Keeneland sale: Changing Skies sells to Mandore International for $4.2 million

Mandore International Agency continued a big week of buying Wednesday, securing well-bred broodmare Changing Skies for $4.2 million at the Keeneland November breeding stock sale.

Changing Skies, a 7-year-old Sadler’s Wells mare, is out of the Group 3-winning Silver Hawk mare Magnificient Style, an elite producer as a racing and commercial broodmare. Magnificient Style’s progeny include multiple Group 1 winner and sire Nathaniel, record-priced Group 1 winner Playful Act, Group 1 winner Great Heavens, and Group 2 winners Percussionist and Echoes in Eternity. All 10 of Magnificient Style’s foals to race have been winners, and six of them have won graded or group stakes.

Changing Skies is “by Sadler’s Wells, who’s a top broodmare sire, and she’s a Grade 3 performer and Grade 1-placed,” said Benoit Jeffroy of Mandore International. “She’s a full- or half-sister to three Group 1 winners, and Nathaniel was one of the best horses in Europe. It’s a beautiful pedigree, and she’s very attractive.”

Changing Skies retired with 5 wins in 19 starts for earnings of $438,949. Her biggest wins came in the Grade 3 The Very One Stakes in 2010 and the La Prevoyante Handicap in 2011. She also finished second in the Grade 1 Flower Bowl Invitational Stakes in 2010.

Consigned by Hill ‘n’ Dale Sales agency, agent, Changing Skies was sold carrying her first foal, by Street Cry.

“I thought she was the best-cataloged mare in the sale,” said John Sikura of Hill ‘n’ Dale. “I thought coming into the sale, she would top the sale. [Her pedigree is] current, active, full of Group 1 horses, just replete with high-class horses. She’s just the complete package of a global mare that’s running at the highest of form.

“Very few mares, you find one dam on the page full of Grade 1 winners and you don’t get even to the second dam,” he continued. “She was that kind of unique mare.”

Sikura said the mare’s pedigree and build may have been different from what North American breeders might be used to, but the strong international market gave him confidence that Changing Skies would perform well in the ring. Having French-based Mandore International sign the ticket vindicated that confidence.

“The Sadler’s Wells type is a bit of an acquired taste,” he said. “Everyone I talked to that are premier European judges said that mare looks exactly like what you’d want to see by that sire. That gave me lots of ease.”

While Changing Skies’s $4.2 million price tag tied her for the second-highest price so far at the November sale, she is only the second most expensive foal out of Magnificient Style, who now has had four of her offspring sell for more than seven figures through the years. Changing Skies’s full sister Playful Act sold to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum for $10.5 million at the 2007 Keeneland November sale, a record for a broodmare.