Japan’s Big Red Farm paid $10 million for the breeding rights to Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner I’ll Have Another, the colt’s owner Paul Reddam has confirmed. Reddam told Daily Racing Form that Shigeyuki Okada’s Big Red Farm topped another Japanese farm’s $9 million offer. Both bids were well above what American stud farms had offered for the 3-year-old Flower Alley colt. Big Red Farm, Reddam said Tuesday, “knew there was another offer, and we said we’d take $10 million,” Reddam said he did not consider the alternative of buying a herd of mares and standing the stallion in the United States with his support. “That’s not the direction I would have wanted to go,” he said. “I’m not a breeder.” On Monday, Reddam wrote a blog post in the Blood-Horse that a pair of Japanese farms stepped in to bid on I’ll Have Another, with Big Red Farm making the winning offer in the private sale. United States farms showed far less interest, Reddam said, with just two written offers: one for $3 million and another for a half-interest, plus nine lifetime breeding rights, for $2.5 million. “By contrast, the offer from Big Red in Japan was $10 million, with another farm bidding just under that,” Reddam wrote. “For further contrast, Bodemeister’s rights recently purportedly sold for about $13 million in America.” WinStar Farm and Ahmed Zayat announced a private deal last month that will send Bodemeister to WinStar Farm in Kentucky at the conclusion of his racing career. I’ll Have Another’s Triple Crown bid was aborted the day before the Belmont Stakes when he turned up with a tendon tear that Reddam described in the Blood-Horse as “like a tear in the seam of a pair of pants.” “You could keep wearing the pants, and maybe the first time or two, the pants would hold, but eventually they would rip,” Reddam told the Blood-Horse. “Knowing this could happen, there was no choice but to scratch.” With I’ll Have Another facing a long recovery time, Reddam opted to retire the colt, and he announced the deal selling I’ll Have Another to Big Red Farm in late June. “I would have liked the stallion to have stood here,” Reddam told Daily Racing Form . “Do you take $2.5 million and roll the dice over the next four or five years? Or you can take $10 million and the downside is you don’t get to see the horse anymore.” – additional reporting by Glenye Cain Oakford