A reason to Make people Believe again

Judging by his fee, there is no doubt that the Ballylinch sire Make Believe has fallen out of favour somewhat in recent years. But that does not mean he is no longer capable of siring horses at the highest level. This year he tripled his number of Group 1 winners which is more than a fair return for a €8,000 stallion. Only top-class sires Wootton Bassett, Frankel, Dubawi, Night of Thunder, Lope de Vega and Sea the Stars have sired more this term, and they all stand for vastly higher six-figure fees. 

Make Believe was the first of 29 Group 1 winners sired by sons of Dubawi, the most recent being Night of Thunder’s Dewhurst scorer Gewan. In his case the link is through Makfi, the first of Dubawi’s four 2000 Guineas winners back in 2010. One of Dubawi’s best-ever racehorses with a Timeform mark of 130, Makfi may have had the honour of supplying his sire with his first Group 1 winner as a grandsire but ultimately failed to live up to expectations at stud and sired only one other Group 1 scorer in the shape of Criterium de Saint-Cloud scorer Mkfancy.

Make Believe, meanwhile, was – like his sire and grandsire – a Guineas winner, in his case the French version. Unbeaten in two starts at two, Make Believe was lightly raced at three and after defeating subsequent Group 1 Prix du Jockey-Club winner and future stud companion New Bay in the Poulains, he was last of five in Gleneagles’ St James’s Palace Stakes, before rebounding after a long layoff in the Group 1 Prix de la Foret. He then bowed out with a fair effort when fifth in Tepin’s Breeders’ Cup Mile.

Retired at a fee of €20,000, the Timeform 127-rated Make Believe attracted 119 mares in his first year will all the quality commensurate with that level of fee. And among his 50 first-year runners were 16 winners and three Stakes winners, featuring dual Group 3 scorer Rose of Kildare, who landed the Firth of Clyde Stakes and Oh So Sharp Stakes, plus Group 3 Preis der Winterkönigin heroine Ocean Fantasy and Deauville Listed winner Tammani, all of which amounted to a fair effort for a freshman sire. 

Mishriff, from Make Believe’s first crop, was only rated 92p as a juvenile, but went on to become a multiple Group 1-winning champion

But his real star was hidden among his other 13 winners. Rated 92p for his two-year-old efforts, Mishriff went on to win the Group 1 Prix du Jockey-Club the following year and was named joint-champion European 3yo, earning a Timeform mark of 124. Even better was to follow a year later when Mishriff, with a Timeform rating of 131, had only the latest Prix du Jockey-Club winner St Mark’s Basilica, who’d also won the Group 1 Eclipse and Group 1 Irish Champion Stakes, rated ahead of him on 132. Mishriff’s victories as a four-year-old included the Group 1 Sheema Classic and Group 1 Juddmonte International which were of such high quality that he was named Europe’s Champion Older Horse. Although he was the perfect early advertisement for Make Believe, Ballylinch, as it has a tendency to do, remained very conservative with his fee, only raising it to €15,000 after Mishriff’s breakthrough three-year-old season. Up to that point, his fee had drifted downwards to €17,500 in years two and three, and €12,000 in years four and five.

Even so, breeders had flocked back to Make Believe a year earlier than his fee increase with more mares and more high-quality mares, and true enough we saw an uptick in his sire metrics. Up to that point, Make Believe had delivered his best results from his first crop, siring six Stakes winners and four Group scorers. Then followed three fallow crops that contained only a single Stakes winner in each. With the better mares in 2020, Make Believe produced another comparatively strong set of results, matching his four first-crop Group winners, and, in the following crop – his sixth overall – the grandson of Dubawi has already equalled his first-crop Stakes-winner count. 

His 2021 crop has also provided his highest number of Group 1 winners, both striking at the highest level this year, his four-year-old son Sajir adding the Group 1 Prix Maurice de Gheest to his earlier Group 3 victories in the Abernant Stakes and Prix Sigy. Appropriately enough, Sajir is owned and was bred by Prince AA Faisal, in whose colours both Make Believe and Mishriff were campaigned. Make Believe’s other 2025 Group 1 winner came when European export and John O’Connor-bred Royal Supremacy landed the 2400m Metropolitan Handicap at Randwick earlier this month, having already shown high-class form when third to Calandagan in the Group 2 King Edward VII Stakes and second to Ancient Wisdom in the Group 3 Bahrain Trophy last year.

Sajir became Make Believe’s second Group 1 winner when landing the Prix Maurice de Gheest at Longchamp in August. Royal Supremacy has subsequently added to that total in Australia

By some margin, 2024 and 2025 have been Make Believe’s best years and he has amassed a career-high 12 Stakes winners and six Group winners so far this term, building on a previous best score of ten black-type scorers in 2024. The key to Make Believe’s success, as his owner-breeder has proven beyond all doubt, is the quality of mare he covers. All told, Make Believe has sired 21 Stakes winners at a rate of 6.2 per cent from runners, which incidentally is ahead of the 6.0 per cent from among his runners’ siblings. More importantly though, that metric climbs to an impressive ten per cent when we count the Stakes winners from his best-bred mares. Clearly, it is entirely possible to get a high-class Make Believe at a bargain base price, so long as you provide a nice mare.

MAKE BELIEVE'S STAKES WINNERS