LEXINGTON, Ky. - The dust still hasn't settled from the result in the Lady's Secret at Santa Anita last Sunday, when Got Koko emphatically denied a 12th consecutive victory to Azeri, the reigning Eclipse champion as older mare and also last year's Horse of the Year. Clearly, Got Koko has added greater interest, speculation, and drama to this year's Breeders' Cup Distaff, which practically had been conceded to Azeri.

Should Got Koko succeed against Azeri in the Breeders' Cup, perhaps some visionary in public relations will arrange a billboard campaign: "Got Koko?"

Owsley, a multiple graded stakes winner, has been retired to the breeding shed. A 5-year-old daughter of Harlan, Owsley arrived at her owner and breeder Arthur B. Hancock III's Stone Farm in Kentucky on Wednesday.

Owsley was being prepared for Sunday's WinStar Galaxy, a race she won last year at Keeneland, when she injured her back while galloping. Owsley's trainer, Randy Schulhofer, said the mare was galloping last Saturday at Belmont Park when she stopped abruptly after changing leads.

"She must have pulled a muscle up high in her back," Schulhofer said.

Claiborne Farm has dropped the fees on two of its most popular stallions, Seeking the Gold and Pulpit, for the 2004 season.

Seeking the Gold, sire of five champions, including Dubai Millennium, Flanders, and Heavenly Prize, will stand for $150,000 in the coming breeding season, down from $225,000 this year. Pulpit, whose recent successes include Grade 1 winner Sky Mesa, will stand for $35,000, a reduction from his 2003 fee of $75,000.

Fees for Coronado's Quest, who stood at $50,000, and Ordway, who stood for $5,000, will be announced later.

LEXINGTON, Ky. - The select yearling market moved back overseas again Wednesday with the opening of the two-day Tattersalls Houghton sale in Newmarket, England.

As at the season's earlier premier yearling sales, John Magnier of Coolmore Stud and his arch-rival, Sheikh Mohammed al Maktoum, dominated buying at the highest levels of the market. Magnier purchased Wednesday's session-topper, a $1,753,500 Kingmambo colt out of Epsom Oaks winner Lady Carla, by Caerleon. Watership Down Stud sold the colt.

Belmont Stakes winner Empire Maker has been retired. The 3-year-old Unbridled colt will stand his first season at owner and breeder Khalid Abdullah's Juddmonte Farms in Kentucky next year for a $100,000 fee.

The fee puts him on a par with recent Jockey Club Gold Cup winner Mineshaft, who also will stand for $100,000 as the 2004 season's most expensive first-year stallions.

LAS VEGAS - With the Breeders' Cup only three weeks from Saturday, the countdown begins in earnest.

And while the spotlight on 2-year-old colts will focus mainly on the Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park and Norfolk Stakes at Santa Anita this weekend, the Lane's End Breeders' Futurity at Keeneland might yield a candidate as serious as any other for the Breeders' Cup Juvenile.

Lure, a two-time Breeders' Cup Mile winner, has been retired from stud duty and will live out his days at Claiborne Farm in Paris, Ky.

Claiborne announced Monday that Ashford Stud, which stood Lure for a $10,000 fee this year, returned him because of increasing fertility problems. Lure, a 14-year-old son of Danzig, has been troubled by infertility since retiring to stud after the 1994 racing season. In his first breeding season, 1995, he impregnated 11 of 37 mares, and Claiborne filed an infertility claim with its insurers.

Fasig-Tipton Midlantic's two-day Eastern fall yearling sale got under way Monday in Timonium, Md.,with strong selling at the top of the regional market.

A $140,000 colt by Allen's Prospect, the popular Maryland sire who died Sept. 3, was the session-leader at 5 p.m. Jay Em Ess Stable bought the colt, a son of the Meadowlake mare Meadow Rose, from the Bluewater Sales agency. That colt was one of three selling for six-figure prices by that point.

Old Friends, the proposed retirement farm for pensioned Thoroughbred stallions, has found a new location, at Afton Farm between Midway and Frankfort, Ky.

The operation's original site was near Interstate 64 in Midway, on acreage that would have been partially developed. "The amount of acreage that would have been available to us was shrinking," said Old Friends co-founder Michael Blowen.

Afton Farm owners Phillip and Betty Sue Walters have offered to lease their property on Georgetown Road, about 10 minutes outside of Midway, Blowen said.

Multiple graded-stakes winner and millionaire Gold Mover has been retired from racing and is at owner Edward Evans's Spring Hill Farm in Casanova, Va.

Trained by Mark Hennig, Gold Mover, a 5-year-old Gold Fever mare, earned more than $1.5 million in four seasons at the races, and her resume includes victories in six graded stakes. She won back-to-back runnings of the Grade 2 Princess Rooney Handicap, in 2002 and 2003, and captured the Grade 2 Schuylerville Handicap in 2000.