Former British point-to-pointer Interconnected smashed the auction price for a jumper when selling for £620,000 on the final day of Goffs UK's Doncaster Spring Sale.
The buyer was property developer and racehorse owner Darren Yates, who purchased the five-year-old on the advice of Yorkshire trainer Phil Kirby, who was Britain's champion hunter chase trainer in 2007 when he saddled five winners.
Interconnected already held the record for being the highest-priced British pointer sold at auction having made £220,000 at Tattersalls Ireland's Cheltenham Festival Sale last year. He had been bought as a foal for €37,000, and then went into training as a three-year-old with Herefordshire-based Tom and Sophie Lacey.
In January last year he fell on debut at Thorpe Lodge, but three weeks later hacked up in an 11-runner maiden point-to-point at Larkhill under Tommie O'Brien. When reoffered for sale he was snapped up by bloodstock agent Anthony Bromley of Highflyer Bloodstock, who was acting for racehorse owners Mike Grech and Stuart Parkin.
They put him into training with Lambourn-based Nicky Henderson, and while Interconnected has run just once since his second-place finish behind Emitom in a novices' hurdle at Newbury was franked when the winner finished runner-up in a Grade One Hurdle at Aintree. Grech and Parkin's decision to wind up their racing partnership led to the sale of all their jumping stock at Doncaster.
Kirby is a trainer on the rise. A farrier by trade, he was just 28 when taking the leading hunter chase trainer award during a single season of training pointers. The following November he took out a licence to train under Rules and in the past five years has saddled 107 winners, headed by the multi-winning mare Lady Buttons.
At Goffs UK's Aintree Sale last month he bought Grand National hopeful Don Poli for £170,000 on behalf of Yates, whose building business interests flourished after he won more than £550,000 in an accumulator bet on Frankie Dettori's 'Magnificent Seven' winners at Ascot in September, 1996.
Interconnected's valuation beat the previous top price of 530,000gns, set by Garde Champetre, in Doncaster's sales ring in 2004.