Pulpit filly leads Keeneland sale Friday at $40,000

LEXINGTON, Ky. – Another Pulpit daughter led selling Friday at the Keeneland January sale’s last session. Poetfromthepulpit, a 3-year-old filly out of stakes-placed Kivi, brought $40,000 from agent Carlos Moore as top-priced horse at 3 p.m.

Vinery, agent, consigned the bay filly, who finished second once in three starts in Canada and has earned $11,605. Poetfromthepulpit sold as a racing or broodmare prospect.

Friday’s session also marked the return of a rare palomino Thoroughbred, Splash of Vanilla, to the Keeneland January auction ring. Now 4, the Ballado Chieftan filly first sold here as a yearling in 2009, when she brought $14,000. Pinhooked to Fasig-Tipton’s Midlantic juvenile sale, she was a $9,500 buyback. On Friday, the Canadian operation Paulee Thoroughbreds paid $4,200 for her as a broodmare prospect. The Taylor Made agency sold Splash of Vanilla, who is out of the Guaranteed Gold mare Maid of Gold T B.

On Thursday, another Pulpit daughter, Paradise Bound, was the session’s most expensive horse at $110,000. Live Oak Plantation (Warrendale Sales, agent) sold the 5-year-old winner to Roger W. Schipke’s Colts LLC. Paradise Bound is out of the Unbridled stakes winner Devotion Unbridled. The dam is also Grade 3-placed. Paradise Bound, a gray or roan mare, went through the ring as a broodmare prospect. She is a Florida-bred with earnings totaling $72,356.

Through Thursday, the last day for which complete figures were available, the auction had sold 849 horses for a combined $24,354,850, a 7 percent increase over last season’s aggregate for 816 horses at the same stage. The four-day average also was up, by 3 percent, to $28,687, and the median price of $10,000 was the same as last year’s figure.

The 2011 sale’s cumulative buyback rate also was level with last year’s figure of 26 percent.

Thursday’s highest-priced yearling was a $40,000 Tale of the Cat filly that Padraig Campion’s Blandford Stud agency sold to Roundhouse Farm. The chestnut filly is out of Grade 2-placed Beefeater Baby, by Thunder Gulch, and is from the family of Grade 1-placed stakes winners The Seven Seas and Royal Gem.