Photos courtesy Fasig-Tipton
Two colts, both by the late Coolmore sire Scat Daddy, tied for highest price at the sale at $250,000 each.
The world of Thoroughbred bloodstock is one governed by repetition — of seasons, of racing calendars and of sales schedules. So, when Fasig-Tipton, the auction house based north of Lexington, announced in March it would hold a new, select yearling auction the day before the start of the Keeneland September Sale, no one quite knew what to expect — including Fasig-Tipton officials.
Fasig-Tipton concluded the first edition of its Turf Showcase of Selected Yearlings late in the evening on September 10 with somewhat disappointing results. At the Turf Showcase, nearly 49 percent of the horses on offer did not meet their reserve prices — a sign buyers were not sufficiently impressed with the horses presented to convince sellers to let them go.
The average price for sold horses was $68,041, while the median was $52,500. Two colts tied for highest price at the sale at $250,000 each, both of them by the late Coolmore sire Scat Daddy.
Fasig-Tipton officials and sellers were brainstorming possible causes for the high RNA rate late Sunday.
A sale focusing on yearlings bred to succeed on turf was meant to draw in buyers from Europe, where the majority of racing and all classic races take place on grass. In the United States, there is less commercial demand for turf-type horses since more races take place on dirt, as do classics like the Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup Classic. (Horses typically prefer running on one surface over the other, and turf horses tend to be have different physiques.)
Fasig-Tipton Photo
Boyd Browning
Although Fasig-Tipton President Boyd Browning said he did see noted European buyers shopping in the days leading up to the Turf Showcase, he was disappointed many of them went home empty handed.
“If you’ve got a really good turf horse you can sell it,” Duncan Taylor, president and CEO of Nicholasville-based Taylor Made Sales Agency, said of the market for turf horses in America. “If you’ve got an average to below average turf horse, it’s tough to sell it. I don’t think there was a lot of participation from Europe, so that pushed the demand down and the Americans got to buy what they wanted.”
Another factor, Browning reflected at the end of the evening, may have been the sale’s construction. For a select sale like this one, the auction company chooses which horses are permitted in the catalogue and which are not, looking at pedigree pages and the horse’s physical makeup over a period of months before sale time. At larger sales like the upcoming Keeneland September sale, entries are grouped by quality on this basis into different sections of the sale, represented by the physical catalogue books containing copies of entries’ pedigrees.
"I don’t think there was a lot of participation from Europe, so that pushed the demand down and the Americans got to buy what they wanted.” —Duncan Taylor, Taylor Made Sales Agency
Although Fasig-Tipton officials got plenty of positive feedback about the idea for the sale, they didn’t know until recently how many actual entries they’d get, and that made it difficult to know what criteria to use when determining which horses would be allowed to participate.
“We were probably a little too lenient on some physicals,” Browning said. “We may have had a little stallion overload in a few spots from North America-based stallions that we thought the world would accept and the world really didn’t, despite some of the success those horses have had in the U.S. It didn’t necessarily translate as we thought it might.”
The scheduling of the sale, so close to the start of Keeneland’s September auction, may not have helped, either. Books 1 and 2 of the September sale are packed with commercially desirable prospects, many of them with pedigrees focused on dirt runners. Some consignors at the Turf Showcase questioned whether that juxtaposition left Keeneland looking rosier than Fasig-Tipton.
For Browning, it all comes back to the same theme he has noted following auctions for the past one to two years: the market has recovered from its depression in 2008, but still, buyers are only willing to compete for quality lots. Prices for low- to mid-quality horses have not been buoyed significantly from the economic recovery, which could help explain the foal crop: the Jockey Club, the registry for Thoroughbreds in North America, recently released numbers predicting there would be 21,500 foals registered in 2018, the lowest figure since 1990.
Of course, all the traditional auctions on the calendar were once new, too, and some years even established sales draw better groups of entrants than others.
Browning was not prepared, as of Sunday, to commit to whether there would be a Turf Showcase on the schedule for next year.
“I hate to make any rash decisions in the heat of battle, but I think we learned an awful lot, and I think we can improve,” he said. “I think the general reaction out there was mostly positive, but I’m not going to make any great stand and say, ‘Absolutely yes’ or ‘Absolutely not’. We’ll evaluate in context of our yearling sales to see how we think we best serve the marketplace. I think we found there was a need. Can we do a better job? Yes.”
Natalie Voss is an Eclipse Award-winning writer and features editor for the Paulick Report, an independent horse racing news and business publication. Voss is a five-time nominee for the Stanley Bergstein Writing Award for investigative reporting. Her coverage of the equine industry has appeared in Business Lexington, the Chronicle of the Horse, The Horse magazine, The Blood-Horse, and Acreage Life, among others.