CAPTAIN AL
EQUUS AWARD: OUTSTANDING STALLION 2011
Captain Al and Jet Master’s record breaking duel for top honours last season saw Jet Master crowned once again as SA’s champion sire with Captain Al being given the Equus Accolade as the “Outstanding Stallion of 2011” for the tough fight that his progeny put up for him to go so close in 2nd place. This was his second acknowledgment by the Equus panel.
Captain Al was also last season’s Champion Sire of 2yo’s – his 3rd consecutive victory – and he set two more SA records in the past season for most winners in a season (102) and most number of races won all ages (177)! He was also leading sire last season by number of stakes winners, number of 2yo winners, number of 2yo races won, number of 2yo stakes winners, number of 2yo stakes races won and he was joint leading sire by number of 3yo races won and 2nd leading sire by number of 3yo stakes winners and stakes races won.
The Captain is now 3 times champion sire of 2yo’s, twice Equus Outstanding Stallion and has broken at least 9 SA records – we are told that he may even have set 11 new SA records. Very proud of The Captain! We join John Koster and his team at Klawervlei in dedicating this award to of the shareholders, breeders, owners, trainers, jockeys and connections that have made him such a successful stallion.
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DYNASTY
Equus Outstanding Sire of 2010 with his first crop to race including Horse of the Year Irish Flame, Gr1 winner Ancestral Fore as well as stakes horses Are We There Yet, Cracker Jack, Dellotto, Ice Diamond, Paddy O’Reilly, Saxe Coburg and Squashy Joy; Leading 2nd crop sire with 10 stakes horses Beach Beauty, Run For it, Fourth Estate, Read My Heart, Regal Bloom, Sage Throne, Sammy Jo, San Remo and Stormy Affair. He entered the 2011 sale season selling his 4th crop – we all love them and the sales results are the proof. We attach an extract from the Sporting Post’s comment on the sale this morning – Dynasty topped the sale with a filly and also had the 2nd highest priced horse on sale:
A filly and colt by Dynasty made top prices at the National 2yo sale, held 12-14 August at the TBA Sales Complex, where the average prices for colts and fillies were down, but median prices showed that the middle and lower end of the market recovered from last year’s drop.
Alec Laird went to R350k for the first foal of Habub mare Fly High, who is a non-winning half-sister to top filly Fun Fly and her Gr1 placed full sister Angel Flight. The youngster was consigned by Lyth Orford’s Bosworth Farm Stud, responsible for all of the talent in the filly’s female family, where Novenna stands out as a beacon.
Hassen Adams got into to the act earlier, securing a Dynasty colt for R325k. This one is the first foal of a 6-time winning US-bred Theatrical mare, from a solid black type family. The dam won up to 2400m, so the 2yo purchase seems bound to need a measure of ground.
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TWO YEAR OLD SALE
The TBA newsletter proclaimed the 2yo sale “mirrored downturn in world economy”. We disagree with their statement.
Results right up until the Sunday session were up 10% both on average and aggregate and we were pleasantly surprised at how well it was going – right up until the Sunday session. Then it seemed to go into labour as the auctioneers dropped their tempo to 22 lots an hour and it became dead boring.
I was astounded that the sale held up as well as it did over the first two sessions. We’d done our pre-sale selections thinking that we were going to be able to steal a few on our shortlist – but that was not to be. However when Sunday came the crowds just weren’t there, auctioneers repetitively pleaded for the minimum bid to the extent that they were selling only 22 lots and hour – very bad to lower the tempo to that extent because at the end buyers leave and those of us that had flights to catch had no option but to miss the last section. Nothing more depressing at a sale than to have to hear auctioneers either trying to get their first bid of R10 000 or once they’ve got it to try and get a bid over it. 40 of the first 275 lots sold made over R100 000 – a healthy 14% – but the 67 not sold were up from 43 the previous year.
The sale average ended at R58 837 and the top price was the lowest in 9 years. Aggregate dropped from R26.17m last year to R21.24m. Way down from the high of R32.76m in 2007. There were clear reasons for this:
More horses have been offered on auction in SA this year than in any of the past 5 years and maybe more than in any year ever. I don’t know about the rest of the country but in the Cape alone we’ve had only 2 weekend race meetings in July and will have only 2 in August – several midweek meetings lost as well – in total we have lost 9 meetings in 2 months. This definitely has had an effect on our buying power. And there has to be a natural saturation point in our market. The new Cape Premier Sale took many of the top lots out of the National Yearling Sales which in turn drew its support from the other sales including the 2yo sale making this one of the weakest 2yo Sales on record. Good horses found support but there weren’t enough of them and too many horses on offer.
In all, I think the sale reflected a healthy market. It is exactly as Sporting Post have reported: a sale where the median showed that the middle and lower end recovered from last year’s slump. The overall picture was adversely affected by the absence of a really big priced horse – remember that last year a Dynasty colt sold for R1m and another reached R600 000. Those two alone tipped the scales.
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TRIPPI
Once again the Drakenstein based stallion headed the sale by average his two lots selling for R470 000. He has been the most profitable stallion on sale this year and his continuing success overseas sees him booked to yet another formidable book of mares again this season. He has had 2 winners, two placed 2nd, and 4 others placed in USA in the past week pushing his year to date tally to 94 winners.
Nicky Bartlett’s Danika Stud sold the Trippi colt out of French mare Zanakiya made R300k. He’s half-brother to Gr1 placed Zanzamar, the female line of Aga Khan origin.
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NEW FOALS
Beautiful Dynasty colt out of Riva Varsfontein Stud
We have had report of the birth of new foals by most of our stallions and look forward to receiving pictures so that we can share them with our readers and on Facebook. The picture below was received from Varsfontein of Alec and Gillian Foster’s Dynasty colt out of their German Acatenango mare, Riva, who is from the same female line as Dynasty – the colt is linebred in the Leon Rasmussen and Rommy Faversham Formula One Formation to the blue hen Black Brook. The colt also has line repeats of the great mare Lalun and has repeats of many of Fort Wood and Dynasty’s most successful elements.
