PRESS RELEASE (Edited)

The sixth installment in the 2025 OwnerView webinar series was held Aug. 12 and covered buying horses at sales and digital sales. 

The conference is hosted by The Jockey Club and the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and presented by Bessemer Trust, Keeneland and Stoll Keenon Ogden. The panel was sponsored by Centennial Farms and Walmac Farm.

A Q&A was sponsored by West Point Thoroughbreds and attendees were able to ask questions through a Q&A link. 

Gary Falter, project manager for OwnerView, moderated the panel with guests Leif Aaron, director of Digital Sales, Fasig-Tipton; Conrad Bandoroff, vice president of Denali Stud; Cormac Breathnach, director of Sales Operations, Keeneland; and Jon Green, owner of D.J. Stable LLC.

The conference started off with a discussion on the first steps when selecting a horse to bid on at a public auction. 

“I think you have to be conscious of the fact that you have to look at every piece of information on that catalog page from the top, which is who’s representing the horse, all the way to the bottom, which is which races they’re eligible for,” Green said. “And every piece of information that’s on that catalog is crucial and critical and should be, you know, looked at and considered before you raise your hand to bid on a horse.”

When asked if walking and conformation are enough to judge a yearling, Breathnach said all the available information on a potential purchase is important. 

“There is a tremendous amount of information available from seeing the horse on its pedigree, its conformation, its walk. The walk is a four-beat gait like the gallop and that’s basically why we don’t trot horses. We don’t jog horses because you don’t really see how they move in the sense of how they would move at a gallop. You see each foot hit the ground individually at a walk, much like they do at a gallop, just obviously at a much slower pace. So, it is a pretty good indicator, but obviously you see good walking horses that don’t run and vice versa.”

Discussing digital sales, Falter asked if there were select sales such as those at Keeneland, Fasig-Tipton, and Saratoga in the digital world. 

“To some degree, all digital sales are select in that, you know, there’s some horses that just don’t fit,” Aaron said. “The other thing that we do digitally that we don’t really do as much in person is that we make sure that the seller’s expectations monetarily are in line with what we think the horse is worth. And if those two things are out of whack, you know, we don’t take the horse.”

Another topic touched on was the benefit of veterinarian reports and the importance of the repository.

“More and more these days, video scopes are taken and put in the repository, which limits the number of times that the scope is physical,” Bandoroff said. “The vets have become very accepting of the video scopes in the repository, which has been a great development over the last few years because it has really limited the number of times that, especially, the yearlings are getting scoped at the barns, which has been, you know, it has been a really, I think, a great move forward.”

The replay of Tuesday’s Thoroughbred Owner Conference panel is available at bit.ly/OVVideos.

 

Four additional Thoroughbred Owner Conference virtual panels are scheduled for 2025. The next session, “Women in Thoroughbred Racing,” will be held Sept. 2 at 2 p.m. EST. A full schedule can be found here: bit.ly/OVSchedule.

There is no registration fee for the 2025 virtual conference series, but registration is required. For more information about the owner conference series, including the schedule and registration page, please visit ownerview.com/event/conference or contact Gary Falter at 859.224.2803 or gfalter@jockeyclub.com.

Return to the August 14 issue of Wire to Wire