Fasig-Tipton Turf Showcase Won't Return in 2018

Fasig-Tipton's Turf Showcase yearling sale will not return for 2018, the sales company confirmed Wednesday after a report by the Blood-Horse. The one-day auction was held for the first time in 2017 on Sept. 10 in Lexington in an effort to capitalize on recent successes of American-bred turf horses abroad and the increased interest in grass racing and breeding domestically.

A pair of Scat Daddy colts topped the sale this year at $250,000, but the buy-back rate was nearly 49% and Fasig-Tipton president Boyd Browning, Jr. expressed disappointment at its conclusion with the lack of foreign participation.

“The senior executives drew together for a meeting on Monday after this project had been evaluated, not only after the sale, but as part of our recruitment for yearlings in 2018,” Fasig's Director of Marketing Terence Collier told the TDN. “We had begun to have discussions with core groups of consignors that provided us with most of the product for the 2017 sale and they all indicated that they had difficulty in going back to their clients and recruiting numbers that would make them comfortable about the sale. Those consignors were fearful that the group of horses that we could put together in 2018 would not really form the basis of a solid sale, both in terms of its quality and numbers, and the consignors, first, didn't want to disappoint their clients. When those reactions started coming back to us, we had to make a pretty quick and hard choice. We didn't want to go through the recruiting, which we would have had to do aggressively, and then come up short of numbers and abandon the project in 2018 and force people to shuffle.”

When asked if the sale was worth a try in retrospect, Collier said, “I think that we went into it with a huge amount of optimism and enthusiasm and we gave it a 100% full-court press effort to recruit buyers to the sale. So we never had any doubts when we decided to stage the Turf Showcase that this was not a very solid idea. It has sadly disappointed us, and we feel really sad that this concept didn't catch on. We are both sad and surprised at that.”

He added, “I think the prominence of Kitten's Joy has done a lot to create awareness about turf racing. We did an evaluation of the number of races on grass and the money available. The one thing that surprised us was the buyers' somewhat lukewarm reception to the project. None more than me; I had been over to Europe to recruit buyers and I was probably the very last one to be convinced that we shouldn't go ahead with the thing in 2018 because Boyd and Bill [Graves] and Bayne [Welker] had started their yearling recruitment, where I don't have as much to do with the consignors as with the buyers.”