With apologies to Thomas Wolfe, this year’s Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale of New York-bred yearlings proved that you can, indeed, go home again. Absent from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 2020 because of the coronavirus, the sale returned this year, recording gains in all metrics. Sellers of New York-bred horses last year were forced to set up…
There’s never a good time for a crisis, but it’s hard to imagine a less convenient time for Covid-19 to have hit the New York racing and breeding industries than mid-March. Mares were foaling and being bred; high-stakes races were on the calendar at Aqueduct; and the popular sales for two-year-olds in training were hitting…
“One of the chief subjects of discussion in the paddock was the sale of yearlings at the Fasig-Tipton company mart last night…” The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 11, 1917 That time-honored Saratoga tradition began 100 years ago this month, when Fasig-Tipton held its first Thoroughbred sale in Saratoga. Established in 1898 to sell riding and driving…
Though several indicators were down from last year in Monday night’s first session of the annual Fasig-Tipton yearling sale, the evening did provide some fireworks, most notably when a half-sister to undefeated champion Songbird by 2004 Horse of the Year Ghostzapper brought $800,000, and again towards the end of the night, when a colt sired…
On Saturday morning, Andrew Motion didn’t look like a man who hadn’t had much sleep over the last couple days. Two days earlier, he’d loaded a yearling filly onto a van and driven overnight to Saratoga from his Upperville, VA farm; three days before he’ll send his first horse through the auction ring here, he…
Late on Thursday afternoon, Dark Hollow Farm’s David Hayden got a call from an unknown number, a call he nearly didn’t pick up. “It was the gas and electric company,” he said with amused incredulity. “They were telling me to be prepared for a huge storm.” The storm that initiated the unprecedented preemptive warning is…
In what could be an indicator of the strength of the market for New York-breds, a first-time buyer at the Fasig-Tipton New York-bred yearling sale made his first dive a deep one by purchasing the session-topper for $250,000. French bloodstock agent Hubert A. Guy, who has offices in California and shops at both domestic and…
On the heels of a healthy selected yearlings sale earlier this week, optimism is high on the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga grounds as attention shifts to New York-breds for this weekend’s preferred yearling sale Aug. 9-10. New York-breds brought high prices from prominent buyers in the open sale, with Stonestreet Farms, George Bolton, and Darley bloodstock agent…
After a slow start that saw the first four horses and five of the first seven fail to meet their reserve prices, the second session of the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga select yearling sale Aug. 5 saw steady momentum gains that led to the third million-dollar horse of the sale. While the number horses failing to meet…
A Tapit filly purchased for $550,000 as a weanling was briefly the star on the first night of Fasig-Tipton’s Saratoga select yearling sale Aug. 4 before she was upstaged several hips later by another Tapit filly, who topped trading at $1.15 million. Hip 81, a Tapit filly out of champion She Be Wild grabbed headlines late…
Brooklyn Backstretch 