"Mother Nature can be a tough old broad"
Assembling a broodmare band that can produce successful sales and racing stock takes a whole lot of patience. When one purchases a mare you must be prepared to look at a couple of foals before deciding if she can remain in your broodmare base. Over the last twenty years only a little over 50% of the mares we have purchased for various owners have earned that right through producing quality individuals. It will not happen with every foal.
A few years back, I purchased a mare named Rokeby Rosie for Lynn Schiff. She was a half-sister to the champion mare Siverbulletday. At the time of purchase she was carrying her first foal to the cover of Silver Deputy, sire of Silverbulletday. Her $325,000 price tag seemed reasonable as the foal she was carrying was closely related to a champion mare. Fusaichi Pegasus retired from racing and we secured a contract for her to visit him in his first season at stud. This seemed a good plan as her first foal would be by a proven stallion that had worked with the family and the second foal would be by a hot first crop stallion. We should be in a good position to recover our capital invested with the first two foals. She had a textbook foaling as she should have because her foal was no bigger than a bird dog. One look at this foal and I knew immediately that we were not going to make any money on this one. She was small and very offset in both knees.
We were able to get Rosie back in foal on one cover so I could worry about her carrying around a $125,000 stud fee. If the Fusaichi Pegasus foal looked like this first one we were in big trouble, about a half million dollars worth of trouble! We gave the Silver Deputy filly a few months to come around but she did not cooperate. She was always going to be small and crooked and it would have put a very small sales number on the mares produce record if we sold the foal at public auction. Ms. Schiff sold the foal privately to her vet for $5,000, not a very big piece of our initial investment. It was closing in on entry time for that year's November breeding stock sale and we had a decision to make. Should we send the mare through the sale in foal to Fusaichi Pegasus and try to recover the half million and move on or look at another foal? It is a judgment call either way, a good foal from her and you could get out, another foal like the first one and you're going to take a big hit. We entered the mare in the sale to keep our options open. We shipped to sale thinking if we got a top price we would take it and if not we would take the mare home and foal her out. As sale day approached we felt unlikely to get a half million for her so we withdrew her from the sale. There were twenty mares in foal to the same horse and plenty for the buyers to choose from. We shipped her home and hoped for the best come foaling time. We were luckier with Rosie's second foal. She had a nice colt by Fusaichi Pegasus with good bone and scope. He was an easy keeper in the top third of the foal crop that year. We decided to skip selling him as a weanling the next November and earmarked him for the yearling sales. As decision time rolled around the following spring as to which sale to point toward, we decided to enter to both Keeneland and Saratoga and delay the decision until May. The sales companies make inspection trips and lobby for individuals that they would like to have and Bill Graves from Fasig Tipton was the first to call recruiting the colt for their Saratoga sale.
As the spring grass hit Kentucky the colt started blossoming into quite a handsome yearling. We decided he could make the early August venue at Saratoga and Ms. Schiff had good luck up there the year before selling Hasslefree to Bob and Beverly Lewis for a handsome price. Her luck held up this time as well. The colt showed well all week and jumped through all of the veterinary hoops to make the short list of several top buyers. We could tell Bill Mott loved him and he was looking for Jeanne Vance and for Live Oak. Shadwell Farm had him on their short list as did every resell pinhooker on the grounds. The bidding blew past a half million in seconds with Mott and Ms. Vance slugging it out with the Sheikh Maktoum's team. Jeanne Vance bought him with a final bid of $900,000.
Rokeby Rosie is a good analogy for the highs and lows associated with breeding Thoroughbreds. It could have gone bad at several junctures and we would have sold out had we got our price. Mares will have an occasional bad foal, if they make a habit of it someone else needs to own them. Just because one buys a mare does not mean she stays around forever. We design our annual mare LLC's with a three year life, with an option for a fourth year if needed. All the mares and progeny are sold at public auction with profit being the objective. This keeps our stock current with the market and should anyone fall in love with a mare they are welcome to bid on her when she sells. Patience is a must with mares and foal, Mother Nature can be a tough old broad.
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