Belmont Stakes winner Empire Maker has been retired. The 3-year-old Unbridled colt will stand his first season at owner and breeder Khalid Abdullah's Juddmonte Farms in Kentucky next year for a $100,000 fee.
The fee puts him on a par with recent Jockey Club Gold Cup winner Mineshaft, who also will stand for $100,000 as the 2004 season's most expensive first-year stallions.
LAS VEGAS - With the Breeders' Cup only three weeks from Saturday, the countdown begins in earnest.
And while the spotlight on 2-year-old colts will focus mainly on the Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park and Norfolk Stakes at Santa Anita this weekend, the Lane's End Breeders' Futurity at Keeneland might yield a candidate as serious as any other for the Breeders' Cup Juvenile.
Lure, a two-time Breeders' Cup Mile winner, has been retired from stud duty and will live out his days at Claiborne Farm in Paris, Ky.
Claiborne announced Monday that Ashford Stud, which stood Lure for a $10,000 fee this year, returned him because of increasing fertility problems. Lure, a 14-year-old son of Danzig, has been troubled by infertility since retiring to stud after the 1994 racing season. In his first breeding season, 1995, he impregnated 11 of 37 mares, and Claiborne filed an infertility claim with its insurers.
Fasig-Tipton Midlantic's two-day Eastern fall yearling sale got under way Monday in Timonium, Md.,with strong selling at the top of the regional market.
A $140,000 colt by Allen's Prospect, the popular Maryland sire who died Sept. 3, was the session-leader at 5 p.m. Jay Em Ess Stable bought the colt, a son of the Meadowlake mare Meadow Rose, from the Bluewater Sales agency. That colt was one of three selling for six-figure prices by that point.
Old Friends, the proposed retirement farm for pensioned Thoroughbred stallions, has found a new location, at Afton Farm between Midway and Frankfort, Ky.
The operation's original site was near Interstate 64 in Midway, on acreage that would have been partially developed. "The amount of acreage that would have been available to us was shrinking," said Old Friends co-founder Michael Blowen.
Afton Farm owners Phillip and Betty Sue Walters have offered to lease their property on Georgetown Road, about 10 minutes outside of Midway, Blowen said.
Multiple graded-stakes winner and millionaire Gold Mover has been retired from racing and is at owner Edward Evans's Spring Hill Farm in Casanova, Va.
Trained by Mark Hennig, Gold Mover, a 5-year-old Gold Fever mare, earned more than $1.5 million in four seasons at the races, and her resume includes victories in six graded stakes. She won back-to-back runnings of the Grade 2 Princess Rooney Handicap, in 2002 and 2003, and captured the Grade 2 Schuylerville Handicap in 2000.
ELMONT, N.Y. - The news was good for the New York breeding industry when The Jockey Club released its breeding statistics for 2002 recently.
New York stallions experienced a nearly 11 percent increase in the number of live-foal reports from last year to this year. In 2002, through Sept. 8, there were 1,317 live-foal reports sent to The Jockey Club on New York sires, compared to this year's 1,459 for the same time period.
The Jockey Club indicated that the reporting on these statistics is about 90 percent complete.
Reviews were mixed for Woodbine's premier yearling sale, which ended on Sept. 6 following a select and two open sessions.
Slight increases in gross sales (2.5 percent) and average price (1.8 percent) on the select side made for a steady market for Canadian-bred yearlings, sold by the Fasig-Tipton Sales Co.
Charlotte Weber's Live Oak Stud is Ocala's biggest farm property. It consists of 4,500 acres - 1,000 of them devoted to Thoroughbreds, the remainder for general agricultural business.
Eric J. Hamelback, who a year ago was assistant farm manager for Adena Springs Farm's Kentucky division, is the general manager for Live Oak Stud.
New Jersey became the latest state to have a special race day to celebrate its homegrown product, the inaugural New Jersey Thoroughbred Festival, which took place Sept. 20 at Monmouth Park.
"The whole thing went even better than we hoped," said Mike Campbell, executive director of the Thoroughbred Breeders' Association of New Jersey. "The turnout was great [a crowd of 9,100 ontrack]. And the support for each of the races was excellent."