Japanese foal sells for record $5.2 million

A $5.2 million King Kamehameha filly set a world foal or weanling record on Tuesday and jump-started the Japan Racing Horse Association's summer foal sale at Hokkaido's Northern Horse Park.

The Tuesday session was the first of two selling foals and followed the company's first yearling sale on Monday, which set a Japanese yearling mark of $1.79 million for a Pivotal colt out of Veil of Avalon. Both the top-priced yearling and the world record filly foal involved the same connections: seller Katsumi Yoshida's Northern Farm and buyer Nobutaka Tada.

The $5.2 million filly's price was 600 million yen. The final bid beat the previous foal record of $4.5 million, or 490 million yen, that Fusao Sekiguchi paid for a Dance in the Dark-Air Groove colt at the 2004 JRHA summer sale. Northern Farm was the consignor of that colt, too.

In buying the record filly, Tada signed the receipt on behalf of a partnership operating as Global Equine Management Company. The names of buyers behind the company name were unidentified.

The filly's sire, King Kamehameha, is a Japanese champion son of Kingmambo. Her dam, To the Victory, is a Japanese Grade 1 winner by legendary Japanese sire and 1989 Kentucky Derby winner Sunday Silence. The filly sold as Hip No. 271.

The Tuesday session sold 128 foals for a total of $44,873,913. That resulted in an average price of $380,287 and a $243,478 median. Twenty-nine of the horses on offer were bought back by their sellers. The day's figures were up sharply from last year's opening foal session. Gross rose 14 percent, while the average jumped 25 percent and median gained 14 percent.

The sale was to continue on Wednesday with the second and final foal session.