first yearlings

Value Sires for 2022, Part 3: First Yearlings

With the global economy tottering in the Covid headwind, last year a lot of stallion farms went out of their way to help breeders with fee cuts. As a result, as I've previously suggested, the market's remarkable rally since means that the present trading environment represents a pretty historic opportunity. And that particularly applies to the next group in our series, as the first to have absorbed those cuts. (Even last year, it felt as though the rookies had been priced with the usual and necessary opportunism.) Especially because one...

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Value Sires: First Yearlings of 2021

In the third installation of our Value Sires series, we will dig into the sire crop with its first foals born in 2020, and therefore with its first yearlings this year. After some two years in waiting since most of these retired to stud, the judges got the chance at the recently concluded foal sales to lay eyes on the first progeny of most of them, and though it is still incredibly early days, their opinions, corroborated through their actions in the ring, will have an impact on the perception...

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Kentucky Sires for 2021, First Yearlings: Part II

Thursday, Chris McGrath covered the first half of the Kentucky stallions with first yearlings. Click here to read about Justify, City of Light, West Coast, Mendelssohn, Good Magic, Bolt d'Oro, and Always Dreaming. The second part appears below. ACCELERATE (Lookin At Lucky--Issues, by Awesome Again) has also been trimmed to $17,500, at Lane's End, having already been our "gold" value pick of the intake at an opening $20,000. Whatever made him attractive then has scarcely diminished in the meantime, given that he was never going to appeal to those fast-buck...

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Kentucky Sires for 2021, First Yearlings: Part I

As we all know, the more a stallion has to prove, the more the market indulges him. As each intake shows more of its hand, however, breeders become progressively more nervous of young sires disproving judgements that are themselves typically more concerned with the anticipation of demand at the sales, than of any potency they may (or may not) be able to recycle on the track. In this third instalment of our survey, then, we begin our descent of the slippery slope with the first group to offer a hint...

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Kentucky Value Sires 2020, Part III: First Yearlings

We've taken a breather in this series during the January Sale, where I shared many conversations on themes raised in its first two parts--notably the market's addiction to unproven stallions. Time after time, it was the same story. A shrug of the shoulders, a helpless spreading of the hands: "Yes, we know it's nuts. But we have to make the game pay." Fair enough. It's a bit like the individual who asks why he or she should make a massively inconvenient personal sacrifice, with regard to the climate crisis, when...

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