grand National on April 15, adding that the coveted handicap steeplechase is the horse’s “ideal” race.
“We’ll see what will happen in the Gold Cup. I don’t know if he’ll be good enough for it. There are a lot of horses in the Gold Cup that have a few little ‘ifs’ about them.”
While his owner might put his horse’s success down to luck, Hewick’s ancestry tells a slightly different story.
His father, Virtual, is owned by Cheveley Park Stud in Newmarket, who won the Lockinge Stakes at Newbury in 2009.
And Hewick comes from a bloodline of Cheltenham contenders.
Russell Ferris, the head of Weatherbys, which researches thoroughbred pedigrees, said: “Hewick has Cheltenham connections further down his pedigree. His great grandmother, Gold Label, was the great grandmother of Cheltenham Festival winner Martello Tower. His great, great grandmother was the mother of Deep Bramble, beaten twice in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.” Even if Hewick doesn’t win, he has made a name for himself back in Bagenalstown, County Carlow, where he is allowed into the pub.