CTHS holding sales in Ontario and British Columbia on Wednesday

Fresh off celebrating this month’s King’s Plate winner and other stakes victors as graduates, the Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society’s Ontario division hosts the Canadian premier yearling sale on Wednesday in Toronto with incentives on the table for both buyers and breeders.

There are 252 yearlings cataloged, with 168 of those being Ontario-bred and Ontario-sired, representing 22 different stallions in the province. The remaining 84 yearlings in the catalog are Ontario-bred, but by stallions standing in the United States.

The sale begins at noon in Woodbine’s sale pavilion.

The buying power of Ontario owners is bolstered as they can use sales credits earned through the province’s Thoroughbred Improvement Program (TIP). The sales credit program provides a credit of $750 or $1,000 to owners of registered Ontario-breds who win at specific claiming levels at Woodbine and Fort Erie. At last year’s sale, trainer Bill Tharrenos pooled nearly $10,000 in sales credits – or $7,368 in U.S. funds – to make up a sizeable chunk of the purchase price of a Reload colt he bought for $21,386.

Tharrenos said in a press release from Ontario TIP that the CTHS sales stakes program available for graduates “motivates you to try and get a good horse out of the sale, and the sales credits helps motivate you to buy. . . . There are a lot of good horses that have come out of our sale. And helping it along and making it better is the sales credits program.”

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The Ontario sale is the largest and most high-profile of four sales the CTHS will conduct across the provinces, with yearlings making up different portions of the various catalogs. The calendar kicked off with the CTHS Manitoba yearling sale on Aug. 21, which posted solid results. Manitoba reported 16 yearlings sold for $183,500, compared to 17 sold for $170,150 in 2022, the average price jumping 15 percent, to $11,469.

The Canadian calendar continues on Wednesday, with both the Ontario sale and the CTHS British Columbia yearling and mixed sale at Thunderbird Show Park in Langley, which has 62 hips cataloged. The fourth sale is the CTHS Alberta Thoroughbred sale on Sept. 22.

The Ontario sale is coming off a strong edition, with 150 yearlings sold for a gross of $3,837,700 in 2022, compared to 159 sold for $3,184,400 the previous year. The average price in 2022 was $25,585, a 28 percent gain.

Leading that sale was a Cairo Prince colt now named My Boy Prince, purchased for $87,835 in U.S. dollars by Dr. Robert McMartin, as agent. Now racing for Gary Barber and trained by Mark Casse, he has won two of his three career starts, dominating the Simcoe Stakes, for CTHS graduates, by 14 lengths on Sunday at Woodbine.

That victory came one week after CTHS Ontario graduate Paramount Prince, trained by Casse and co-owned by Barber and Mike Langlois, won the King’s Plate. The son of Canadian stalwart Society’s Chairman was purchased for $16,647 by Langlois out of the 2021 CTHS Ontario sale.

He was consigned by Hill ‘n’ Dale Sales Agency for breeder Ericka Nadine Rusnak. The same connections have a half-sister to Paramount Prince in Wednesday’s sale. Out of the stakes-placed mare Platinum Steel, she is by Souper Speedy. Rusnak stands to benefit not only from the catalog update, but from TIP breeder awards stemming from Paramount Prince’s ontrack achievements.

“With his success he’s paying it forward constantly, and every time he’s picking up a check it helps,” Rusnak said. “That aside, the black type is a huge benefit for the mare. It makes her pedigree so much stronger.

“Her half-brother [young sire Army Mule] is very successful in Kentucky, but to see her producing black type that’ll never go away and will help all of the siblings, it’s fantastic.”

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