Fasig-Tipton Gulfstream sale features 10 high-ticket yearling purchases

The yearling purchase price for a horse cataloged in a sale of 2-year-olds in training is often a solid indicator of what the seller expects in return when the horse is offered again. Though myriad circumstances can affect a horse’s stock between auctions, the initial buy-in price provides a public break-even point on the investment.

Wednesday’s Fasig-Tipton Gulfstream select sale of 2-year-olds in training has 10 horses cataloged who sold for $300,000 or more at a previous sale. With the median sale price of last year’s auction being $250,000, those juveniles will have to draw upper-level prices to generate a healthy profit.

Consignor Eddie Woods will handle two of the $300,000-plus horses as agent for other clients but said he knows the risk and reward that come with buying high for the pinhook market from his own ventures.

“It’s part of the game,” Woods said. “We have bought our share of expensive slow ones where we’ve lost a lot of money because they didn’t pan out. There’s no crystal ball for it. You just try to go with your best gut reaction when you’re buying them, and what will be will be.”

Working in Woods’s favor at the Gulfstream sale is that both of the high-priced yearlings he consigns are for clients typically identified as end-users, meaning the prospect of not selling the horses and keeping them to race is not as undesirable.

Woods consigns a Tapit colt out of the stakes-placed Bluegrass Cat mare Ithinkisawapudycat, a full brother to Grade 1 winner Sweet Loretta, for Everett Dobson of Cheyenne Stables. Dobson bought the colt through agent Cromwell Bloodstock for $450,000 at last year’s Fasig-Tipton Kentucky July yearling sale, making him the second-most-expensive offering of that sale.

Gatewood Bell of Cromwell Bloodstock said the Tapit colt’s momentum, both in development and on the catalog page, moved Dobson to enter the colt in the Gulfstream sale as a last-minute decision. Sweet Loretta won the Grade 3 Schuylerville Stakes and Grade 1 Spinaway Stakes in the months following the July purchase.

“The good thing about buying them to race initially is we came to this conclusion after we’d seen a lot of the cards,” Bell said. “We’d seen the full sister win a Grade 1 at Saratoga, we’d gotten reports from Eddie Woods that he was training really well and was forward and had a good mind on him, and could potentially handle the 2-year-old sales process.

“Everybody’s out there looking for the Saturday afternoon colt that could potentially turn into a lottery ticket and become a stallion,” he added. “That’s what he was, and if someone’s buying him at this stage, that’s what they’re hoping for, too. Hopefully, they’re going to have to pay a little more to do it than we did since they’ve gotten to see these cards.”

Also under the Woods shed row is an Awesome Again colt out of stakes-placed Quiet American mare Kiss the Lady who was purchased by Zayat Stables for $400,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga select yearling sale.