All Equine All The Time

If you’ve been on social media the last few years, you’ve probably seen people complain about the lack of good young sires in the U.S. gene pool. After Bodemeister (Empire Maker) became the second consecutive first-crop sire to produce a Grade 1 Kentucky Derby winner last Saturday, I decided to dig into the data to see if the younger stallion pool is as weak as some claim. I looked at the top three finishers in every Kentucky Derby from 2010 to 2017, since that’s often theoretically where you should find the best-of-the-best routing sires in North America represented, to see if the young guns stack up. What I found actually looks pretty decent for the younger generations. In the time period that was reviewed, 24 different stallions had a horse hit the board in the Kentucky Derby with no stallion having more than one horse hit the board in that time. Sixteen of those 24 stallions (67 percent) produced that on-the-board finisher in one of his first four crops. Of the eight s...

Candy Ride Tuesday marks the start of the second major 2-year-old sale of the year and with 521 2-year-olds slated to go through the ring at OBS's March Sale as of Sunday morning, buyers have a variety of horses to choose from. While buyers have long been doing their homework for this sale, they got their first glimpse of the potential the horses show on the track last week when the 2-year-olds put in their only public breeze before going through the ring at the breeze show.  With bullets of :9.3 for a furlong and :20.2 over a quarter mile, the 2-year-olds were motoring over the synthetic surface at OBS with 48 horses working under 10 seconds during the three-day preview last week. While buyers can always expect stallions like Tapit (Pulpit), Scat Daddy (Johannesburg), Uncle Mo (Indian Charlie) and War Front (Danzig) to be popular, the breeze show highlighted a few others that may be worth a second look before they enter the ring over the next few days.  Here are eigh...

With the first 2-year-old sale in the books, fireworks lit up the Gulfstream Park paddock on Wednesday night with four horses selling for $1-million or more. Here are some quick observations made about this year’s Fasig-Tipton Florida Sale and the stallions represented in it. Tapit Tapit continued his reign as the king of North America: While Tapit only had three horses go through the ring and two RNAed (for $145,000 and $520,000, respectively), one was all he needed to take over the leader board. Buyers weren’t willing to go over $1-million for any horse until the colt out of a half-sister to Hard Spun (Danzig) walked into the ring and hammered $1.8-million to Woodford Racing, Lane’s End and Robert LaPenta, $800,000 more than the three second most expensive horses. He was a $1.2-million RNA last year as a yearling so even though it may have seemed a little crazy to let go of that money then, his owners obviously knew they had something special on their hands. It’s good to be ...

When looking at the freshmen sires in this year's Keeneland September sale, the number of yearlings by those stallions is staggering. Freshmen sires are represented by over 830 foals during the two week sale, a little over 20 percent of the catalog. That group is led by Bodemeister with 83 yearlings scheduled to sell from the stallion's first crop. As mentioned in my previous blog , 98 Bodemeister foals have sold or will sell at this year's summer Fasig-Tipton and Keeneland sales with the majority coming in this sale. To put the number of Bodemeister yearlings to sell at Keeneland into prospective, 61 percent of his first crop will be entering the Keeneland pavilion (before outs) in the first five books of the sale (Bodemeister has none cataloged in Book 6, which is the final two sessions of the sale). However, when looking at Bodemeister this interest in his yearlings makes sense. One of the most popular (if not the most popular) stallion prospects to retire for the ...