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Santa Anita Releases Winter/Spring Meet Stakes Schedule Highlighted By 10 Grade 1 Races

A comprehensive stakes schedule spanning six months will be keynoted by six graded stakes, three of them Grade 1 events, when Santa Anita's Winter/Spring Meet opens on Sunday, Dec. 26.

Three Grade 1, $300,000 stakes, the Runhappy Malibu, the La Brea and American Oaks, along with three Grade 2, $200,000 Stakes, the Mathis Brothers Mile, the San Antonio and the San Gabriel, will highlight a blockbuster opening day program that will begin at 12 noon PT.

Santa Anita's Winter/Spring Meet will run through June 19 and will include a total of 94 stakes, 59 of them graded, with 10 Grade 1 offerings including the $750,000 Santa Anita Derby on April 9.

“We have added a significant amount of money to our stakes program along with some minor changes that I think trainers and owners, not only in California, but around the country, will appreciate,” said Chris Merz, Santa Anita Director of Racing and Racing Secretary. “We have a lot of positive momentum going in California right now and these enhancements to the stakes schedule add to it. We would like to thank our partners at the TOC for getting behind this to help make California racing all that it can and should be.”

America's longest continually run “hundred grander,” the Grade 1, $650,000 Santa Anita Handicap, which will be contested for the 85th time, along with the Grade 1, $500,000 Beholder Mile and the Grade 1, $500,000 Frank E. Kilroe Mile, will headline another tremendous card on March 5.

Along with those three Grade 1 stakes, one of the nation's most important Derby preps, the Grade 2, $400,000 San Felipe, the Grade 2, $200,000 Buena Vista and the Grade 2, $200,000 San Carlos Stakes will all be run on March 5 as well.

The Santa Anita Derby, which has now produced 20 winners of the Kentucky Derby, will be complemented by the Grade 2, $400,000 Santa Anita Oaks and a pair of $150,000 California-bred stakes, the Echo Eddie and the Evening Jewel, on April 9.

Three Grade 1 stakes, the $400,000 Gamely, the $400,000 Hollywood Gold Cup and the $500,000 Shoemaker Mile, will highlight a festive Memorial Day card on May 30 as the Winter/Spring meet “turns for home,” with three racing weeks remaining.

Closing weekend, June 18 and 19, will offer a wide variety of six stakes, with a pair of $100,000 sprints for 2-year-olds, the Fasig-Tipton Futurity and Fasig Tipton Debutante being run on June 18 along with the Grade 2, $200,000 Santa Maria for fillies and mares.

On closing day, June 19, the iconic Grade 3, $125,000 San Juan Capistrano, for 3-year-olds and up at a mile and three quarters on turf, along with the Grade 3, $100,000 American at one mile on grass and the $100,000 Possibly Perfect, at a mile and one half on turf, figure to bring a dynamic ending to the meet.

For additional information, including Santa Anita's complete 2021-22 Winter/Spring Stakes Schedule, please visit santaanita.com or call (626) 574-RACE.

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Shadwell Stud To Conduct Full Review Of Global Operations

The global racing and breeding enterprise – the vision of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who passed away in March this year – announces that it is undertaking a full review of all its activities that will result in important changes for the business.

As a result, its operations in the U.K., Ireland and the U.S. will contract, with a focus on quality and competition at the highest level of the sport with horses of the calibre of Baaeed and Malathaat.

A number of horses in training and homebred yearlings will be sold this autumn, while its broodmare band will be further reduced through dispersals at key auctions over the coming months.

The family wish to stress that they remain extremely passionate about the sport and through the chairmanship of Sheikha Hissa, herself an accomplished horsewoman, are committed to ensuring that their father's legacy endures for many years to come. They intend to retain a significant number of homebred foals and will continue their global stallion operations.

Chris Kennard, the U.K. director of Shadwell Estate Company Ltd, said: “As part of a long-term plan for Shadwell to operate on a sustainable footing, a recent decision has been made to contract the size of the global business. This will involve the imminent sale of a substantial number of horses – including yearlings, horses in training and breeding stock, and in due course, a reorganization of each of the worldwide operations.”

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One For The Little Guy: Little Run Debuts Single-Horse Consignment At Keeneland September

Between the ballooning size of the catalog and the deep families that reside within it, it can be hard to stand out in Book 2 of the Keeneland September Yearling Sale. Fortunately, Little Run has a one-of-a-kind offering.

The one-woman operation of Wendy Clay makes its debut in this year's renewal of the bellwether auction with a single horse. Hip 831, a Gun Runner colt, will go through the ring Thursday, bookending a comeback years in the making.

A native of Okemos, Mich., Clay had accumulated a broad range of experiences in the Thoroughbred business, breaking and galloping horses in Australia, South Africa, and Ireland, working domestically with the stallions at Three Chimneys Farm, and consigning horses under the Amelia's Field Farm banner; but her ties to the business had mostly lapsed by the mid-2010s. She still had friends and family in the Thoroughbred industry, but she'd found gainful employment outside the sphere.

Clay started to get the itch again in 2017, and by January of the following year, she'd purchased a pair of short yearlings to pinhook through consignor Brookdale Sales. She broke yearlings for others in the years that followed, but she never lost the urge to bring up a sale horse of her own.

Then, at this year's Keeneland January Horses of All Ages Sale, Clay found a Gun Runner colt she couldn't resist, and brought him home for $35,000. She signed the ticket “Little Run,” and the same words would hang from Barn 41 at Keeneland eight months later.

“I had to buy a horse that I enjoyed being around and looking at every day, and that's how I feel about this boy,” she said. “He has such a kind eye and just a warmth about him. I just gravitated to him. It was freezing cold in January, and I just loved the way he walked. He has an elegance, a grace, about him. My favorite movie is 'Phar Lap,' and when I lead him, I feel like I have Phar Lap on my shank.”

There are 689 yearlings cataloged in Book 2 of Keeneland September, not including the horses that sell and show in the sessions immediately before and after the second book. Even a good horse can get lost in the shuffle at that point of the sale, but being a son of leading freshman sire Gun Runner certainly doesn't hurt business, as evidenced by the high-end caliber of buyers that inspected the colt Wednesday afternoon.

Beyond what's on the page, Clay said what she and her horse offered was the physical and mental benefit of individual attention. The colt spent his time between sales at Clay's Winchester, Ky., farm, which has a small creek – or run – at the front of the property, giving the consignment its name.

Working with this colt in particular, Clay reclaimed what she had missed being away from the business. However, she also admitted that this sale might be tougher to get through than the ones she'd worked before.

“I've enjoyed every single day, seven days a week,” Clay said. “My favorite time is just going out and grooming him every single morning. I'm going to miss him.”

“You bond, because you're with them all the time,” she continued. “Sometimes, I think to myself, 'Why am I saying goodbye?' but it's fun. I love prepping them. I love watching them grow and blossom, and doing the best I can for him and his future, not only physically, but mentally. The better behaved he is, and the better he's treated, I believe that he'll be treated kindly in his future, because he'll be well-behaved, trained, and well-fed. I like being a positive influence. It stays with them, like it does for us, their whole life.”

That bond stemmed from her childhood, even if it wasn't quite a straight line from one to the other.

Her family had nothing to do with horses – and they still don't to this day – but everything changed when they moved next to the farm of Irv and Naomi Weitzman, who owned Quarter Horses that ran at the national level, and spearheaded the opening of Mount Pleasant Meadows, a mixed-breed track in central Michigan.

“I was four or five years old, and I would just crouch down into the weeds in the field next door and watch the horses, and I just fell in love with them,” she said. “I would sneak over there, and they knew my dad was a lawyer, so they were worried about liability, and they kept saying, 'No, no, you need to stay away from those Quarter Horses.' I just wouldn't stay away. They let me train their German Shepherds. I would go over and groom and train their German Shepherds, and then it gravitated to taking care of the horses as I got older. They got my first pony for me when I was eight.”

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Clay eventually got in the saddle for the Weitzmans, and she still uses the saddle they gave her to start her yearlings under tack to this day. A set of Kentucky Derby tickets she won in a contest at Mount Pleasant Meadows eventually led to her first summer job in Kentucky at Dixiana Farm.

Now with a farm of her own, Clay commemorates that spark the Weitzmans gave her with a horse charm on her necklace that Irv bought for Naomi when they had a horse running in the All American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs, Quarter Horse racing's richest event, in the 1980s.

“He bought this little horse for Naomi, and when she was dying, she gave it to me and said, 'This brought us luck,' and that's why I wear it,” she said.

Working with the horses brings back memories for Clay of the people no longer around, but selling the colt has reunited her with others she hasn't seen in years.

She was being assisted on Wednesday afternoon by Cori Krause, a friend she made back in Michigan during their first years together in 4-H, who was serving as the mouthpiece of the consignment. Even after years apart, when they got back together, their work was practically seamless.

“We haven't seen each other for 25 years,” Clay said. “We talk, but we've just been busy being moms, so she wanted to come down from her busy job and help, which was so kind. She's a natural at greeting people. I'm just really into the horse; the horse husbandry and taking care of them. I prefer to be in the stall, grooming and showing. She likes the grooming part, and I like the horse part. Maybe we'll be doing this again together.”

It might be a brief stay at the Keeneland sale, but it was immediately clear that Clay had returned to a comfort zone when she brought her colt out of his stall.

Clay's doing it the hard way, hanging her own shingle against the current of the name-brand consignors, but she's not at Keeneland this week to topple the giants. The victory comes from being back in the game.

“I have met over the 30 years that I've been in and out of this industry, I've always had a warm welcome, and met lifetime friends,” she said. “I just feel honored to be welcomed to come back. Keeneland has been so kind. I call and ask questions because I haven't done this before by myself, and it's just been a really nice feeling.”

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Bloodlines: The Declining Foal Crop And The War On ‘Average’

The Jockey Club announced late last week that the projected foal crop for 2022 is 18,700, and most of the racing press reported this without commentary. That number of foals is the lowest figure in more than 60 years. The trendlines appear to be giving us both clear indications of what is happening and generally why it's happening too. Breeders are hearing what the marketplace is telling them and are responding in accordance.

For a generation, the commercial market has been pummeling breeders whose stock ranks below the median in auction sales. Typically, the prices for those foals and yearlings do not even cover the cost of on-farm production, without even considering ancillary expenses or the cost of money tied up in non-productive assets.

As a result, the number of foals that breeders are willing to produce has hit a noteworthy low point.

The last time the North American foal crop of Thoroughbreds came this low was 66 years ago in 1965 when the foal crop was 18,846, and only five years before that, in 1960, the foal crop was 12,901. So in the span of half a decade, the foal crop increased by nearly 50 percent, but the decades of the 1960s and 1970s featured exponential growth in Thoroughbred racing, and especially in breeding, with the expansion of breeding programs outside of Kentucky, Florida, and California.

Now, those regional programs are nearly dead. Many breeders are pensioning stallions, selling off mares, and not breeding for those specialty markets.

In contrast to the present trend, the foal-production boom peaked in 1986 with a foal crop of 51,296, just in time for the tax act that changed the rules for breeders and sent the market into a panic and decline. By 1995, the selloff had bottomed out with a foal crop of 34,983, more than 16,300 foals fewer than only nine years earlier.

Since then, the foal crops remained remarkably stable around the 35,000 level until 2010, when the foal crop dropped below 30,000 for the first time since the 1970s. Crop numbers have been drawing down, slowly but steadily to the present level, and one of the great factors for this direction is the continuing negative pressure from buyers.

Despite the tone of the foregoing information, there is a good market for Thoroughbreds, but it is a good market, consistent and profitable, only for premium foals and yearlings. Nobody wants an average one. Or what is perceived to be an average yearling, because every year there are graded stakes winners from every book and every session of the September sale. Perception of average-ness is not the same as being average (or below average).

At the same time that breeders are stuck with half or thereabouts of their annual foal crop in the “below-average” section of sales, the same breeders are consistently being prodded to spend more for stud fees and other services, then to accept less at the sales, because what other choice would they have.

The situation is sufficiently trying to make one wonder “what if”: what if breeders made different decisions; what if breeders formed cooperatives (or a single cooperative) to improve their economic and political impact; what if a group or several groups collectively hired trainers to train the horses that were not “sales types?” These and other choices are out there, apparently waiting for someone or a group of someones to latch onto them and bring them into operation.

By these and other avenues, there are ways out of the financial quandary breeders find themselves in, but it may not be the path that brought them here. We have, for more than 20 years, been breeding stallions to as many mares as breeders will present and as many as the horse can (hopefully) handle.

This approach, in hindsight, might be considered an overreaction to the concept of a free market, as in too much of a good thing can drown you.

Stallion syndicates, hard number syndicates that restrict access to premium stallions and control the supply of yearlings as a result, are one option. This is considerably different from the current free-for-all that seems to be sending more breeders to the poor house each year.

Instead, a syndicate with a contractual cap on seasons and members would be a return to the style of syndicates from the 1950s and '60s and '70s, when everyone made money in horses. And somehow the horses were even better and raced more and seemed more like fun, than what we have now.

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