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Fasig-Tipton Eastern Fall Yearling Catalogue Released

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Set to begin Tuesday, Oct. 27 at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium, Maryland, 239 yearlings were catalogued for the Fasig-Tipton Eastern Fall Yearling Sale, and may now be viewed online, the auction house announced Monday.

Restructured into its new format for this season with the sale also returning to the former name, the catalogue is organized to provide each of the region’s state-bred programs with its own dedicated section. It begins with yearlings bred in non-Eastern states (Kentucky, Florida, Canada, etc.) before moving through individual sections of yearlings bred in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Each state-bred section is prefaced by introductory pages that provide a snapshot of its breeding and racing incentives. Informational pages for the Delaware-certified, Virginia-certified, and West Virginia-certified programs, as well as Maryland Million, are also included. For all applicable sales information and to view the catalogue, please go here. Print editions are available from the Fasig-Tipton offices.

“We’re pleased with the catalogue, which has grown slightly in numbers over last year and offers strong sire power,” said Paget Bennett, Fasig-Tipton Midlantic director of sales. “This sale is also being held three weeks later than its traditional date, on the Tuesday following Maryland Million Day at nearby Laurel Park, tying the auction to one of the region’s most popular racing days. It also gives yearling buyers an opportunity to shop later into the season than usual.”

2027 Midlantic Juvenile Sale

Fasig-Tipton has also set the dates for the 2027 Midlantic May Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale, which will be held May 24 and 25 in Timonium following the Preakness. The under-tack show will be conducted May 18-20.

The post Fasig-Tipton Eastern Fall Yearling Catalogue Released appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Drakenstein Spearheading Cape Revival

---

The mountains stand above the farm like a petrified wave over a green strand. It is as though Africa has gathered the core of its wild interior to plunge into the real ocean, down on the Cape, only to recoil from this sudden Eden of pasture, vineyards, groves and flowers.

From the reverse perspective, of course, it is the crags themselves that elevate the paddocks and architecture of Drakenstein Stud, so gleaming and orderly, into perhaps the most dramatically beautiful horse farm on the planet. But then your eye settles on the creatures grazing here, and suddenly everything else recedes. It is as though nature and humankind have together contrived a still greater beauty, condensing the awful majesty above and elegant cultivation below.

Gaynor Rupert, the woman whose vision and investment have made all this possible, puts it well.

“Why did Degas paint horses and ballet dancers?” she asks.

And you see the point at once, in her stallions: the fusion of form and function, of aesthetic and physical qualities.

“Both are exquisite athletic forms,” Rupert continues. “If you try to explain the secret [of the Thoroughbred], it’s a very esoteric thing. But for me, maybe it’s that: the beauty of it all, the literal, physical beauty of the horse.”

That magnetism, of course, has ever abided. But these are days of especial renewal for the South African Turf, after long and contentious isolation on account of African Horse Sickness. Drakenstein graduate Beach Bomb (SAf) (Lancaster Bomber) hinted at what the world had been missing, when enduring a laborious quarantine process–including two months in a New York airport compound–to win a couple of graded stakes last year. But with more practical protocols now agreed, traffic and trade are opening up, with Gimme a Nother (SAf) (Gimmethegreenlight {Aus}) leading the way in recently winning her third consecutive graded stakes. Moreover, the domestic racing program has been enjoying a parallel revival, its troubled previous operators having been succeeded by dynamic new investors.

Drakenstein Stud | Drakenstein Stud photo

This spirit of renascence is complemented by the youthful complexion of the nine-strong Drakenstein roster, which is dominated by fresh blood–typified, aptly, by G1 Durban July winner Oriental Charm (SAf) (Vercingetorix {SAf}). His owners include Greg Bortz, the recently retired chairman of Race Coast, who partnered with Hollywoodbets to energize racing in the Western Cape.

“Everything’s improving here,” Rupert says with enthusiasm. “Kenilworth was literally falling apart. But ever since Greg came in, and Hollywoodbets, literally hundreds of millions of rand have been spent fixing everything up. They worked on field sizes, and prize money has more than doubled in three years–up another 20% last year.”

To Rupert, the next priority is to expand the mare population.

“There are probably around 2,000 broodmares here, and we have a lot of stallions,” she says. “But we’re growing that pool and we’ve a lot of international people investing. Everybody’s so positive about the industry, and we’re very hopeful that we can compete internationally. It’s a bit more difficult getting horses here, but that’s the next step.”

Rupert’s own program straddles hemispheres, her British farm Cayton Park having recently celebrated a French Group 1 success for Royal Ascot winner Thesecretadversary (Ire) (St Mark’s Basilica {Fr}), co-bred and co-owned with Mrs. John Magnier. And Rupert can certainly see the potential for South Africa, borrowing the example of Japan, in drawing together blood from different racing theatres.

No stallion, certainly, will ever have a dearer place in her heart than Trippi, imported from Florida in 2008 to become champion sire. He finally reached the end of the road only a few weeks ago, at 29, having been lovingly tended through retirement by the Drakenstein team–even as his sons Jet Dark (SAf) and Charles Dickens (SAf) set out to extend his legacy.

At the same time, nobody should underestimate the genetic bedrock of the local breed, whether in terms of nature or nurture. The roots of its global impact, from Hong Kong and Dubai to the Epsom Derby itself, can in some respects be paralleled to the precious minerals that nourished the nation’s wider emergence. Every crop of Drakenstein weanlings, for instance, migrates for six months to draw on the ore of a sister farm in the Karoo, some 300 miles away.

“The King’s Plate, which we sponsor [through L’Ormarins], is 165 years old,” Rupert reminds us. “So racing has been going on here for a long time. And over the years we’ve had exceptionally good breeders in the Karoo. It’s semi-desert. My horses are very sound and the Karoo plays a good part in that. I mean, there isn’t a dentist in the whole of that region. My father-in-law was born there and died in his 90s without a single filling.”

Those benefits are enhanced by the management of the young stock in the Karoo, where they range over huge paddocks.

The late Trippi | Drakenstein Stud

“I always have an older, retired horse with them, that teaches them how to walk over the puddles or whatever,” Rupert explains. “But it’s not like they’re running wild. I’ve a very good manager there and by the time they go to their trainers, they’re definitely used to plenty of handling.”

The result is a Thoroughbred with assets that seem in urgently short supply elsewhere, notably in those commercial environments where breeders tackle structural flaws with surgical intervention.

“We’ve always tried to breed a defect out, rather than correct it,” Rupert says. “In South Africa, I wouldn’t breed with a horse that has issues, whether that’s bleeding or breathing or conformation.”

Drakenstein itself was developed after the tragic loss of Rupert’s brother-in-law Anthonij in a 2001 car accident. Her husband Johann, head of an international business empire, suggested that she might accommodate what then remained a modest breeding program at the L’Ormarins winery he preserved in his brother’s memory. He would have been startled, then, to be told of the sumptuous facility that processed 622 matings in the season leading into its silver anniversary.

But then his wife had no better an idea of what lay ahead, on a fateful day in 1986, when attending a yearling sale with the doyen of South African breeding, Mick Goss.

“I’d visited Mick’s farm and seen his stallions and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I could do this all my life long,’” Rupert recalls. “My grandfather had adored horses. But he didn’t breed them–just bet on them! In fact, he wrote in his will that none of his children were allowed to bet.

Following Charles Dickens’s victory in the L’Ormarins King’s Plate | Drakenstein Stud

“I’d gone to this sale in Johannesburg and was just looking through the catalogue, sitting next to Mick, chatting away–and ended up buying this little filly, the cheapest in the sale but with a very good pedigree. A friend was going in with me, but pulled out. But I knew the horse could go to Mick’s farm and, as it happened, everything she produced was a winner. As so often, it was beginner’s luck.”

Final Call (SAf) (Elevation {SAf}) was actually sent back by her trainer, who found her wholly devoid of ability. But she subsequently became a priceless foundation mare for Rupert, who has cultivated the line through five generations.

The farm itself has meanwhile been developed with equally meticulous care. “When I started out, I thought, ‘Well, maybe we can’t compete with international breeders–but I can compete in terms of the beauty of the farm,” Rupert reflects. “So I really wanted to do it all properly. I went to Kentucky, England, France, and picked up things everywhere. I read Joe Taylor, read all the books.

“But I could never have built the farm without Mick. He taught me everything. Honestly, I phoned him every single day: he’s incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. So I did a lot of homework before putting down the first brick. It took ages, but it was worth it.”

It certainly was. And while the farm absolutely operates on a commercial basis, it does so on edifying principles that deserve wider emulation in America and Europe.

“Ultimately what we want to do is breed the best racehorses,” Rupert says. “I think everybody here is pretty much on the same page. There are a lot of outstanding horsemen in South Africa and, in their heart of hearts, really that’s what they all want to do. We believe that if we can breed runners, then people will want to buy from the farm.”

That model has been sustained by Eight On Eighteen (SAf) (Lancaster Bomber), the 24th Group 1 winner raised here. In 2022, farm graduates won 20 of 35 stakes races staged in South Africa; and Drakenstein has broken that record twice since. The following year a ratio of 9.2% stakes winners-to-runners was bettered, among breeders globally, only by Coolmore, Sheikh Mohammed Obaid al-Maktoum and Godolphin Australia.

To Rupert, such success is above all a credit to the team assembled under manager Kevin Somerville. (“I’ve got outstanding people in every area, absolutely outstanding,” she says gratefully. “Kevin is brilliant with pedigrees, very hardworking, very straight.”) But it all starts with the woman at the top, who brings to the enterprise a resource still deeper than funding. For the diamond set into the ring on her finger is no mere token of affluence, but a symbol of endeavor, of striving: the first gem found by her grandfather Hugh Romilly Abercrombie, after leaving Scotland for the Kimberley rush at the turn of the last century. The settler spirit then expressed itself in laying down his roots in land and horses, establishing a chain of farms around Pretoria and riding from one to the next.

Now the same, questing spirit sustains his granddaughter towards new horizons for the South African Thoroughbred.

“What I love [about breeding] is that you can never know anything for sure,” says Rupert. “Often, it’s the one of which you don’t really expect anything that becomes the superstar. It’s an extremely patient game. Especially here, because you don’t have access to everything. So you have to do it slowly, and wait, and the reward might be generations away.” She pauses and smiles. “Maybe we can speed it up now.”

But the vibrancy now so obvious in the local Turf never went away.

“People say, ‘Oh, racing’s going to die because of this and that,’” she says. “But I always think that it will never die. Because here, it pretty much did. We were just about racing for a rosette. But nobody stopped. We knew that we were never going to export a case [of AHS] but you have to actually show that, scientifically, and get it signed off by vets. It took time, but they finally did it. And meanwhile we weren’t going to give up, at any point. Ever.”

The post Drakenstein Spearheading Cape Revival appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Fasig-Tipton Eastern Fall Yearling Catalogue Released

---

Set to begin Tuesday, Oct. 27 at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium, Maryland, 239 yearlings were catalogued for the Fasig-Tipton Eastern Fall Yearling Sale, and may now be viewed online, the auction house announced Monday.

Restructured into its new format for this season with the sale also returning to the former name, the catalogue is organized to provide each of the region’s state-bred programs with its own dedicated section. It begins with yearlings bred in non-Eastern states (Kentucky, Florida, Canada, etc.) before moving through individual sections of yearlings bred in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Each state-bred section is prefaced by introductory pages that provide a snapshot of its breeding and racing incentives. Informational pages for the Delaware-certified, Virginia-certified, and West Virginia-certified programs, as well as Maryland Million, are also included. For all applicable sales information and to view the catalogue, please go here. Print editions are available from the Fasig-Tipton offices.

“We’re pleased with the catalogue, which has grown slightly in numbers over last year and offers strong sire power,” said Paget Bennett, Fasig-Tipton Midlantic director of sales. “This sale is also being held three weeks later than its traditional date, on the Tuesday following Maryland Million Day at nearby Laurel Park, tying the auction to one of the region’s most popular racing days. It also gives yearling buyers an opportunity to shop later into the season than usual.”

2027 Midlantic Juvenile Sale

Fasig-Tipton has also set the dates for the 2027 Midlantic May Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale, which will be held May 24 and 25 in Timonium following the Preakness. The under-tack show will be conducted May 18-20.

The post Fasig-Tipton Eastern Fall Yearling Catalogue Released appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Drakenstein Spearheading Cape Revival

---

The mountains stand above the farm like a petrified wave over a green strand. It is as though Africa has gathered the core of its wild interior to plunge into the real ocean, down on the Cape, only to recoil from this sudden Eden of pasture, vineyards, groves and flowers.

From the reverse perspective, of course, it is the crags themselves that elevate the paddocks and architecture of Drakenstein Stud, so gleaming and orderly, into perhaps the most dramatically beautiful horse farm on the planet. But then your eye settles on the creatures grazing here, and suddenly everything else recedes. It is as though nature and humankind have together contrived a still greater beauty, condensing the awful majesty above and elegant cultivation below.

Gaynor Rupert, the woman whose vision and investment have made all this possible, puts it well.

“Why did Degas paint horses and ballet dancers?” she asks.

And you see the point at once, in her stallions: the fusion of form and function, of aesthetic and physical qualities.

“Both are exquisite athletic forms,” Rupert continues. “If you try to explain the secret [of the Thoroughbred], it’s a very esoteric thing. But for me, maybe it’s that: the beauty of it all, the literal, physical beauty of the horse.”

That magnetism, of course, has ever abided. But these are days of especial renewal for the South African Turf, after long and contentious isolation on account of African Horse Sickness. Drakenstein graduate Beach Bomb (SAf) (Lancaster Bomber) hinted at what the world had been missing, when enduring a laborious quarantine process–including two months in a New York airport compound–to win a couple of graded stakes last year. But with more practical protocols now agreed, traffic and trade are opening up, with Gimme a Nother (SAf) (Gimmethegreenlight {Aus}) leading the way in recently winning her third consecutive graded stakes. Moreover, the domestic racing program has been enjoying a parallel revival, its troubled previous operators having been succeeded by dynamic new investors.

Drakenstein Stud | Drakenstein Stud photo

This spirit of renascence is complemented by the youthful complexion of the nine-strong Drakenstein roster, which is dominated by fresh blood–typified, aptly, by G1 Durban July winner Oriental Charm (SAf) (Vercingetorix {SAf}). His owners include Greg Bortz, the recently retired chairman of Race Coast, who partnered with Hollywoodbets to energize racing in the Western Cape.

“Everything’s improving here,” Rupert says with enthusiasm. “Kenilworth was literally falling apart. But ever since Greg came in, and Hollywoodbets, literally hundreds of millions of rand have been spent fixing everything up. They worked on field sizes, and prize money has more than doubled in three years–up another 20% last year.”

To Rupert, the next priority is to expand the mare population.

“There are probably around 2,000 broodmares here, and we have a lot of stallions,” she says. “But we’re growing that pool and we’ve a lot of international people investing. Everybody’s so positive about the industry, and we’re very hopeful that we can compete internationally. It’s a bit more difficult getting horses here, but that’s the next step.”

Rupert’s own program straddles hemispheres, her British farm Cayton Park having recently celebrated a French Group 1 success for Royal Ascot winner Thesecretadversary (Ire) (St Mark’s Basilica {Fr}), co-bred and co-owned with Mrs. John Magnier. And Rupert can certainly see the potential for South Africa, borrowing the example of Japan, in drawing together blood from different racing theatres.

No stallion, certainly, will ever have a dearer place in her heart than Trippi, imported from Florida in 2008 to become champion sire. He finally reached the end of the road only a few weeks ago, at 29, having been lovingly tended through retirement by the Drakenstein team–even as his sons Jet Dark (SAf) and Charles Dickens (SAf) set out to extend his legacy.

At the same time, nobody should underestimate the genetic bedrock of the local breed, whether in terms of nature or nurture. The roots of its global impact, from Hong Kong and Dubai to the Epsom Derby itself, can in some respects be paralleled to the precious minerals that nourished the nation’s wider emergence. Every crop of Drakenstein weanlings, for instance, migrates for six months to draw on the ore of a sister farm in the Karoo, some 300 miles away.

“The King’s Plate, which we sponsor [through L’Ormarins], is 165 years old,” Rupert reminds us. “So racing has been going on here for a long time. And over the years we’ve had exceptionally good breeders in the Karoo. It’s semi-desert. My horses are very sound and the Karoo plays a good part in that. I mean, there isn’t a dentist in the whole of that region. My father-in-law was born there and died in his 90s without a single filling.”

Those benefits are enhanced by the management of the young stock in the Karoo, where they range over huge paddocks.

The late Trippi | Drakenstein Stud

“I always have an older, retired horse with them, that teaches them how to walk over the puddles or whatever,” Rupert explains. “But it’s not like they’re running wild. I’ve a very good manager there and by the time they go to their trainers, they’re definitely used to plenty of handling.”

The result is a Thoroughbred with assets that seem in urgently short supply elsewhere, notably in those commercial environments where breeders tackle structural flaws with surgical intervention.

“We’ve always tried to breed a defect out, rather than correct it,” Rupert says. “In South Africa, I wouldn’t breed with a horse that has issues, whether that’s bleeding or breathing or conformation.”

Drakenstein itself was developed after the tragic loss of Rupert’s brother-in-law Anthonij in a 2001 car accident. Her husband Johann, head of an international business empire, suggested that she might accommodate what then remained a modest breeding program at the L’Ormarins winery he preserved in his brother’s memory. He would have been startled, then, to be told of the sumptuous facility that processed 622 matings in the season leading into its silver anniversary.

But then his wife had no better an idea of what lay ahead, on a fateful day in 1986, when attending a yearling sale with the doyen of South African breeding, Mick Goss.

“I’d visited Mick’s farm and seen his stallions and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I could do this all my life long,’” Rupert recalls. “My grandfather had adored horses. But he didn’t breed them–just bet on them! In fact, he wrote in his will that none of his children were allowed to bet.

Following Charles Dickens’s victory in the L’Ormarins King’s Plate | Drakenstein Stud

“I’d gone to this sale in Johannesburg and was just looking through the catalogue, sitting next to Mick, chatting away–and ended up buying this little filly, the cheapest in the sale but with a very good pedigree. A friend was going in with me, but pulled out. But I knew the horse could go to Mick’s farm and, as it happened, everything she produced was a winner. As so often, it was beginner’s luck.”

Final Call (SAf) (Elevation {SAf}) was actually sent back by her trainer, who found her wholly devoid of ability. But she subsequently became a priceless foundation mare for Rupert, who has cultivated the line through five generations.

The farm itself has meanwhile been developed with equally meticulous care. “When I started out, I thought, ‘Well, maybe we can’t compete with international breeders–but I can compete in terms of the beauty of the farm,” Rupert reflects. “So I really wanted to do it all properly. I went to Kentucky, England, France, and picked up things everywhere. I read Joe Taylor, read all the books.

“But I could never have built the farm without Mick. He taught me everything. Honestly, I phoned him every single day: he’s incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. So I did a lot of homework before putting down the first brick. It took ages, but it was worth it.”

It certainly was. And while the farm absolutely operates on a commercial basis, it does so on edifying principles that deserve wider emulation in America and Europe.

“Ultimately what we want to do is breed the best racehorses,” Rupert says. “I think everybody here is pretty much on the same page. There are a lot of outstanding horsemen in South Africa and, in their heart of hearts, really that’s what they all want to do. We believe that if we can breed runners, then people will want to buy from the farm.”

That model has been sustained by Eight On Eighteen (SAf) (Lancaster Bomber), the 24th Group 1 winner raised here. In 2022, farm graduates won 20 of 35 stakes races staged in South Africa; and Drakenstein has broken that record twice since. The following year a ratio of 9.2% stakes winners-to-runners was bettered, among breeders globally, only by Coolmore, Sheikh Mohammed Obaid al-Maktoum and Godolphin Australia.

To Rupert, such success is above all a credit to the team assembled under manager Kevin Somerville. (“I’ve got outstanding people in every area, absolutely outstanding,” she says gratefully. “Kevin is brilliant with pedigrees, very hardworking, very straight.”) But it all starts with the woman at the top, who brings to the enterprise a resource still deeper than funding. For the diamond set into the ring on her finger is no mere token of affluence, but a symbol of endeavor, of striving: the first gem found by her grandfather Hugh Romilly Abercrombie, after leaving Scotland for the Kimberley rush at the turn of the last century. The settler spirit then expressed itself in laying down his roots in land and horses, establishing a chain of farms around Pretoria and riding from one to the next.

Now the same, questing spirit sustains his granddaughter towards new horizons for the South African Thoroughbred.

“What I love [about breeding] is that you can never know anything for sure,” says Rupert. “Often, it’s the one of which you don’t really expect anything that becomes the superstar. It’s an extremely patient game. Especially here, because you don’t have access to everything. So you have to do it slowly, and wait, and the reward might be generations away.” She pauses and smiles. “Maybe we can speed it up now.”

But the vibrancy now so obvious in the local Turf never went away.

“People say, ‘Oh, racing’s going to die because of this and that,’” she says. “But I always think that it will never die. Because here, it pretty much did. We were just about racing for a rosette. But nobody stopped. We knew that we were never going to export a case [of AHS] but you have to actually show that, scientifically, and get it signed off by vets. It took time, but they finally did it. And meanwhile we weren’t going to give up, at any point. Ever.”

The post Drakenstein Spearheading Cape Revival appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.