00:002025 is likely a year that will be hard to forget for those of the Agacan studs.
00:07Having started with the sad passing of His Highness the Agacan,
00:10it ended with the continued success of the bloodlines that he has curated over the years.
00:15Pierre Gagné, who succeeded Georges Rameau as the manager of the French studs,
00:20sat down with TDN to speak about his involvement with the operation,
00:24as well as recounting the year that was.
00:27I always grew up with horses.
00:30My parents always used to keep a couple of males, especially in National Land, who to breed from.
00:36My brother, which is younger than me, was also a National Land jockey.
00:41So you can imagine that I spent most of my weekends as a child on touring the countryside rest tracks.
00:49As a young Frenchman, you're in full admiration of the Agacan studs and the family,
00:56the green and red seals are the most famous on the rest track for years.
01:02It's a symbol of excellence, tradition and obviously great success.
01:08If you told me a long time ago that I would be part of it, I would never have thought about it.
01:15A dream come true. I'm privileged and grateful and deeply thankful to Princess Zahra and all the team, her family.
01:24I'm extremely lucky, the team I work with.
01:29And special thanks to pneumonia roots, Pat Downs and of course Princess Zahra.
01:34They've been working with his highness, the Prince Agacan, for many, many years, 30 years almost.
01:42So they know the operation very well and they can teach me and guide me.
01:48People are working at the Agacan studs for so long.
01:52So when the news came, the loss of his highness, they were very much heartbroken and affected.
02:01But we still had to do our job to look after the horses in the best way possible, the way he would have liked us to do, which we did.
02:11And thankfully, nature played in our favor and horses run all year from strength to strength better than we expected.
02:22Going forward, we just have to keep doing what we do, which means breeding resources.
02:30If I go back to sum up the emotions around the year that happened.
02:35That's what we are, a small team working very closely with Princess Zahra and her family.
02:40It makes it all the more special and amplifies the emotion.
02:46I will never forget the first time I met her. She kept telling me that the objective, the goal was to race, to breed, which is something that needs to be mentioned because it's very special nowadays.
03:01Every phone we produce will be going at one stage to one of our trainer.
03:06We know very well, which means we know the family extremely well.
03:10It's special because you're full circle. We can be optimistic and still believe that success will keep breeding success.
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