Ladies and gentlemen

England's champion older filly Sariska refused to leave the starting gate today in the Yorkshire Oaks. Despite jockey Jamie Spencer's frantic urging, the magnificently made four-year-old daughter of Pivotal out of Maycocks Bay, by Muhtarram, stood almost motionless in her stall as the rest of the field raced away across the Knavesmire.

Refusal to race has become a rarity since mechanical starting gates became universal virtually the world over in the 1960s. The most recent comparable incident I can think of in a major race is, of course, Quality Road's refusal to enter the starting gate before the 2009 Breeders' Cup Classic. Refusal to enter the gate and refusal to leave it are, of course, quite different problems for a trainer. Todd Pletcher has done a wonderful job helping Quality Road get over the panic attacks that caused him to lash out dangerously before the Breeders' Cup and then refuse to get on a plane a few days later.

Sariska's trainer Michael Bell speculated that his filly might have refused at York because the gate to the stable area is right next to the 1 1/2 mile start point, implying that the filly just wanted to go back to her box. She didn't get to immediately. Once Spencer and the gate attendants extricated her from the stalls, he had to canter her down the course to unsaddle and weigh in. A very large horse, though not as big as Quality Road or Zenyatta, Sariska has had issues about going into the stalls--which are notably smaller in Europe than in America--but had never before shown any inclination to stay in them any longer than necessary.

When a horse reveals temperamental quirks, racing folk are always quick to look to the pedigree to find reasons for such behavior, but none are readily apparent in Sariska's case. The only horse close up in her pedigree with any sort of temperament issues that I know of is Alleged, sire of her broodmare sire Muhtarram, and Alleged was a totally honest racehorse who only became a difficult, somewhat dangerous animal after several years at stud.

One cannot help but be reminded, however, of other famously temperamental racehorses of the last century, most notably Nasrullah and some of his sons. Unlike his brilliant sprinting son Grey Sovereign (who appears in Sariska's pedigree) Nasrullah himself never completely refused to race, but Phil Bull's acerbically humorous description of his behavior before his first start at three says all too much about his temperament:

"He refused to leave the paddock; he refused to break into a trot; he refused to respond to the blandishments of the friendly hack sent out on the course to kid him; he refused to do anything except behave like a spoiled child. ....Could the catcalls and cries of derision which greeted this unthoroughbred-like behavior have been heard by [his sire] Nearco across at Beech House stud...it might have had a serious effect on his fertility."

That comical description in Bull's Best Horses of 1943 sits adjacent to the accompanying photo of Nasrullah (above) , which includes the best caption I have ever read for a racing photo. A few pages further on, Bull included a photo of Nasrullah lunging sideways with another contender for best caption--"Nasrullah impersonating a mule".

Nasrullah appears three times in Sariska's pedigree, a rather lower dosage than average actually, but it would be worse than foolish to attribute Sariska's behavior to such a distant ancestor. Some behavior traits are certainly heritable, but, even with the rapidly emerging genetic screening techniques now available, it is impossible to attribute them to specific ancestors--at least so far.

The Yorkshire Oaks was only her fouth loss in nine starts in a career that includes victories in the 2009 Epsom and Irish Oaks, and she had beaten today's winner Midday on all three of their previous meetings. Hopefully Bell will be able to convince Sariska that it is still worthwhile to come out of the stalls when they open, and she will be able to pursue her fall objective, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.

The Saratoga conundrum

Sheikh Mohammed bought eight horses for $3,155,000 at the opening session of the Saratoga select sale last night. That was more than three times as many horses and three times as much money as any other buyer spent on the sale's opening night.

The Sheikh did not buy every expensive horse, however, nor every horse he bid on. Although it is true that his representative John Ferguson signed for the session's top-priced horse, a beautiful $800,000 colt by Sheikh Mohammed's homebred champion and top sire Street Cry, the next most expensive horse he purchased, a $400,000 Smart Strike filly, ranked only eighth on the list of high prices.

Early in the session I commended Ferguson for letting someone else win after he stopped bidding at $425,000 on a gorgeous Rock Hard Ten colt bought by Charlotte Weber's Live Oak Plantation. He responded tellingly, "This sale has to succeed."

Ferguson, and no doubt the Sheikh as well, is always aware of Darley's dominant position in the market for racing prospects and of both the good and the harm that dominance can do. For the market to thrive, it needs Sheikh Mohammed to compete for what are perceived as the most desirable prospects. And the man is a competitor. He wants to win every time.

If he wins every time, however, other competitors who, however wealthy, do not possess Sheikh Mohammed's bottomless pockets, will decide that it is useless to even try to buy horses they think he might bid on. That inevitably leads to nice horses who would otherwise sell well being led out unsold.

That conundrum is especially acute at Saratoga for three reasons. The sale is so small--less than 200 horses--that it would be all too easy for buyers to decide that it is useless to make the trip for such a small number of horses when Sheikh Mohammed is going to buy all the good ones anyway. They would, of course, be wrong (good ones ALWAYS escape the big buyers' attention...you just have to find them), but perception is everything.

Secondly, fair or not, true or not, Sheikh Mohammed is widely believed to be Fasig-Tipton's principal owner. Abdulla al Habbai, principal of the firm's nominal owner, Synergy Investments, is described as a "close associate" of Sheikh Mohammed. It is all too facile for cynical observers to leap to snide assumptions about what that really means. In the age of Faux News, the truth doesn't seem to matter as much as it once did.

Finally, both the management of Fasig-Tipton and, one hopes, Ferguson and the Sheikh, are aware of Fasig-Tipton's history. In the late 1980s Peter Brant and partners, including J.T. Lundy of Calumet Farm bought Fasig-Tipton. They came close to destroying it by running their own horses through the sale and creating bogus sales of those horses at inflated prices. Legitimate buyers and other consignors began deserting the sale and only John Hettinger's intervention to buy out Brant, plus years of gut-wrenching work by the management team led by D.G. van Clief, saved the company.

Sheikh Mohammed is not a commercial breeder and does not sell yearlings at Saratoga, but if buyers begin to feel that they are competing against "house money" at Saratoga, many of them will decide to buy elsewhere.

And that is why John Ferguson will stop bidding more often than you might think.

New life for an old lady

It would be facile and sentimental to say "Saratoga never changes." It would also be a lie.

I'm as guilty as anyone of settling for the easy lie sometimes, but, no, not at Saratoga. The town, the track, the sales grounds, the horses retain their charm, but the world around them has changed too much for any place, no matter how determinedly charming, to remain unchanged.

I first came to Saratoga in 1974 and have returned most years since. Most things about the track itself are better now than they were then, but the impossibly cramped boxes are still just as uncomfortable, but otherwise, the facility has improved. Even in these recessionary times, crowds are bigger than they were then.

Tonight, Fasig-Tipton removed the veil, almost literally from the Grande Dame of Thoroughbred sales facilities, the Humphrey S. Finney pavilion at the corner of East and Madison in Saratoga Springs. Built in 1968, the Finney was then state of the art, but for the last 20 years or so has felt cramped and outdated. Not any more.

As with their redesign of the common areas behind the pavilion last year, Fasig-Tipton has done the old girl justice. Anyone who has been inside a modern corporate board room will be familiar with the decor--classy, elegant and simple. Lots of wood and stone, appropriate for a horse auction facility.

The redesign of the Finney resulted in 35% fewer seats, but expansion in critical spaces resulted in lots more room for buyers to mingle, and, without doubt, trade. The old building no longer feels cramped.

Fasig threw a very nice party for the occasion, complete with a brief ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Doc Scantlin orchestra, and catered hors d'oeuvres and buffet. Now let's see if the sale can match the party.

Distance=perspective

Distance is supposed to give one perspective.....and I suppose it does. But my conclusions about the Fasig-Tipton July sale are no different today from the banks of the Caney Fork in Tennessee than they were yesterday from the banks of Elkhorn Creek in Kentucky.

The market for Thoroughbred racing prospects still appears to be bouncing along at the bottom of a deep valley. There does not appear to be any significant prospect of climbing out of that valley anytime soon. At the moment, on the other hand, there does not appear to be any likelihood of it dropping off another cliff either. Cliffs, however, have a disturbing propensity to appear out of nowhere in the cartoon universe in which we now live, courtesy of....well, don't get me started.

As a result of the economic uncertainty with which we all live, buyers appear to have finally figured out that it is really stupid to pay a premium for the progeny of first-year stallions. Ironically, this burst of intelligence arrived in a year graced by perhaps the most promising group of first-year stallions of the last five years, most of them owned by Darley.

One or more of Darley's stellar group of firsters--Any Given Saturday, Discreet Cat, Hard Spun, and Street Sense--is virtually certain to develop into a first-rate stallion. Opinions vary on which is the most likely to light the lights, but Hard Spun was the horse to whom breeders were most eager to send a mare two years ago, and he led first-year sires at the sale with three or more sold. All four of the Darley horses had their moments, though, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out when some real numbers are added to the statistics in September.

This is likely to be the toughest year for commercial breeders in this cycle. Stud fees were at their highest in 2008 when these yearlings were conceived and prices are (hopefully) at their lowest point in the cycle. That is like buying at retail and selling at wholesale--not a formula for making money.

The underlying question, though, is have stud fees come down enough even now? At the end of the sales season it will be interesting to compare the stud fee ratios based on stud fee at conception versus current year stud fee. It may not be pretty.

The object of the game

Like most horse sales these days--and for the foreseeable future--the first session of the Fasig-Tipton July sale was a mixed bag. Yes, average and median both increased, but, with a significantly smaller catalog, total proceeds to breeders declined by $1.2-million compared to the same session in 2009.

The killing statistic for commercial breeders, though, is the actual clearance rate. 107 of the 170 horses through the ring were listed as sold, which leaves a 37.1% buy back rate, which is bad enough, but not disastrous on the surface. When you consider the fact, however, that 203 horses were cataloged for the first session, that means that only 52.7% of the horses breeders planned to sell at the first session found apparent buyers--and there are always a percentage of reported sales that remain the property of their owners.

The only reason that the final buy back rate was not over 40%--where it hovered throughout the day--was that Fasig-Tipton now (correctly) includes after market private sales that are reported to them in their statistics. A dozen yearlings were listed in the final results with "PS" for private sale beside the price.

Everybody in the business knows that this crop of yearlings was bred on stud fees that reflected the inflated market that existed before the economic crash of October 2008, and that it is going to be very difficult to make money overall this year. That's why it was so disappointing--shocking really--to see so many yearlings listed as not sold for substantial multiples of their stud fees.

Consignors and breeders always have excuses (they're called "reasons" in their minds), but it is difficult for a disinterested observer to understand why anyone would not accept $70,000 for a yearling by Sun King, $75,000 for a Bob and John, $74,000 for a Flashy Bull, or $100,000 for a Rockport Harbor. All of those hammer prices represent more than four times the stud fee presumably invested, and, regardless of how promising the yearling is or how much the breeder paid for the mare, that should be an acceptable return on investment in a severely depressed market.

I don't mean to pick on any breeder or any consignor by mentioning those particular failed transactions, but it should be clear to everyone by now that we live in a changed environment. If the object of the exercise is to sell the horse, then sell the damned horse when offered a reasonable profit.

Fasig-Tipton removed the second-year horses from their young sire showcase (the first 144 hips) since they'd been getting killed on those horses the last couple of years. That is, in fact the main reason the average was up slightly. Take a big chunk of the least desirable horses out of the sale, if your average doesn't go up then you're really in trouble.

But buyers clearly are no longer paying the same kind of premium they once did for first-year sires. If they were, the average would have been substantially higher. This is a good thing. Paying more for progeny of first year sires just because they were by first year sires never made any sense. It was a fantasy cleverly exploited by breeders and pinhookers that has severely distorted the stallion market.

The reversal of that 15-year trend is the best thing that happened today.

The big dogs are loose

It's got to be a good sign when you walk into the barn area at a horse sale and the first thing you see is John Ferguson of Darley looking at a horse on one side of a show ring and Paul Shanahan of Coolmore looking at another one on the other side of the ring. And it can't be bad when they then switch positions and horses.

Who knows what it really means at the Fasig-Tipton Kentucky July sale, though. Historically neither Darley nor Coolmore buys large numbers of horses on Newtown Pike, but consignors always have a bit more hope when the big dogs are on the loose.

But mostly, FTK July is not that kind of sale. Pinhookers are everywhere, if for no other reason than the sales company caters specifically to them in the horses they select. A horse chosen for a yearling sale in July, by definition, has to be precociously mature, which, historically, is exactly what pinhookers have to have, even among their two-turn horses.

One veteran, highly successful pinhooker told me that he thought this is the best collection of horses he has seen at FTK July. I'm sure if I'd asked around I could have found another pinhooker who thinks it's the most useless collection of manes and tails in history, but, from my own somewhat casual observations, there are plenty of attractive racehorses here.

The one horse that tickled my fancy the most has absolutely no chance of topping the sale. From the late '70s through the 1980s and early '90s, maybe 25% or more of select yearling sales would be small to medium-sized, muscular, typey, elegant, refined horses with tremendously athletic walks, horses that looked like their sire (or grandsire), the immortal Northern Dancer. Although the Northern Dancer male line remains powerfully prominent, that physical type has all but disappeared from yearling sales.

The shift began with the bloodstock crash of the late '80s, when Sheikh Mohammed, Coolmore, Stavros Niarchos, and other big European-based buyers cut back their buying severely at American auctions. American commercial breeders shifted their focus to American dirt sires, away from the European-raced champions who had dominated the sales rings in the '70s and '80s. Yearling sales--or at least American yearling sales--are now dominated by big, powerful horses who are likely to be suited to dirt racing. That may change over the next few years because of synthetics, but that has certainly been the trend for most of the last 20 years.

Four Star Sales's High Cotton colt out of Echo Bluff, by Pine Bluff, is a throwback. He would have fit right in at a mid-1980s yearling sale. He bears the mark of Northern Dancer proudly. High Cotton was a good, honest racehorse, and his sire, Dixie Union also resembles his grandsire Northern Dancer, but High Cotton is not on anyone's list of prospective sires of sale toppers.

His son at FTK July is inbred 4x6x4 to Northern Dancer, but the percentage of horses in the breed inbred to Northern Dancer is rapidly approaching 50%, so that is no real explanation.

The new DNA testing services are useful aids in selecting horses, but they have little to say so far about such genetic mysteries. Some day that may change, but, thankfully, atavistic wonders can still delight us and inspire a stroll into nostalgia-land.

Where are Cuz and Tom when we need them?

Blogging is a very odd--in my case--hobby....or at least that's the best label I can come up with at the moment for what I do here. Certainly not a job, since the only income is psychic.

When you get into a rhythm of posting--once a week, twice a month, every day...whatever--posts flow fairly easily and steadily. When real life intervenes in the form of hernia surgery followed by a series of (welcome) guests, excuses not to post proliferate, as natural as breathing.

But life goes on and yearling sales season is here. July nowadays is not very much like July in Lexington from 1945 through 2002, the year the Keeneland July sale of selected yearlings died a rather ignominious death. For much of that period, Keeneland July was the social event of the Lexington summer, as well as being the most important and expensive horse sale in the world.

My first Keeneland July sale was 1970, when Majestic Prince's brother Crowned Prince sold for a then-record $510,000. Those two sons of Raise a Native (comprising two-thirds of the only set of three brothers to set world record yearling prices) were bred at Spendthrift Farm and sold by the inimitable Leslie Combs II.

Cousin Leslie set the tone at Keeneland July, and motivated other consignors like Tom Gentry to stage ever more lavish parties to lubricate buyers and loosen their grip on their wallets. Sheikh Mohammed's Dubai World Cup parties have nothing on the Tom Gentry parties of the 1980s.

That all came to an end with the bloodstock recession of the late '80s. Spendthrift and Gentry both imploded in different ways, and once Keeneland inaugurated select sessions at the September sale in 1989, the July sale was doomed.

Fasig-Tipton's new, Dubai-based ownership is making an effort to return a hint of glamor to July. That is surely one of the things that Thoroughbred racing in general and the auction scene in particular, needs.

Once one reaches a certain age, the contemporary world never seems as glamorous, as exciting, somehow as real, as the world of our youth. We could use more than a few Cousin Leslies and Tom Gentrys about now.