Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Blue Prize sells for $5 million
LEXINGTON, Ky. – The Fasig-Tipton Kentucky fall selected mixed sale on Tuesday night showcased the unpredictable nature of mixed sales with active race fillies and mares among the highlight offerings. These runners may give themselves major catalog updates on the racetrack – but, based upon performance, owners may elect to withdraw their horses from sale and continue racing.
The Fasig-Tipton November sale got a major update with a pair of Breeders’ Cup winners last Saturday, including Distaff heroine Blue Prize, who sold for $5 million to Larry Best to lead the single-session auction. However, several stars were withdrawn to remain in training in 2020, including championship candidate Midnight Bisou. Partially as a result, the auction’s figures couldn’t keep pace with last year’s powerhouse renewal.
Fasig-Tipton reported 128 horses sold for gross receipts of $68,011,000 at the November sale, compared to a record gross of $89,473,000 in 2018 from 140 sold. The average price was $531,336, dropping 17 percent from $639,093 last year, which was the fourth-highest average price in this sale’s history. The median dropped 8 percent to $300,000 from $327,500, which was the second-highest figure.
The buyback rate did improve to 24 percent, compared to 27 percent last year.
Fasig-Tipton president Boyd Browning acknowledged that the figures may have been impacted by withdrawals from the initial catalog, led by fivetime Grade 1 winner Midnight Bisou, who had been expected to spark a multi-million-dollar bidding war. Other notable withdrawals in recent days included Grade 1 winners Bellafina and Got Stormy, the runners-up in the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint and the Mile, respectively.
“You’re thrilled when you get some updates, like Blue Prize,” Browning said. “And the nature of this sale is you get some of those tremendous updates, and you have sometimes a loss [from the catalog]. . . . We understand that when we put it together.”
Best, a relatively new player in the bloodstock market who races as OXO Equine, has expressed the desire to build a broodmare band while purchasing fillies as weanlings and yearlings. He kick-started that portion of his operation by stretching to $5 million to acquire Blue Prize, who was consigned by Bluegrass Thoroughbred Services as agent for the Merriebelle Stable of John Moores and Charles Noell.
Best said this purchase brings his broodmare band, boarded at Taylor Made Farm, up to three mares. He will seek out opinions from bloodstock experts before booking a stallion for Blue Prize’s first mating in 2020.
Blue Prize was fresh off her victory in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff on Saturday at Santa Anita, defeating heavily favored Midnight Bisou by 1 1/2 lengths. It was the fourth Grade 1/Group 1 victory for the 6-year-old Argentinian-bred daughter of Pure Prize. Blue Prize traveled from California to Kentucky less than 24 hours later, and Best said she made a solid impression when he first saw her on the sale grounds after that grueling trip.
“She had just shipped in, and she just looked so gorgeous,” Best said. “Probably the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen. Hopefully, I’ll have success breeding her. I think it was a worthwhile risk. It’s obviously more money than anyone would want to pay, but she is a Breeders’ Cup champion, and if you look at her record, it’s just stellar.”
Ignacio Correas, who saddled his first Breeders’ Cup winner in Blue Prize, was on hand to see his stable star sell.
“It’s been a great ride,” Correas said. “Sad to see her go, but they’re going to take good care of her. It’s the horse of a lifetime. I don’t know if I’m going to have one like her again, but at least I was blessed to have one. And that, in a trainer’s career, is a lot to say.”
Best said that he does plan to race the offspring of Blue Prize, but that he also will sell her foals as business dictates.
“At some point, every breeder will tell you you have to sell some,” he said. “But down the road, I hope to home breed a lot of good runners. I will sell some along the way, just because it makes sense business-wise, but she’s a special horse. I’m very happy.”
Blue Prize was the only horse to sell for a price beyond $3 million, a threshold seven horses reached at last year’s Fasig-Tipton November sale. The second- and third-highest prices of the evening were fetched by Grade 1 winner Photo Call, sold for $2.7 million to Katsumi Yoshida, and Eclipse Award champion Shamrock Rose, with bloodstock agent Mike Shannon signing the ticket at $2.5 million.
Shannon also signed the ticket, as agent for undisclosed buyers, for another newly minted Breeders’ Cup winner, as Turf Sprint heroine Belvoir Bay sold for $1.5 million.
Belvoir Bay, a 6-year-old Equiano mare bred in Great Britan, was consigned by Bluewater Sales for owner Gary Barber. This was the 10-time stakes winner’s second trip through the Fasig-Tipton November ring, as last year Barber bought out co-owner Team Valor for $625,000.
Belvoir Bay rewarded Barber and trainer Peter Miller with a 2019 season in which she won three stakes, highlighted by her 1 1/4-length victory in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint last Saturday, establishing a course record of 54.83 seconds for five furlongs on the Santa Anita turf. She also finished second to Blue Point in the Group 1 Al Quoz Sprint in Dubai, with twotime Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint winner and Eclipse Award champion Stormy Liberal in third. Blue Point was acknowledged as Europe’s leading sprinter in the first half of the season.
Belvoir Bay’s success was improbable. In December 2017, she was one of several horses initially unaccounted for following a California wildfire that consumed a portion of the San Luis Rey training center, where she was stabled. She spent several weeks at a clinic recovering.
“She really and truly ran for her life,” Meg Levy of Bluewater Sales said. “I just can’t even imagine.”