Sport: My Magic Is Science

One of the most remarkable figures in thoroughbred racing is France’s stout carelessly dressed Germaine Vuillier 71, the grandmotherly breeding manager behind the traditions and the profit of the famed Khan family stables. In recent months Madame Vuillier’s success has even begun to make a racing buff out of family’s spokesman who has always been bored by horses: 23-year-old Karim the reigning Aga Khan and son of the Sportsman Aly Khan, who was killed in May at the wheel of his Lancia. When Aly’s will was published last week, it declared that the stables must be sold, but added the proviso that any of his heirs had first priority to buy. Karim himself is expected to be the first to be firstin line with cash in his hand to preserve for the family the prime racing stock developed by Mme. Vuillier—la magicienne de l’Aga Khan.”

The description makes Mme. Vuillier blush like a Cub Scout den mother who has been praised for her chocolate-chip cookies. “Please don’t call me a magician,” she says. “My magic is science. My art is genealogy. A good pedigree reads to me as a Bach fugue sounds to a musician. It’s heredity that’s winning, not the horse. What difference does it make what the horse looks like, so long as he has the correct genealogy?”

Just a Pair. Mme. Vuillier cares so little about the looks of her horses that she seldom visits the stables, almost never goes to a race. Her system of producing a winner begins and ends with a theory of breeding developed by her husband, Colonel Jean-Joseph Vuillier, who ran the Khan stables from 1927 until his death in 1931. The colonel found that hundreds of winning thoroughbreds carried in their veins certain fixed proportions of blood derived from a handful of great horses of the late 19th century. What was more, Vuillier traced the pedigrees of 654 winners back through twelve generations and made the startling discovery that 770/4,096 of the blood of each horse came from an English stallion named Herod, in 1758. Vuillier then set about breeding horses to duplicate this precise percentage of Herod’s blood, plus the proper proportions of blood from the 19th century progenitors. Although she was trained for a career as a concert pianist, Mme Vuillier absorbed the theory well that the old Aga Khan himself persuaded her to take over the job of breeding manager when her husband died

Each winter Mme. Vuillier pores over the genealogies of the world’s outstanding horses to find the proper blends of blood that will produce a winner. Says she: “Call me, if you will, a ‘mixer of cocktails.’ ” She avoids the common practice of inbreeding her own horses on the ground that it weakens the strain. She often mates two glue-footed platers “We’re just looking for a pair of horses with the right traits that will dominate m the offspring,” she explains. “The chance of producing a winner from two outstanding horses is smaller than if one of the parents is great. Two pluses don’t always yield a plus in horse breeding.”

The Fever. Mme. Vuillier’s calculations have added up to a plus so many times that the Khan family stables are often ranked as the world’s best. In all the family has 85 brood mares and 15 stallions on five Irish and three French farms in addition runs a “horse hospital” in Lassy for the infirm and the aged. Blood from the family horses ran in the veins of such recent U.S. champions as Nashua and Swaps. Since the start of the 1959 season, the Khan horses have won more than $1,000,000 in purses, more than earned their keep in stud fees.

“Karim is not yet wholly infected by the racing fever,” says Mme. Vuillier, but he has the bug and it’s growing in him. One sure sign of Karim ‘s fever: he is eying the rich U.S. stakes, hopes to enter a horse in November’s $100,000 Washington. D.C. International at Laurel, Md. And if, despite the success Germaine Vuillier has brought to his stables, Karim ever does weary of racing, he has a half sister— Yasmin, 10, by Aly out of Cinemactress Rita Hayworth— who has inherited all the family passion for turf and Hashing hooves.