2YO Sale Season Gets Started

The two-year-old sale season has returned, with neither a bang nor a whimper. In contrast to prior years, when the Fasig-Tipton South Florida sale led off the calendar, this year the Ocala Breeders Sales Co.'s March sale was first, with the elite Fasig-Tipton sale, now hosted by Gulfstream, moving to the end of the month.

Whether the timing change affected results is unclear. Overall, the OBS results were pretty similar to last year's OBS March sale: 261 of the 573 horses originally catalogued were sold, for a 45.5% clearance rate. Those 261 include 44, an unusually high 17% of the total number sold, that were bought privately after failing to attain their reserve in the auction ring. Those "post-sale" purchases, as the sales companies describe them, are almost all for a price less than the sellers wanted, i.e., below the reserve, but were enough to convince the sellers not to take the horses home and try again later.

One hundred and two of the horses that actually went through the sale were listed as RNAs (reserve not attained) and did not sell privately before they left the sales grounds. That number was 17.8% of the total catalog. Using the sales companies' preferred measure of success, that meant that the "buy-back" or RNA rate was 28% of the horses that actually went through the ring. But another 210 horses originally catalogued for sale were scratched, many after poor breezes or after they failed to attract enough potential buyers to take a look at them in the days before the sale. So, looking at the catalogue as a whole, of the 573 horses originally listed, 45.5% sold (including "post-sales"), 17.8% were RNAs and 36.7% were scratched. Those numbers are roughly in line with the higher-quality sales in 2017.

The average price for horses sold at OBS March was $164,854, a decline of more than 12% from last year's $187,741, but the median price increased from $95,000 in 2017 to $105,000 this year, a 10.5% jump. The decline in the average reflects a slight weakening at the top of the market. At last year's OBS March sale, five horses sold for $1 million or more, and another four went for between $900,000 and $1 million. This year, the top price was $875,000 (for a Scat Daddy filly).Those million-dollar babies pulled the average up last year, but this year there were comparatively more sales in the $200,000-$400,000 range, pulling the median up.

As always at the two-year-old sales, blistering quarter-horse speed was at a premium. An astonishing 95 horses breezed an eighth of a mile in 10.0 seconds or less, 17 of them recording a time of 9.4. Another 11 "stretched out" to a quarter of a mile in less than 21 seconds. Reminder: a dozen years ago, The Green Monkey recorded one of the first-ever 9.4 breezes, at the Fasig-Tipton then-Calder sale. He sold for a record $16 million -- after Godolphin's John Ferguson and Coolmore's Demi O'Byrne engaged in conspicuous displays of masculinity for some 15 minutes -- and never won a race.

Nine of those horses with sub-10 furlongs or sub-21 quarters ended up in the list of the top 20 highest-priced horses at the Ocala sale, including the $875,000 sale-topping Scat Daddy filly. While it's true that, in the aggregate, the horses that breeze faster at the two-year-old sales do better on the race track than those that don't breeze well, it's also true that pressuring a horse to run faster than it ever will again, at a time when some of the horses aren't even 24 months old, can't help but contribute to unsoundness and shorter careers. Everyone knows this, but the buyers -- and especially the agents -- with the big bucks still want to see speed. As the late Pete Seeger said in another context, when will they ever learn?