Tom Malone drove home after the last day of the Cheltenham Festival 20 years ago this March overcome with conflicting feelings of anguish and exhilaration.

Then a conditional jockey claiming 7lb, his mount Hawadeth had just flown home in the Vincent O’Brien County Hurdle but couldn’t quite reel in Sporazene, finishing half a length second at enormous odds of 50/1.

“If I could have ridden, I would have won,” he recalls with a laugh. “They went off at a scorching pace and he couldn’t keep up, but he kept rolling along and I was about 10th or 12th jumping the last. Suddenly the leaders started stopping, and he had more to give. If I’d gone 10 strides earlier than I did, I might have won. 

“I’ll never forget it. It was the last race of the Festival when it was still three days, the getting out stakes. Sporazene was joint-favourite, and had the crowd roaring him home, and then this little shit from Devon came and nearly did them all.

“I was delighted to finish second, but also devastated because I knew that was the chance I needed to make it as a jockey and I didn’t quite get there. But there you go, that’s life.”

Malone might not have achieved that potentially career-changing victory at the Festival in the saddle, but he has more than made up for the disappointment in his true calling as a bloodstock agent.

Top class buys 

He has been responsible for the purchases of Cheltenham Gold Cup hero Native River, Champion Chase victor Dodging Bullets and numerous other meeting winners, including four last year alone: Envoi Allen, Stage Star and Stay Away Fay in Grade 1s and Delta Work in the Cross Country.

Malone made the sidestep into buying horses as a consequence of rides drying up after a fruitful spell based at Martin Pipe’s stables. 

“There was a time soon after McCoy left for the job at Jonjo O’Neill’s that Martin had no first jockey, so I got more rides,” he says. “If I won on a horse I’d stay on it until I was beaten, so I had about 35 winners one year. Not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but it was good for someone at my level.

“Then Timmy Murphy was appointed first jockey and Andrew Glassonbury came in behind me, and I didn’t get so many rides, so I started spotting a few horses. I sold one to Nick Shutts by approaching him and saying ‘you don’t know me, but I have a good horse and if you buy him I won’t charge you anything, but you’ll have to let me ride him’.

“That horse was Milton Des Bieffes. I’d bought him because he’d won a ‘winners of one’ point-to-point and had a handicap mark of just 83, so was a no-brainer. I won three races on him. Doing that with other horses got me my last 10 or so winners, but then I got too busy at the sales and I didn’t want to ride any more.

“The excitement of finding a horse had got to me. I couldn’t get away from it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I was never at home, flying here, there and everywhere trying to find good horses.”

Innovative

Malone’s progress as an agent was accelerated by him unwittingly taking an innovative and advantageous approach to boutique sales when they were in their infancy.

“Boutique wasn’t boutique back then. It was the year that McCoy won the Grand National and there were probably 75 horses catalogued for one of the UK sales, so I went home to Ireland and rode 60 of them in four days.

“I went all over the country, from Cork to the north, and rode so many horses that my back seized up in the evenings and I’d have to lay flat on the floor. I didn’t realise nobody else was doing that. I thought I was just doing my job.

“But when I got to the sales a lot of the other agents said ‘we might as well go home, you’ve ridden all these bloody things, you know exactly what they are’.”

Malone insists he wasn’t trying to be a smart-arse, or show up his elders in the bloodstock agent business. 

“I honestly never thought I was being better than other agents, but either way I’d found an angle, something that set me apart from them, and the amount of people who came up to me after that asking me to buy a horse from those sales was amazing,” he continues.

“I carried on trying out the lots for about three years, but I couldn’t keep it up. New sales were popping up every month and then every fortnight. Catalogues weren’t being finished in time to ride the horses, and now you have all the last-minute wildcards too.

“I eventually bought quite a few good horses that I hadn’t tried, so I gained the confidence that I didn’t have to ride them. Looking back, I don’t think riding the lots made me buy the best horse, but it did enable me to stop buying the wrong one. You can’t tell whether the horse will be a superstar at that stage, but you can find out whether they have wind issues or back problems.”

Malone has since widened his net to land big fish for all sorts of clients, but in recent years he has become best known as Paul Nicholls’ chief talent scout.

“When Anthony Bromley became manager for Simon Munir and Isaac Souede he gave up his role buying for Paul, and that swung the door open for me,” he says. “I’d already bought a few good horses for Paul, including the Martin Pipe winner Salubrious from Pam Sly, but I was nowhere near his number one. 

“Since then it’s taken off, though I still do work for a lot of other trainers like Jamie Snowden and Tim Vaughan. I get things wrong, but I like to think I get better and better every year. 

“I’ve already bought the winners of most of the biggest jump races, including One For Arthur in the Grand National, but I do buy a lot of horses. I run a very good business.”

Malone leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of high-class jumpers for his clients, and estimates that he will have already seen 70% of all point-to-pointers in Ireland before they have run. 

Goffs purchases

A lot of the most recent stars he has sourced for Nicholls came from the store sales, though. Turners Novices’ Chase hero Stage Star, Rising Star Novices’ Chase winner Knappers Hill and exciting young hurdler Inthewaterside were all bought as three-year-olds from the Goffs Land Rover Sale, now known as the Arkle Sale. And that is no coincidence. 

“We weren’t getting the best of Ireland or France, or what was available on the private market, because realistically we didn’t have as much money to spend as the biggest owners,” says Malone. “We were constantly underbidding them.

“Paul would sometimes start barking and roaring at me when we didn’t have the latest Grade 1 winner, so I told him he needed to come to the boutique sales with me so that I could show him the sort of horse we needed but couldn’t afford, and were going to the likes of Gigginstown or Robcour instead.

“I wasn’t missing those top horses. I miss nothing. We might not be able to afford them, and that’s fine. But you won’t get a good one from underneath me without me knowing about it. So we were left to buy the first division horses rather than the premier league ones, and when you’re consistently doing that you cannot win. 

“Paul eventually saw that, and so we put our heads together and said if we can’t get the best proven horses, why don’t we try and beat them to the stores, as we can be strong there. We won’t get all the best horses, but we might get a few.”

Malone and Nicholls were still unable to buy exactly what they wanted at the store sales during the early days of the new approach, as they faced stiff competition from one particular party. But that would soon change.

“We were underbidding Eddie O’Leary on the nicest horses every single time,” says the agent. “There was nothing we could do about it, as we didn’t have the orders. You can be as brave as a lion in the ring but you’ll always be braver when you’ve got the money beside you. We never shirked it, though, we knew we had to get some of those top horses even if we had to own them ourselves and then sell them.

Biggest players

“The turning point with the stores was when Gigginstown stopped buying. We became the biggest players then. If we wanted one, there was no-one who could beat us. There were only about four players past €100,000 for stores and nobody else dared get near €200,000, within reason.

“We were able to buy exactly what we wanted and the proof of the pudding has been in the eating. We’ve had some really nice horses, a few average ones too, but generally we’ve had more luck with stores.”

Stage Star, who won the Grade 1 Turner Novices’ Chase at last year’s Festival and the Paddy Power Gold Cup this season, is a leading fancy for the Ryanair Chase at this year’s Festival. A son of Fame And Glory and the high-class hurdler Sparky May, he is well-bred and was bought by Malone and Nicholls for €60,000 from Baroda Stud at the Goffs Arkle Sale in 2019.

“He was a real beauty and I knew the dam as she was trained here in the west of England, and was the most gorgeous mare with solid Festival form, but people were knocking Fame And Glory at the time, saying his stock didn’t jump fences,” says Malone. “That’s why he was affordable. 

“I rarely buy a store with no pedigree, as most of the time breeding comes through. If you go back and look at what I’ve signed for you’ll see that 90% of them have good pages.”

One who fell into the other 10% was Inthewaterside, a son of the then unknown sire Jeu St Eloi from a French family light on blacktype. He still cost €90,000 in spite of that relatively ordinary page, though.

“He’s the only horse I threw it all aside for,” says Malone. “He had no pedigree and his sire wasn’t fashionable as he had very few runners, but as soon as he was pulled out of the box I said to myself ‘oh my God, you’re as good as I’ve seen’. He had motion, power, strength, leg, gaskin; everything.

“If he did have a flashier pedigree I’d still be there bidding on him. €90,000 was a lot for that page, but he’ll be a good horse, no doubt.”

Knappers Hill, meanwhile, required Malone to take a chance on his unproven sire Valirann but once again everything else about the horse justified him splashing out €155,000.

“He cost a lot for a Valirann but I loved the pedigree, as he was a half-brother to two good horses in Rene’s Girl and Swamp Fox,” says Malone. “I closed my eyes to the sire, but he was still unproven so I couldn’t have knocked him then.”

SuCcess stories

Success stories from the store sales like those have bred more success.

“It ignited Paul’s owners to spend more money again, so the wheel turned for us and we returned to being able to buy some good horses at the boutique sales,” says Malone. “We bought Bravemansgame a few years ago and were only just outbid on some good horses last year. 

“We’ve got our ducks in a row now. If I say we need to buy a horse, Paul doesn’t question it. I buy them, he trains them. He never stands in the way.”

No, Malone might have had to put up with finishing runner-up at Cheltenham in the saddle, but he sure as hell won’t settle for second best as a bloodstock agent.