There were a lot of great stories finding their happy endings at the Fasig-Tipton November Sale. The one-night, high-end Thoroughbred auction traditionally features some of the most successful female runners, fresh off the plane from the Breeders’ Cup Championships the previous weekend. In just a few days, a horse’s value can increase exponentially based on their performance in the Breeders’ Cup and hours later, colts can be whisked off to Kentucky to prepare for stud duty the next year, and fillies and mares may find themselves headed to auction and on to a breeding career.
For Belvoir Bay (GB), a 6-year-old plain bay mare, the bright lights of the Fasig-Tipton auction pavilion were the climax in a rollercoaster life. The daughter of French stallion Equiano and British mare Path of Peace began her career in England, where she sold as a yearling for $33,401. She then ran five races at the age of two before being imported to the United States for owners Team Valor and former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executive Gary Barber. She transferred to the West Coast and moved up in competition, establishing herself as a solid allowance and stakes runner with trainer Peter Miller.
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Belvoir Bay, a 6-year-old daughter of French stallion Equiano and British mare Path of Peace, sold at the Fasig-Tipton November Sale for $1.5 million.
In late 2017, Miller pointed Belvoir Bay at her first Grade 1 race in the Matriarch at Del Mar. She finished seventh, but it’s not unusual for trainers to try moving a horse up in competition at the end of a season and go into the winter with new training goals based on the results. If all had gone to plan, Belvoir Bay would probably have gotten a little vacation and come back into training aiming another graded stakes run. But in December, the lives of Miller, Belvoir Bay and hundreds of others were altered forever.
Miller kept a string of horses at San Luis Rey in Bonsall, California, an established training center in Southern California that houses up to 500 horses at a time. In early December, the Lilac Fire began burning miles away from San Luis Rey. Horsemen kept an eye on it and thought the blaze was contained. On Dec. 7, the winds increased and changed direction, and in a matter of hours, the blaze that had been 20 miles away was suddenly blowing embers into a canyon 200 yards away from the property. Trainers began evacuating horses from San Luis Rey, but couldn’t get all of them out quick enough. Palm trees around the property’s edge caught fire, and in minutes the blaze jumped to barn rooftops. Grooms, trainers, veterinarians and exercise riders ran through the training center, freeing horses from their stalls as the smoke began to roll in, realizing their only chance for survival was to let them out of a barn that may go up. Facebook video shot by one man as he dashed from stall to stall shows people running through plumes of smoke, coaxing horses out of their stalls with herds of confused Thoroughbreds running in the background. One trainer dashed into a burning barn, trying to free her horses and suffered such severe burns that she nearly died.
Belvoir Bay was one of many horses who went missing for several days after running away from the flames. When Miller found her again, she had suffered serious smoke inhalation and had bad burns on her legs. She spent two weeks in the hospital undergoing hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Belvoir Bay was luckier than some of her stablemates—Miller lost five horses in the blaze, and a total of 41 from other barns also perished.
Incredibly, she eventually received clearance from veterinarians to resume training and, in late March 2018, she returned a winner in the Mizdirection Stakes at Santa Anita. That win brought on more graded stakes victories, and she was entered in last year’s November sale, where Barber spent $625,000 to buy out Team Valor’s ownership interest in the mare. Back to the racetrack she went, and on Saturday Belvoir Bay got her first Grade 1 win in the biggest way she could–winning the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint against males in track record time.
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Belvoir Bay won the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint in a course record 54.83 for five furlongs.
On Tuesday night, she was back at Fasig-Tipton, where she sold for $1.5 million to bloodstock agent Mike Shannon, who confirmed she will be retired from racing. The $33,000 yearling earned $1.1 million on the track.
“She’s tough as nails,” an emotional Miller told media on Saturday after her Turf Sprint win. “She’s 900 pounds soaking wet and it’s all heart. She’s unbelievable.”
No doubt her new owners are hoping that kind of grit is genetic.
Overall, the November Sale’s economic indicators were down slightly; 128 horses sold for $68,011,000, down 24 percent from last year. The average was down 17 percent to $531,336 and the median was down 8 percent to $300,000. The buyback rate was slightly better, finishing at 24 percent compared to last year’s 27 percent.