Texas sale's average up from '03

The Fasig-Tipton Texas 2-year-old sale at Lone Star Park improved its results from 2003 in most categories Tuesday, showing some signs that this year's strong market for select juveniles is helping to boost regional markets.

The one-day Texas sale in Grand Prairie sold 192 lots for $3,507,800, up 42 percent from last year, when 152 juveniles sold. The average price also rose, by 12 percent, to $18,270. The median, though, fell 18 percent to $8,250. The buy-back rate fell from 43 percent last year to 31 percent.

The 2004 auction produced six horses who sold for $100,000 or more, up from last year's single six-figure sale, a $240,000 Indian Charlie colt. Tuesday's top price was the $160,000 that Our Blue Streak Stable paid for Hip No. 271, a Dixieland Band colt out of the Seattle Slew mare Madam Moyra. The colt's dam is a half-sister to three stakes winners, most notably the Grade 1 winner Magical Maiden, who also produced a Grade 1 winner in Miss Houdini.

Pre-K Training Center, agent, sold the sale-topper.

The 2004 select juvenile sale season has produced buoyant prices from Florida to California. The Fasig-Tipton 2-year-old sale in Miami rewrote the record books first with a $3.1 million Stephen Got Even colt and again with a $4.5 million Fusaichi Pegasus colt, establishing a new world-record auction price for a juvenile colt. Another world record fell a week later when the Barretts sale in Pomona, Calif., sold an Awesome Again filly for $2 million. And the Ocala Breeders' Sales Company's Calder select sale yielded a sale-record $1.6 million Wild Rush colt.