Phipps family to auction some broodmares

LEXINGTON, Ky. - The Phipps family, owners of some of the world’s most productive and coveted bloodstock, will sell 16 of its mares and racing-age fillies at the Keeneland November breeding stock sale, Ogden Mills “Dinny” Phipps announced Thursday.

Claiborne Farm will consign the horses on the Phippses’ behalf.

“The decision to sell some of our horses was made as part of the normal course of stable management,” Phipps’s daughter Daisy Phipps Pulito, who aids her father in running the stable, said in a statement distributed by Keeneland. “My family remains fully invested in the Thoroughbred industry.”

The group of fillies and mares includes Just Reward, whose daughter Persistently defeated 2009 Horse of the Year Rachel Alexandra in the recent Personal Ensign Stakes. Just Reward, an 11-year-old, is by Deputy Minister out of champion Heavenly Prize and is in foal to Malibu Moon. Also in the catalog is Grade 1-placed Resort, dam of 2007 Peter Pan winner and Wood Memorial runner-up Sightseeing. A 13-year-old Pleasant Colony mare, she is in foal to Tapit.

The Phipps family is in its fourth generation of Thoroughbred ownership and has bred and campaigned numerous champions, such as Hall of Famers Buckpasser, Personal Ensign, Easy Goer, and Inside Information. Dinny Phipps and his children have raced champions Smuggler, Rhythm, and Successor, to name a few of their many major winners.

Dinny Phipps’s father, the late Ogden Phipps, won the Eclipse Award as leading breeder in 1988 and as leading owner in 1988 and 1989, and also received the Eclipse Award of Merit in 2002; the younger Phipps, currently The Jockey Club’s chairman, received the Eclipse Award of Merit in 1978.

The Keeneland November breeding stock sale will take place Nov. 8-20.