The Ocala Breeders' Sales Co.'s annual winter mixed auction gets under way on Wednesday and runs through Friday. The consignors' preferred session will be conducted Wednesday, and 248 broodmares and short yearlings have been cataloged. The two-day open portion of the sale is set for Thursday and Friday. All three sessions have an 11 a.m. starting time.
Private Lap, a six-time stakes winner by Private Terms, has been retired from racing and will enter stud this year at Atalanta Acres in Shannondale, Ind., in a deal brokered by agent Michael Slezak.
A 9-year-old horse, Private Lap will stand for $2,500, or $2,000 if paid by Sept. 1 of the year bred, as property of Jeff Puglisi and Atalanta Acres.
Private Lap retires with 16 wins from 48 starts and earnings of $730,546. A son of the Dynaformer winner Just Like Jill, he is a half-brother to multiple stakes-winners On the Bus and Kat Kool and stakes-placed Growth Stock.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - The Kentucky Derby is four months away. So those colts (and perhaps a filly or two) with classic aspirations need to be stepping out of the shadows and grabbing some graded earnings if they want to earn a spot among the premier young athletes at Churchill Downs in 20 weeks.
The Kentucky-bred Cowboy Cal, owned and bred by the Stonerside Stable of Robert and Janice McNair, won his third race in a row with a two-length victory in the Tropical Park Derby, which Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro used two years ago as the starting point of his classic campaign.
Canadian classic winner Wild Desert has joined the stallion roster at McMahon of Saratoga Thoroughbreds in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., for the 2008 breeding season.
A 5-year-old son of Wild Rush, he will stand for a fee of $7,500.
He joins recent arrival Utopia at the McMahon facility for stud duty.
Wild Desert earned $1,042,674 with a record of 3-7-2 in 20 starts.
His biggest victory came in the 2005 Queen's Plate, the 1 1/4-mile classic that is the oldest stakes race for 3-year-olds in North America.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Keeneland's January all-ages auction, set for Monday through Jan. 13, already has bucked one recent sale trend: it has a smaller catalog than last year, slimming down its entries by 386 horses. Keeneland consignors and the company's director of sales, Geoffrey Russell, hope the smaller catalog will help the sale continue a second trend, that of high prices for mares and broodmare prospects.
Peter Fuller is 84 years old, and he has not lost one bit of his enthusiasm for breeding and racing Thorough-
breds. He has had his hurrahs during the decades he has been active, and he has had grievous times as well.
No disappointment was greater than when his homebred Dancer's Image became the first and only horse to be disqualified from winning the Kentucky Derby. He was disqualified because he had traces of then-prohibited Butazolidin in his system. That was 1968, and it took years of litigation before the disqualification was made official.
Apple Special's forceful victory in the Maryland Juvenile Championship Stakes last Saturday was part of a spectacular double play for his sire, Outflanker, a son of Danzig standing at Maryland Stallion Station in Glyndon, Md.
Less than 10 minutes after his son claimed supremacy over seven 2-year-old Maryland-bred male rivals at Laurel Park, Outflanker's daughter, Bayou's Lassie, captured the Grade 3 Stage Door Betty Handicap at Calder.
The Jockey Club announced Thursday that its third year of field inspections of broodmares in 2007 found fewer foals born in late December than in the previous two years.
Field inspectors checked the status of broodmares with early 2007 breeding or foaling dates and found only three foals who had been born in late December, too early to allow them to be registered as members of the crop of 2008. That was down from six foals in late December of 2005 and 2006.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Turning into the homestretch of the freshman sires contest this year, the Silver Deputy stallion Posse - with seven stakes winners and nearly $1.5 million in earnings - seemed home free. But a couple of other freshman sires have continued to ramp up the pressure on the front-runner, and one of them, Harlan's Holiday, is making a race of it to the wire on Dec. 31.