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00:00The Irish National Stud has welcomed two new stallions to the roster for the 2022 season
00:06in Nando, Parado and Lucky Vega. Both were high-class two-year-olds and both will have
00:12significant support this year, as Conor Harland explained when TDN paid them a visit.
00:18Yeah, we're very excited to stand Nando, Parado and Lucky Vega here at the Irish National Stud in
00:222022. We feel they offer breeders, you know, something similar in that they were both very
00:26good two-year-olds, but they're also different in ways as well, so we're very excited to see
00:31how the bookings come in for them this season. Lucky Vega, he won on his debut at NACE, he then
00:37followed that up to be second in the railway stakes, and then I suppose his career-high
00:41performance was in the Group 1 Phoenix Stakes at the Curragh, where he beat a high-class field
00:45by over three lengths. He had world champion three-year-old St Mark's Basilica in behind,
00:49Laws of Indosales, who won the Group 1 Prix Jean Prat. You know, he then went down as a
00:55second in the Group 1 Middle Park Stakes to Supremacy, who was European champion two-year-old.
01:00At three, he progressed again, he trained on, he was a close third in the guineas behind
01:06Poetic Flair and Master of the Seas, who are two high-class horses, and then he signed off
01:10his career in the Group 1 St James's Palace behind Poetic Flair again.
01:17So his owners, Yulong Investments, they have a nice farm down in Melbourne, Australia,
01:21so it was a business decision made to send him down there for the Southern Hemisphere season.
01:27He was very well received, as you can see, he has the physique to appeal to a lot of Australian
01:32breeders, he's got a lovely hip, he's a loose-moving horse, and his precocity, you know,
01:38they love speed in Australia, so it made sense for him to go down at the end of his racing career.
01:44Yulong, they've signalled great belief in the horse. At the yearling sale last year,
01:50at the Orby sale, they purchased his half-brother for €630,000, they then went on to purchase his
01:55Phoenix Spain half-sister Fole for €195,000. And then Mick Dunne, who was very active at all
02:01the breeding stock sales, he's spent nearly two million on mares for Lucky Vega, you know,
02:07Plying is probably the highlight of the book so far, she's the DAMV Group 1 winner, alcohol-free,
02:13and you know, he's purchased a lot of stakes-winning, stakes-producing mares from the
02:17Pivotal, Galileo, Sayuni, Sire Lines, you know, he's a very easy horse to mate to, so
02:23we're looking forward to the book that he's going to cover.
02:28Leporado, he was a horse that was on our radar from early on, he won the Coventry Stakes at
02:33Rye Lascaux on his second start, he's the only son of Kodiak to do that, and you know, he was
02:38second to Campanelle, another Kodiak in the pre-morny, and then he was second to future
02:43Champions Stakes winner Sealaway in the pre-Jean-Luc Lagadaire. He cost 165,000 guineas
02:49as a foal, which I believe is the most expensive foal Paul McCartan has ever purchased, so that
02:54kind of tells you everything it needs to say, but you know, Paul's had a lot of success with Kodiaks,
02:59he's had Tiggy Wiggy, he's also pin-hooked Coolstie, and you know, he's also bred Harry Angel,
03:07Extension, you know, the list goes on, he's bred a lot of high-class, fast, precocious racehorses,
03:12so you know, we're very excited to have him on board, and he's retained a chunk of the
03:15horse as well, so we're very excited for what's going forward with Nando.
03:21Great to have that base of shareholders involved in a young stallion like Nando Parado,
03:25and we sold 25 shares in him, so we're kind of working off a good base of noms already, so he's
03:30proven to be a popular choice, there's some great commercial breeders in behind him, lots of, you
03:35know, foal sale people, but foal sale purchasers as well. I recently started in doing the nominations
03:41here at the Irish National Stud in the summer of last year, and I previously worked here,
03:45I did the course in 2019, and followed that on to do the internship here at the Irish National Stud,
03:51and I spent some time working in the yards, in the foaling unit, and on stallions as well, so
03:56no, I'm very excited to get out and about and meet all our breeders,
04:00and hopefully we all have success together.