If Curlin were to get any hotter, I suppose the imposing chestnut son of leading sire Smart Strike (by Mr. Prospector) would have to be trotting through the Sahara Desert.
Not only did the Big C have three winners at the highest level in the Grade 1 Breeders' Cup races on Saturday – Cody's Wish in the BC Dirt Mile, Idiomatic in the BC Distaff, and Elite Power in the BC Sprint – but Curlin's sons Keen Ice and Good Magic have sired the last two winners of the G1 Kentucky Derby. Although the 2023 Derby winner Mage did not go in the BC Classic, Good Magic's top juvenile son Muth was second in the BC Juvenile and had previously won the G1 American Pharoah.
In contrast to all the immediate success and raging popularity of Clan Curlin, consider the fortunes of the sire of the colt who defeated Muth in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile, Fierceness. The Juvenile winner is from the second crop to race by Pegasus Invitational winner City of Light (Quality Road). A winner in six of his 11 starts, including the G1 Malibu at 3, the BC Dirt Mile, G1 Triple Bend, and G2 Oaklawn Handicap at 4, and the G1 Pegasus at 5, City of Light showed very high ability, and when he was retired to stud at Lane's End Farm for the 2019 season, he proved one of the most popular young sires.
He deserved to be and not only on the score of his best racing performances. The striking bay impressed more than one knowledgeable judge as the best physical in a good-looking group of new sire prospects that year, which included champions Justify (Scat Daddy), Accelerate (Lookin at Lucky), and Good Magic.
The horse continued to impress with his early yearlings and 2-year-olds in training, as they averaged three and four times his entering stud fee of $60,000 for a live foal.
Yet, a year ago with the first racers by City of Light at the races, things were not going the way one would have hoped for this bright prospect of the stallion firmament. At the end of the season, he ranked only 10th among freshmen sires, behind crop leader Bolt d'Oro (Medaglia d'Oro), Good Magic, and Justify. And there wasn't a runner among the whole crop from City of Light who could have warmed up Fierceness.
Such a difference a year makes.
Because Fierceness, oh Fierceness, was not just an average winner of a Breeders' Cup race. He did not win by a modest margin in a “brave display” or hold off a charging foe in an “exercise in gameness.” Fierceness won the Juvenile by one of the longer margins in the history of the 40 years of the Breeders' Cup: 6 ¼ lengths. Champion and subsequent Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense won by the greatest margin: 10 lengths. Likewise, divisional champion and Horse of the Year Favorite Trick (Phone Trick) had won his Juvenile by 5 ½ lengths, even more than the amazing Arazi (Blushing Groom), who had been five lengths ahead of Bertrando.
And just in case some are inclined to whisper, “who'd he beat,” each of the next four finishers – Muth (American Pharoah), Locked (Breeders' Futurity), Timberlake (Champagne), and Prince of Monaco (Del Mar Futurity) – are already winners at the G1 level. Those results suggest that this is a pretty good Juvenile and that Fierceness might be a better than good winner of the race.
Bred in Kentucky by Repole Stable Inc., Fierceness is the first runner and winner out of the winning Nonna Bella (Stay Thirsty). In addition to racing the colt and his dam, Repole Stable also bred both, and Nonna Bella is a half-sister to G1 Wood Memorial winner Outwork (Uncle Mo), and the dam of Outwork and Nonna Bella is the Empire Maker mare Nonna Mia. She is a half-sister to Cairo Prince (Pioneerof the Nile), a winner in three of his five starts, including the G2 Holy Bull and G2 Nashua Stakes.
Far more than that bare record, however, Cairo Prince was “one of the ones.” He was so impressive in his late juvenile and early 3-year-old form that he drew multi-million dollar offers from around the world. All that promise on the track was cut short by ill fate, but this is a pedigree that long has flirted with athleticism of a very high order, and Fierceness may be the one who fulfills the promises of the past.
A pair of Eclipse champions sold for $6 million each to share the top spot at the Fasig-Tipton November Sale, held Tuesday afternoon and evening at the Newtown Paddocks in Lexington, Ky.
Billed as the world's premier breeding stock event, the sale grossed in excess of $100 million for the third consecutive year.
“Just another remarkable evening of horse sales, literally from start to finish,” said Fasig-Tipton president Boyd Browning. “We had a wonderful collection of horses here on the sales grounds. You could feel the energy building (since Sunday).”
Nest, last year's Eclipse champion 3-year-old filly, was the first of the co-sale toppers through the ring when offered as Hip 163 by Highgate Sales, agent.
Mike Repole of Repole Stables went to $6 million to secure the 4-year-old daughter of Curlin (video), who he previously campaigned with co-owner Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners and trainer Todd Pletcher. A six-time graded stakes winner at two and three, Nest's championship campaign included three victories at the top level – in the Grade 1 Alabama Stakes, G1 Ashland Stakes, and G1 Coaching Club American Oaks.
Reigning Eclipse champion female sprinter Goodnight Olive, fresh off a successful defense of her Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Sprint title Saturday at Santa Anita Park, matched the evening's top price when offered as Hip 237 by ELiTE, agent.
Gavin O'Connor, agent for John Stewart, signed the $6-million ticket for the 5-year-old daughter of Ghostzapper (video). Campaigned by owners First Row Partners and Team Hanley and trainer Chad Brown, Goodnight Olive has won or placed in all 12 of her career starts to date, with nine victories, and earned $2,196,200. Her resume includes four Grade 1 victories including, in addition to back-to-back victories in the Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Sprint, wins in last year's G1 Ballerina Handicap and this year's G1 Madison Stakes.
“I'm blown away that we grossed over $100 million again this year,” added Browning. “It's remarkable, beyond our wildest expectations.”
Overall, 154 horses sold for $101,281,000. The average was $657,669, up 9.8 percent over last year's average of $595,818. The median rose 18 percent to $295,000 from $250,000 last year. The RNA rate was 24.9 percent. Twenty-five fillies and mares sold for $1 million or more.
Jacob West has had a hand in selecting racehorses that later inked stud deals in the multi-millions. In the final tally of dollars and cents, whatever champion Nest hammered for at the Fasig-Tipton November sale likely wouldn't crack that pantheon.
That wasn't the point. Nest was already in the pantheon.
After brokering the partnership between Repole Stable and Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, and to buy the Curlin filly for $350,000 at the 2020 Keeneland September Yearling Sale, West said Nest developed a special place in his heart beyond that of “just” a star runner. Over the next three years, the bond he developed with Nest would also strengthen the bond between West and his mother, Kathy.
On Tuesday night, West was ready to help the filly to her next step as the co-owner of Highgate Sales, the consignment that handled the filly. As he watched the hammer fall for $6 million, tying champion Goodnight Olive for the evening's highest price, he didn't realize that his client Repole was the winning bidder.
West was ready to say goodbye to one of his favorites. A life in horse trading is as much about goodbyes as it is greetings. After the ink dried on the ticket, it was as much relief as it was elation.
“This wasn't the end of her story, this was just the close of a chapter, but for her to stay in-house and still be around, because of how special she's been to everybody, it's pretty cool,” West said. “We'll get to see her live her long days out to wherever Mike decides to send her, we'll breed her and get foals out of her, and we'll go from there.”
In an industry where its top players are often born with generations of built-in Thoroughbred industry knowledge, West's success as a bloodstock agent has been largely from scratch, and his mother will be the first to say it.
Kathy West, a registered nurse and diabetes educator from Paducah, Ky., made the four-hour trip in the days leading up to the sale to pitch in where needed, make homemade treats for the Highgate welcome tent, and watch her son sell one of his favorite horses at one of the industry's biggest sales. The extent of her equine experience prior to her son's vocation was spending time with her family's shetland pony as a youngster.
“I think he was probably seven or eight years old at our hospital picnic, that's the only time he was ever around a horse until he got out of college,” Kathy said. “He'd never been around horses or anything until he got with Taylor Made.”
West got his start with the Taylor Made operation as a yearling groom through a mutual contact during his time as an assistant coach for the Henry Clay High School baseball team in Lexington. He climbed the ladder through the organization, ultimately becoming a buyer account manager before moving on to other endeavors.
“He had excellent mentors and he listened to them,” Kathy said, leaning up against a floor-to-ceiling sign advertising Nest outside the Highgate barn. “He does, he soaks it up like a sponge.”
Kathy West, mother of bloodstock agent Jacob West, in front of a sign for one of her son's greatest purchases.
One of the positions West held after leaving Taylor Made was vice president of bloodstock with Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, which he held until 2022. At the same time, he was part of the auction braintrust for prominent owner Mike Repole.
Repole is best known in the auction scene as a buyer of colts, aiming to get a number of them to hit at the track and land lucrative stud deals, while at the same time supporting his own active stallions' average sale prices.
However, Repole has also signed tickets on plenty of fillies, and West said it didn't take much arm twisting to flip the script on a Curlin filly that passed the eye test for many of the owner's advisors.
“Instead of two people bidding against each other, we just came together and said, 'Look, let's do this as a partnership,'” West said. “Mike and Aron (Wellman, founder of Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners) have had a long-lasting friendship and business partnership, and it was just another one that got added to the list, but she was obviously the best one.”
Nest was a revelation, winning on debut by five lengths and finishing her season with a Grade 2 win. She came back even stronger at three, picking up her first Grade 1 victory in the Ashland Stakes, and finishing second to Secret Oath in the 2022 Kentucky Oaks.
From there, Nest faced her tallest challenge yet, taking on colts in the Belmont Stakes.
West brought his mother along for the race, marking the first time she'd ever been to New York City. They filled their time ahead of the race with all the activities one might expect a first-time visitor to the Big Apple to enjoy, but it was hard to ignore the reason why they were there in the first place.
“We got there on Friday, and he was a perfect tour guide,” Kathy said. “We went to Central Park, and we went to an Italian restaurant for supper.
“It was just wonderful and then we went to the race that day and he was a nervous wreck,” she continued. “He knew she could do it, but he didn't know first or second.”
Nest finished a game second in the Belmont to another horse in Repole's colors, Mo Donegal, co-owned with Donegal Racing.
The filly remained in New York for the rest of the summer, piling on graded wins and building an Eclipse Award-clinching resume.
By that point, Nest had become a known commodity to horse racing fans, and the knowledgable racegoers at Saratoga Race Course helped her star power grow as she annexed Grade 1 wins in the Coaching Club American Oaks and Alabama Stakes.
“What I thought was really cool was after the Alabama when she was coming back, the crowd, appreciated her,” West said. “They gave her like a standing ovation, and that was something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That's pretty cool that Saratoga is such a historic place to see that, and to have something like that and be a part of a horse that got that kind of emotion from the crowd was pretty unbelievable.”
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So, what does West think makes Nest so successful? The answer lies just under her ears.
“I think the number one thing with her – and I keep telling everybody this – is mentally, she is just bombproof,” West said. “Sometimes you get around some of these big mares and the good racemares, and they're a little fiery, and they have some personality to them. This filly, her personality would just be being sweet.
“I mean, she just is like a dog almost,” he continued, “and that's what's amazing about her is, as she got better, and as she came into herself and got more mature and race fit and all that stuff, she still kept that incredible mind and personality of being so kind to everybody around her.”
Nest hadn't quite shown the same spark at four that earned her the Eclipse Award as champion 3-year-old filly in 2022. Though she started the season with a win in the G2 Shuvee Stakes, her ensuing two starts were uncharacteristically dull.
When it became clear that Nest wouldn't be her best self for this year's Breeders' Cup, she was taken out of training and sent to WinStar Farm to prepare for the Fasig-Tipton November Sale, gathering radiographs, walking videos and conformation shots to help buyers know more about the horse. At the time, trainer Todd Pletcher said Nest was “far from retired,” but the next destination of most fillies and mares that go through that auction is a spot in someone's broodmare band.
Nest shipped from WinStar to the Highgate consignment in Barn 3 of Fasig-Tipton's Newtown Paddocks base on Sunday, and she was immediately a horse of great interest with buyers.
Throughout her time on the sales grounds, wherever she went, the clicking of cameras often followed. This continued as she paraded around the back ring and in front of the auctioneer's stand on Tuesday night.
West watched the filly go through the ring from the furthest-back part of the back ring, next to Highgate co-owner Jill Gordon. Kathy watched it two seats behind Repole.
In the back ring, West shifted his weight from foot to foot with his arms crossed as the price went up, stalling for a bit at $4 million before scaling that plateau and rolling up to $6 million. His mother said he watches races the same way.
This was a big deal for the Highgate Sales consignment, which West and Gordon founded just last year. Putting a horse of Nest's caliber through the ring and commanding a price like that is the kind of thing that a fledgling consignment can use to open a lot of doors in the future.
At the time, he thought he knew where Repole's stopping point was, and it was beyond where the hammer fell. He and Gordon exchanged a hug and a high-five – the first of several they'd receive from well-wishers as they moved from the back ring to the pavilion.
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“We thought, 'Oh, that's great. Somebody else got her,' and I didn't want people to think there was something going on,” West said. “Then, we walk up here, and Mike's signing the ticket, and I'm like, 'shit.'”
West was joking on the expletive, of course. but he went out of his way to note that the interest in the filly was real, and the bids that peppered the front and back rings were live money. He expected one or both of Nest's major partners to be a player on the filly, and Repole going rogue was not off the table, even if he thought it was at the time.
“Walking up here, he told me he was going to a lower number, and I jokingly said to him, 'No you're not. You're gonna go higher,'” West said. “Everybody has the right to bid on their own horse, but what gave us a lot of confidence was the amount of action she had at the barn. Mike's incredibly sentimental toward this filly for everything that she was doing on the track, and the joys and thrills that she gave us. I knew it was going to be tough to part ways with her.”
Repole said after signing the ticket that he'd like to bring Nest back to the races after she's able. If not, he has a deep roster of stallions at the ready for her first mating, specifically referencing champion Uncle Mo.
“I think she has unfinished business,” Repole said. “If she would have went for seven or eight (million), I probably would have let her go, but considering I owned 50 percent of her, I feel like I just bought her for $3 million, not $6 million.”
So, Nest stays in the family and Highgate Sales gets its most notable graduate to date. There was plenty to be proud of.
Back at the Highgate barn after the hammer fell, the only light besides the fluorescent bulbs between the aisles came from the consignment's welcome tent. Inside, Kathy was handing out the last of her homemade treats – an old family recipe bag of Chex Mix was especially a hit – and beaming enough to power the entire tent.
“Watching him do this is just…I never thought it would be that level of excellence, with just the people he's met and the people that trust him to make decisions,” she said. “You always hope for the best and know that they can. But when they get to, it's an amazing, amazing story. He's done quite well.”
Two-time Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Sprint winner Goodnight Olive sold to John Stewart, a relative newcomer to the Thoroughbred business, for $6 million on Tuesday at the Fasig-Tipton November sale, and plans call for her to remain in training for a 2024 campaign.
The 5-year-old Ghostzapper mare went before the auctioneer's stand just three days after winning her second consecutive edition of the Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Sprint at Santa Anita Park, putting her in prime position to secure her second Eclipse Award as champion female sprinter. That race improved her record to nine wins in 12 starts for earnings of $2,196,200.
Goodnight Olive previously raced for the partnership of First Row Partners and Team Hanley, and she was trained by Chad Brown.
“We bought a lot of yearlings, and we've got some gaps, and we wanted some horses that had the potential to run, and she fits every bill of that,” Stewart said. “I think we can have a lot of fun with her this next year, and we'll get to know Chad through that process, and hopefully have her defend her title at the Breeders' Cup. I think there's an opportunity for her to run at Del Mar and do that.”
After finishing second in her debut, Goodnight Olive won her next seven races, climbing the ladder from a Keeneland maiden special weight, into the allowance optional claiming race, and then Grade 1 company in the Ballerina Handicap and her first Breeders' Cup win.
She started her 2023 campaign with a win in the Grade 1 Madison Stakes, and after her winning streak was snapped with a third in the G1 Derby City Distaff Stakes, she came back to win the G2 Bed o' Roses Stakes before finishing second in her defense of the Ballerina and winning her second Breeders' Cup race.
Stewart said he decided he was going to make a play for Goodnight Olive as soon as he saw her name in the Fasig-Tipton November catalog, but watching her recent Breeders' Cup performance only strengthened his resolve.
“There's no price to keeping that horse in this country,” he said. “That's one of the reasons that I'm getting into this sport, is because I'm from Lexington, and I feel like if we continue to let these bloodlines go out of the country, it just makes things more challenging here.
“I knew there was a lot of foreign interest, and I was 100 percent set that she was going to stay here, because of her quality pedigree and the success that she's had to date – and I think she still has some opportunity to still run, and add to what she's already done,” Stewart continued. “Once I decided I was buying it, I was buying it, so they could have bid whatever they want, that horse was going home with me.”
Bred in Kentucky by Stonestreet Thoroughbred Holdings, Goodnight Olive is out of the Grade 3-winning Smart Strike mare Salty Strike. She was consigned by Elite, agent.
Goodnight Olive was the highlight of a busy night for Stewart, who also bought Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf winner Pizza Bianca and Queen Caroline, the dam of champion Forte, for $3 million each. He also bought Lenni Girl, a half-sister to champion Jackie's Warrior, for $500,000; Goddess Pele, a half-sister to Group 1 winner Sibelius, for $300,000; and a pair of weanlings by Munnings.
