This year

FASTHORSES

THE WINNING PEDIGREE

Federico Tesio and Vital Energy

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This year's early yearling sales have been strong and the most exciting lot to be offered for any sale this year was Octagonal's little brother who brought 1.6 Million. Perhaps the staff at Cambridge Stud are used to having such celebrated offerings, but when I think of the anxiety that goes into preparing any yearling for sale, the magnitude of their worries must have been great indeed. Doubtless many bottles of antacid, aspirins, sleeping potions and tranquilizers must have been on hand for the staff alone.

Octagonal still holds the crown as the best foal of Eight Carat and I remember hearing Bart Cumming's story about his wanting to buy him but having been talked out of it by his vet. Mouawad slipped through he Sydney Easter sales relatively cheaply, mainly because the mating flagbearer Octagonal's best effort to that point was a win at Rosehill.

Mouawad showed more natural brilliance than his older brother and for that reason looked like the most exciting southern hemisphere bred stallion prospect for the decade. Alas it was not to be and Lynden Burn's purchase price of 1.6 was probably seen as a good investment given the circumstances.

The history of the thoroughbred abounds with colourful stories of full siblings to famous horses. Probably the most famous sibling to enter a sales ring was Sayajirao the full brother to the elite racehorse Dante, who ironically was brought back home not having secured a bid of three thousand guineas. His younger brother Sayajirao was sold six years later for a then world record price of twenty eight thousand Guineas.

Sayajirao won several good races including the St. Leger but was not considered the light his brother was, being regarded as something the inferior to the best miler of modern times Tudor Minstrel. La Fleche's little sister Memoir also attracted a fair degree of attention the day of her sale although it is unlikely that her new owners were disappointed with their purchase. Memoir won two classic races and although she didn't have the same ability as her sister she was rated the best horse of 1890 by Dr. H. E. Platt. The opposite can also happen and I can't imagine that the superb racehorse Fairway would have attracted much attention had he been sold as a yearling as his older brother Pharos, was according to Sir Charles Leicester, nothing better than a high class handicapper.

The full sibling is better known, however, for falling well short of the mark. For every great horse there seems to be a full brother or sister who did absolutely nothing. Ready O Ready (Leilani), Minsky (Nijinsky), Nizami (Nasrullah), Milan Meadow (Mill Reef), Far North (The Minstrel), Town Guard (Brigadier Gerard), Silent Fox (Affirmed), Captain General (Dahlia), The Draughtsman (Boucher), Acropolis (Alycidon) are just some.

Ask a pedigree consultant to explain the variation in ability commonly seen in siblings and you will get either an open admission of defeat or some quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo, which basically amounts to the same thing.

Although Federico Tesio's name has been used to sell everything from pedigree software to books on breeding, his words on this subject have been overlooked and worse still, his book "Breeding the Racehorse", has been dismissed as a delightful but unrevealing essay.

The act of interpreting facts does not in itself create new facts but I felt that a particularly interesting idea in Tesio's book was that of Vital Energy. Tesio wrote at length about the cyclic nature of this energy which he believed could be manipulated by the individual (expenditure, restoration, accumulation and conservation) or by circumstances and man.

A product of the late 1870's, Tesio was born in a fertile era and some of his contemporaries included Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Sir Alexander Fleming and Rudolph Steiner. Born in Austria not far from Lago Maggiore, Steiner was a prominent philosophical scholar of his time. Fascinated by Goethe's scientific writings, Steiner wrote at length about "vibrationary" fields in nature.

Although claimed as a pedigree man, which to me is rather like describing Michelangelo as just a painter, Tesio seems to have approached breeding his horses from both a practical and esoteric standpoint. Pedigrees haven't been taken in isolation but rather worked within a sympathetic understanding of the laws of nature.

In the forward to Tesio's book the writer says that Dormello was structured as series of self contained farms and that "the keynote of the farms seemed to be that Nature knows best". Tesio liked his horses to move from farm to farm which would follow their natural migration patterns and he also abhorred irrigation which he believed "forces the growth of the grass and deprives it of its strength". These points sounded very similar to a number of issues discussed in a series of lectures given by Rudolph Steiner at Koberwitz, Silesia in June 1924. Those lectures formed the basis of what is now known as Bio-Dynamics.

Of course, proximity of time and distance and the similarity of ideas might be nothing more than coincidental but it does suggest that Tesio's reference to the "nervous energy" had some basis in the broader field of thought of the day. Cynics have said that Tesio's claim of "vital strength" was nothing more than a red herring designed to throw readers off the track of how he really bred his horses. I could be drawing a long bow here but to write something in a book is one thing while physically structuring your operation along such similar lines is quite another and indicates a serious commitment to something other than pedigrees.

It is odd that vital energy is now viewed in so narrow a context as to be seen as merely the degree of nervous excitability apparent in the individual. It is also a shame that what seems to be a central tenet of Tesio's book has been dismissed by those who would believe they know better how he worked his magic.