The Bid

New purchase just below. Left click on it and you can read it. RR reaches nearly physical illness Monday in the time slot when Hip 185 by Richter Scale left the ring going for $10,000.00 after an RR $9500.00 bid. Max (my Fasig Tipton Bidder--heck of a guy and same one that helped me last year with Amart) was egging me on--"c'mon, find $500.00 somewhere". Well, $500.00 more was in the drawer, but I (stupidly) stuck to my limit.

Nothing like the Richter Scale anywhere else so far in this sale, or most sales, but Hip 354 at left caught my attention when I noticed something interesting very late.

I had scanned this catalogue backward and forward, and had the interesting hips both in mind as well as stallion photos.

Earlier in the day I'd check out the Blood Horse page on Arch. Whoops! Beauty. $25,000.00 stud fee. Family of Althea, Alydar, and, bear with me here, Aurora, the dam of Arch is by DANZIG. And, Aurora won $285,000.

Arch is a heck of a horse with a heck of a race record. If he were on top the pedigree of Hip 354 this would be a $40-50,000.00 horse. Arch won 4 of 6 as a 3 year old and finished 2nd the other. SuperDerby, track records, winning by 9 lengths, Arch has it all except they hurt him early.

Then we get to the sire of 354, Shore Breeze. And, Whoops again! He's by DANZIG. DANZIG is sire of sire and sire of dam of broodmare sire. Hmmmm would describe the RR reaction, pencil tapping desk.

Now, I rather dislike bidding on the progeny of unraced mares. Too much chance of inherited breathing problems. I've been that route before, and was sworn to avoid. BUT, there's even more to like.

I'd become enamored with Short Breeze, standing at Eagle Valley Farm in Lexington for $5,000.00 before the sale. I like the photo, the balance, the breeding with the broodmare sire by Gulch. DANZIG-GULCH. This ought to be a decent horse. Today, several nice horses had come through the ring already by Shore Breeze!

Then, we go down the page. That the second dam is Rapunzel Runz by Explodent(think Explosive Bid, Explosive Wagon) and Rapunzel with $250,000 winnings was hardly a turnoff. Third dam unraced a bummer, but she's by Sir Ivor. And 4th dam wins $150,000+ way back when. There is black type all over this pedigree.

Then the colt enters. Max from FT on the line but the Internet feed is 30 seconds behind real time. He sees the colt before I do. The black colt looks a bit small. Max contradicts me and says he's decent size. I fail to see that, but, hopefully he's right. May foal though, and he looks at least 15'1". I'm unable to see any defects. There's good energy and he's a little bit of a chunk athlete sort.

Bidding starts. It was late afternoon and the auctioneers were having to work to sell anything. We were definitely in a dead spot in the sale. Bidding was in increments of 100s. Having researched the colt thoroughly I was laughing at the ignorance, to myself of course, but somebody kept egging it on. Final bid: RR for $3500.00, and to get to that $3500.00 we must have hit almost every 100 mark all the way up. Somebody, probably Eagle Valley was bidding against me, and then quit. Fine. Most of my bankroll is intact.

I called FT and arranged them to take care of the horse, and the Van desk is looking for transport. I'll get back to it in the morning. It was other than a Richter Scale, but real decent for the money.