“It is sentimental, he is the only one,” Hutchins said.

The Street Cry colt had lost his mother at birth, which devastated Hutchins and his wife Fu Mei.

“I remember when we found out about this colt, we were on holidays,'' Hutchins said. ''We had been cruising on the Adriatic Sea, so no one could get in contact with us.

“We got back to our hotel, we were in bed at midnight and Fu Mei looked it up on her iPad to see if there was any news.

“She said Typhoon Tracy had a colt, but then she said 'what does it mean that she didn’t get up?'

“I had to explain that she had died giving birth. We were both numb.”

Hutchins took his colt to the Easter yearling sales to test the market, but admitted that it was with a heavy heart. So, as lot 263 walked into the ring at Newmarket on Wednesday, it had perhaps the biggest reserve in Australian sales history of $3 million.

“He is so special to us and I was prepared to take him home,” Hutchins said.

“Some people didn’t like the X-rays, but that doesn’t worry me. We can race him like we did his mother.

“She made such a difference to our lives and if she was still here it would be different, but I had to come to a figure that I was happy to let him go for.”

The colt attracted several bidders, but the last bid was $2 million from Katsumi Yoshida on behalf of Northern Farm in Japan. The call went to $2.1 million, which was a vendor bid.

“I thought that $2 million was a fair price for him, but you can’t tell someone to sell their horse,” said Peter Orton, who offered the colt as part of the Vinery Stud draft.

The top lot of the day, another Street Cry colt, went for $1.5 million to the partnership of Emirates Park and Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Maktoum.

It is the same partnership that last year bought a $4 million Fastnet Rock colt, which has yet to start but is named Emaratee.

"We thought rather than competing against each other and that sort of thing, well, we just buy one a year and if we find more than that, we buy more than one a year, but it's good fun to have everybody joining in to together,” Emirates general manager Trevor Lobb said.

Later in the day, George Moore Bloodstock paid $1 million for an Exceed And Excel colt out of Allegra.

After two days, the sale average was $254,000 with an 80 per cent clearance rate.