This year's Santa Anita Derby winner, Buzzards Bay, will head for auction this month at Fasig-Tipton after his owners decided to dissolve their partnership.
David Shimmon and Bill Bianco will go their separate ways, and Shimmon will continue to race under the stable name of Fog City Stable. As a result, 3-year-old Buzzards Bay will make an unusual addition to Fasig-Tipton Kentucky's July yearling sale, where he will sell as the last lot on July 18, the two-day auction's opening session.
Fasig-Tipton Midlantic's "extra" sale on Tuesday, a one-day juvenile and horses of racing age auction, new this year, ended with a $74,000 top price and a 33 percent buyback rate.
EQB Inc. purchased the sale-topper, Hip No. 75, a Tiznow colt out of Grade 3 winner Scratch Paper, by Notebook. Ciaran Dunne's Wavertree agency consigned the colt, a half-brother to the winning filly Our Nancy Lee and the winning colt Scratch Off.
A Tiger Ridge filly posted the fastest eighth-mile time of 10.20 seconds at Monday's under-tack preview for the June 28 Fasig-Tipton Midlantic 2-year-olds and horses of racing age sale. The workouts took place at Timonium. Md., where the auction will be held starting at 10 a.m. on Tuesday.
The Tiger Ridge filly is a daughter of Xcept Your Address (Silver Deputy) who will sell as Hip No. 4 in Hank Bird's Steephollow Farms consignment.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Coolmore's hot young sire Giant's Causeway won't be on the shuttle taking the operation's stallions from Kentucky to Australia for Southern Hemisphere duty this season. The global breeding operation has announced that it will give the 8-year-old Giant's Causeway the summer off before he takes up his Northern Hemisphere duty again in 2006.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - The victory by Lava Man in the Grade 2 Californian was another solid success this season for the good Seattle Slew stallion Slew City Slew. With Grade 1 winner Sis City also among the stallion's 33 lifetime stakes winners, Slew City Slew has carved a niche for himself in the Kentucky stallion market and has gone a long way toward justifying Brereton C. Jones's belief that "Slew City Slew is the best $5,000 stallion in the world."
With his son Gold and Roses in sharp form, and with progeny earnings topping the $1 million mark, Gold Token is enjoying a solid season at stud.
Among his current runners, 50 percent are winners, and he has had 66 percent winners from starters overall.
The 12-year-old son of Mr. Prospector is owned by Questroyal Stud and stands at Sugar Maple Farm, in Poughquag, N.Y., for a fee of $3,500, live foal.
It is not unusual that there is a lot of buzz in the air about the Queen's Plate, Canada's most famous race, but a lot of the noise this year is coming from places much farther west than Woodbine.
Three of the 10 horses in the 146th Plate, worth $1 million, were foaled in the province of Manitoba.
No Manitoba-bred has ever won the Plate, and it is rare to even see one in the 1 1/4-mile classic for Canadian-foaled 3-year-olds.
Only two winners in the 145 previous runnings were foaled in western Canada, and both were bred in Alberta.
The 2005 Ocala Breeders' Sales June sale of 2-year-olds in training statistically fell back to earth. The overall numbers for the sale, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, were down from those of 2004 but still finished on a par with the averages of the '02 and '03 June sales.
"Last year's numbers were a pleasant surprise," said Tom Ventura, the general manager and sales director of the OBS. "The averages, the medians jumped significantly, and the buy-back rate was unusually low. This year's results were more in line with the steady growth of previous years."
Edward P. Evans works diligently to breed a better racehorse. And the master of Spring Hill Farm in Casanova, Va., who has assembled a band of nearly 90 broodmares and turned nearly 3,000 acres of Virginia countryside into a horse paradise, continues to rise in the ranks of the nation's leading breeders. But his results last weekend were exceptional, even by Evans's lofty standards.