For Derek Price, owning a homebred horse with as much potential as young Dubawi colt Dubawi Sound is the culmination of 28 years’ involvement in racing and breeding.
“This is once in a lifetime to have a horse as good as this, “ he says. “I’ve turned down offers for him. I really don’t want to sell him, I just want to enjoy it.”
Those years have not been short of success. Derek and his wife Wendy have shouted home more than 50 winners since becoming involved in their first horse, Try To Remember, with colleagues.
“I was working in the catering industry at the time and a rep who used to call round quite a bit said to me one day ‘you’ve been selected to have a share in a horse’,” recalls Derek. “I thought it would be a bit of fun and there were four of us involved.”
Try To Remember was placed during her time in syndicate ownership but by the end of the year, Derek’s partners wanted to move on and he bought their shares and sent the filly to be trained in Bristol by Richard Holder.
“She won four races from there and when she retired we didn’t really want to sell her so we started to breed from her.”
The daughter of Music Boy produced three winners, including the six-time scorer Name The Tune.
“We’re not commercial,” says Derek. “We don’t cover the mares every year so we don’t end up with too many horses but we do sell the odd one.”
It was a mare who was a paddock mate of Try To Remember who would provide the first chapter to the Dubawi Sound story.
“When we first had the mare at stud we didn’t have our own farm at the time and she was running with another mare, Pink Mex,” says Derek. “We ended up buying the farm and the man who sold it to us said he couldn’t really keep the mare, so I bought her from him for £1 to make it official. Try To Remember was by Music Boy so I decided to send Pink Mex to Music Boy.”
The resultant foal was Hannah’s Music, the dam of Dubawi Sound. The filly was sold as a yearling and raced four times for Pat Haslam, winning her first two races and finishing fourth in a Listed race before injury cut short her career.
“Pat rang me when she had finished racing and said he thought she would have been at least a Group Three horse so I ended up buying her back to breed from. I had sold her for £2,000 and bought her back for £2,500 and it was worth it,” says Derek.
Hannah’s Music, now 20 and in retirement, is the dam of four winners, including the Listed-placed mare Russian Rhapsody, who is now alongside her at the Prices’ Cromhall Stud in Wiltshire and has already produced a Listed winner herself, Russian Spirit. She is in foal to Authorized.
Despite a level of success of which any breeder would be proud, Derek is quick to play down his own part in it, saying modestly; “I haven’t got a clue! We thought we’d try to find stallions that might become popular. I’d spend months going through the stallion books and get it down to the last four or five and then I’d ring Martin Percival, who advises us. My wife Wendy does all the hands-on work with the horses and she loves them. I just pay the bills!”
Dubawi Sound is a fitting tribute to the Prices’ hard work, coming at a time when the couple are downsizing their breeding operation. The three-year-old may only have run once so far but it was highly eye-catching debut to win an ultra-competitive Newbury maiden on 16 April that has allowed the owner/breeders and first-season trainer Roger Varian to start dreaming about what might be to follow.
“I’m so pleased I came to Darley to look at Dubawi four years ago,” says Derek. “I’m 70 now, time’s getting on. We’ve had a lot of fun and this horse might give us a bit more.”
