Pulpit mare brings $110,000 at Keeneland sale

LEXINGTON, Ky. - Keeneland’s January all-ages sale remained on the upswing Thursday after its fourth session, the auction’s penultimate day.

Through Thursday, 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.

A $110,000 Pulpit mare from Live Oak Plantation was Thursday’s session-topper. Roger W. Schipke’s Colts LLC purchased Paradise Bound. Offered as Hip No. 1231 by Live Oak Plantation (Warrendale Sales, agent), she is a 5-year-old winner 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. 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.

The Keeneland January all-ages sale was to continue through Jan. 14 at Keeneland’s sale pavilion in Lexington, Ky. Sessions begin each day at 10 a.m.