Catalogs are out now for Fasig-Tipton's Aug. 30 Texas summer yearling sale, which has 363 yearlings on offer. The auction will take place at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas, starting at 10 a.m. The catalog is available online at www.fasigtipton.com and at Fasig-Tipton offices.
Arqana’s yearling sale in Deauville, France, ended Monday with decreases across the board, adding more evidence that the boutique Thoroughbred market is still soft.
The four-day sale offered a smaller catalog of horses – 420 as compared with 459 last year – and sold fewer of them in the auction ring, as the buy-back rate increased from 26 percent to 31 percent.
Tuesday’s Northern California yearling sale at Pleasanton, Calif., is the first yearling sale of the year in California, and follows a 2009 sale that showed growth for consignors.
Last year, 110 horses sold for a gross of $566,000, an increase of 12 percent over 2008. The sale averaged $5,145, an increase of 8 percent. The 2009 average was lower than the record of $8,192 set in 2006, but reversed two years of decline.
At a session marked by steep drops in all financial categories, the day’s most expensive horse at Arqana’s Deauville yearling sale in Deauville, France, was not one who sold in the auction ring.
A Galileo filly, a half-sister to 2002 Flower Bowl Invitational runner-up Turtle Bow and a full sister to Group 1 performer Age of Aquarius, failed to reach her reserve on a final bid of 650,000 euros, or $832,000. But British bloodstock agent Charles Gordon-Watson later purchased her privately for about $768,000 on behalf of an undisclosed new client.
Formally, his name was Frank Vessels, but it was hard to imagine anyone calling him that. From the time of his youth spent around Los Alamitos Racecourse, he was better known as Scoop.
Scoop Vessels, who died Wednesday at 58, was a third-generation horseman whose family founded Los Alamitos Race Course in Los Alamitos, Calif.
It was Scoop Vessels who picked up the family’s Quarter Horse breeding tradition at Vessels Stallion Farm in Bonsall, Calif., after his mother’s death in the early 1990s, and turned the northern San Diego County farm into a showcase venue.
LEXINGTON, Ky. − The sale of more than 100 Stonewall Farm horses will go ahead despite the farm’s Aug. 11 lawsuit against Fifth Third, the bank that has taken control of the bloodstock; its receiver Bluewater Sales; and JPMorgan Chase Bank.
Thoroughbred owner and breeder Gary Biszantz has put half of his Lexington, Ky., property, Cobra Farm, on the market. But he intends to stay in Thoroughbred racing, according to realtor Arnold Kirkpatrick.
Two portions of Cobra Farm totaling about 196 acres are listed with Kirkpatrick and priced at $45,000 per acre. One tract includes the foaling barn where 1977 Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew was foaled when the property was Ben Castleman’s White Horse Acres and where 1993 juvenile champion Dehere was foaled when Robert Brennan owned the farm and called it Due Process Farm.
England’s Tattersalls auction house in Newmarket will begin drug-testing for corticosteroids at its yearling sales this fall, marketing director Jimmy George confirmed.
The company has contacted its consignors to let them know that their sale entries will be subject to testing.
Tattersalls is believed to be the first major British or European Thoroughbred auction house to conduct corticosteroid testing for its yearling sales.