Making sense of a sale with nearly as many yearlings as Britain's entire annual foal crop - meet Cormac Breathnach

Good Morning Bloodstock is Martin Stevens' daily morning email and presented here online as a sample.

This week it has become Good Morning Y'All, in honour of his week in the Bluegrass, where Martin has visited some truly iconic stud farms and stallions. Here, he chats to Keeneland's Cormac Breathnach about what goes into delivering the world's biggest bloodstock auction, Subscribers can get more great insight from Martin every Monday to Friday.

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Everything’s bigger in Texas, so they say, and the same goes for Kentucky when it comes to selling horses.

The Keeneland September Yearling Sale is the world’s largest thoroughbred auction, and by some distance.

Last year, some 4,164 yearlings were catalogued to sell over a marathon 12 sessions, which makes the 2,097 yearlings lots who were entered to sell in Books 1 to 4 of the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale in 2022 look like a fun run in comparison.

It must be a logistical nightmare, having to co-ordinate entries, inspections, cataloguing and stabling for such a vast number of horses: almost the same quantity as the entire annual foal crop in Britain, in fact. Imagine each and every one of those going to market in the same fortnight.

The man whose task it is to make sense of it all is Galway native Cormac Breathnach, Keeneland’s director of sales operations.

“We have 4,200 entries this year, which is 50 more than last year and a couple of hundred more than in 2021, which is surprising when breeding in North America is in a small but steady decline,” he says. “But commercial breeding is still strong. Entry numbers topped out at 5,555 in 2007, so the sale has shrunk a bit but not as much as the overall foal crop.

“We can take it, though. We have a large facility at Keeneland, with 46 barns that contain either 32 or 40 stalls each. In total we have 1,569 stalls on the grounds here we can use for sales, and the ability to have 400 horses catalogued in each session on consecutive days, until we run out of horses.”

Keeneland hosts an unfiltered (though eventually graded) number of commercial yearlings due to its unique structure. The auction house and accompanying racetrack business are owned by a trust that ploughs profits back into the industry or to charities.

“Our role and mission as Keeneland Association is to be a partner with the industry,” says Breathnach. “We are a for-profit company but there is no dividend, so everything we make through sales goes into purses, philanthropic initiatives, research into the welfare of the horse, local good causes and so on.

“We’re all working for the success and promotion of the best aspects of the industry, whether that’s racing or greater good. That’s our mission, and for that reason we don’t turn horses away in September or November. We have the stall space, we have the staff, the facilities, and we’re here to provide a sales venue to the industry.”

Putting this together is some jobCredit: Keeneland photo

So how do Breathnach and his team get to grips with the annual avalanche of applications to sell at Keeneland in September?

“Entry deadline is around the first of May every year, and it’s a case of come one come all and we’ll build a catalogue to suit,” he says. “What happens is we’ll get up to 4,500 initial entries but that comes down a little because some are cross-entered in other sales or entered as a precaution.

“In the middle of May we start compiling those entries, and plot the locations of every horse from their entry information on a Google map. We then work out how many we can physically inspect, as they’ll cover a huge area of land, from Ontario in the north, to New York in the east, to Florida in the south, to California in the west, with some in Virginia and Maryland too.

“A lot of them are in Kentucky, though, and more will be coming to Kentucky for the sales prep period, so we get to see them when they come to us.

“This year we saw just over 3,000 yearlings who are entered in the September sale, with two inspection teams, four people on each. We started in mid May, and on a slower day each team might see 60 horses, and on a busy day we might see 90 to 100 at a stretch.”

The inspection process is of paramount importance for putting the catalogue together, so that there is a progression from the creme de la creme in the first, most prestigious, session to more commercial offerings in the latter days of trade.

“The physical conformation of the horse is the most important variable in terms of its reception at the sale,” says Breathnach. “People want to buy athletes. Sire power and the strength of the female family are important, but ultimately if you have a really good-looking athletic horse who fills the eye, people just go crazy for them and pedigree quickly becomes secondary to that. That’s why we like to emphasise our inspections as much as possible.

“All inspection team members follow the same protocols, we use specific notes and grading scales and note them on ipads and the Jockey Club sales app, while one person takes photos so that we have another data point to refer to each horse. By the end of it we have a clear picture of each horse and what everyone thought of it.”

Cormac Breathnach (right) with colleague Tony Lacy, Credit: Keeneland photo

Grading the catalogue correctly is also of utmost importance to Keeneland because the reputation of Book 1 had started to suffer around a decade ago. In a scenario that might have been familiar to buyers in Europe at some points in history, the premier session was attracting blue-chip pedigrees but not always brilliant physicals.

“You have to go back to 2003 when the July Yearling Sale was phased out, to get to the root of the issue,” says Breathnach. “The September sale had just begun to grow, with some seven-figure horses selling there, and although it wasn’t boutique it was a large market where you could get a lot of money for the right horse. It also gave vendors more time to get an April, May or June foal to a sale looking the part. So it just sort of took over 20 or so years ago.

“The September sale has this six or seven-book format where it should be upfront that the quality gradually steps down – not that there aren’t good horses found in every one and a market for each book – as it makes more sense when people know what to expect in terms of the flow of the sale.

“But there has been a difficulty at times, or at least a perception in the market, that big pedigrees with sometimes lesser physicals found themselves in Book 1 and the best physicals were more easy to find in Books 2 and 3. That’s something we’ve already changed, as it was no way to run a sale for maximum success.”

He adds: “That’s why inspections are so important. We aim to get 400 of the best physical representations of as many different stallions as we can, but obviously with a lot of the more prestigious stallions, represented in Book 1, then the next bigger block in Book 2, which is a two-day sale with about 700 horses, and then we have a dark day.

“The focus is to concentrate as many of the best, most marketable horses in week one, and at the head of that week, so that the people who take private jets to the sale can come in and like what they see rather than wade through 46 barns’ worth of horses to get what they want. There’s a deep concentration of quality on those first two days if they’re making a flying visit, and they can still buy over the phone after they leave if need be.”

After the entries have been received and inspected as much as possible Breathnach is accompanied by Keeneland vice president of sales Tony Lacy, director of sales development Mark Maronde and assistant director of sales operations Dean Roethemeier in trying to put the lots in order of quality and dividing them into books.

Their starting point is consignors’ wish-lists, and the team do their best to give everyone what they want, as long as the requests are reasonable and reflect the quality of the yearling. You might think everyone wants to chance their arm in Books 1 or 2, but surprisingly that is not the case.

The busiest sale ring in the businessCredit: Keeneland photo

“What actually happens is you get a stack in the middle, in Books 3 and 4, which is considered by many people to be the safe zone,” says Breathnach. “They think to themselves ‘it’s a really nice colt but he’ll stand out in Book 3’, or ‘it’s a $10,000 pinhook but I don’t want it in Book 6’.

“We usually end up getting a lower number of horses wish-listed to Book 1 than we need, so we identify the horses we think should be up there on our inspection data, and push them in mainly from Book 2 and some from Book 3, and then back-fill those. We’ll still have an excess in Books 3 and 4, though, so a lot of 5s will have to go to 6 to create space for the 3s that need to become 4s and the 4s that need to become 5.”

Naturally, not everyone will be pleased with their placement, and so after the preliminary catalogue spaces are sent to consignors, they have a period in which to request swaps.

“We’re amenable to changes but scrutinous in Book 1, as we don’t want lesser horses to get swapped in there after all the discussions and work we’ve done,” says Breathnach. “Nobody gets everything they want, and there has to be compromise because of the number of horses and books we have, so there’s lots of back and forth and plenty of appeals, but we’re working to tight constraints.

“It comes down to stabling and actually the sale working. And the sale has always worked. That’s thanks to this process, which was instituted a long time ago. We’re just trying to bring our perspective to it.”

My visit to Keeneland and chat with Breathnach took place last Friday, which was in fact the deadline day for swaps. As such, our conversation was interrupted numerous times by his mobile phone buzzing, and he showed me a long list of missed calls and messages from consignors. Rather him than me.

The swaps will have been considered and implemented where applicable by last weekend, and then the entries are cross-checked and assigned hip numbers and stables, which is another logistical nightmare as consignors with a range of horses to sell over the two weeks won’t be best pleased if they have to keep moving around the sales complex.

All that information is currently with the Jockey Club, who will do the cataloguing and put together the proof pages, updating for recent black-type results. The final catalogues go online early next month and the physical books are available by the middle of August.

That is the end of what Breathnach calls the “long, arduous process” of making sense of 4,500 initial yearling entries.

The fun doesn’t end there, though, because from the third week of August to the start of the September sale the same process, minus inspections, is repeated for the November Breeding-Stock Sale.

Preparations for sales, be they September, November or otherwise, begin months in advanceCredit: Keeneland photo

“It’s a push,” notes Breathnach drily.

He accepts the hardship of putting those mammoth catalogues together, though, as he knows it is for the greater good.

“The September sale is the biggest thoroughbred sale in the world and it comes with a great deal of responsibility,” he says. “It’s the annual crop going to market for a lot of our friends, colleagues and farmers in the local area. We know what it means to everybody; it’s exceedingly important, so we want to get it as right as we can for the industry. It’s the toughest part of the job, but the single most important thing we do.”

Of course, studying an immature horse's pedigree and physique has never been a foolproof method to predict future racecourse success, so the painstaking process of trying to grade 4,200 accepted yearlings is a little in vain.

For example, this year’s Classic winners Mage and Arcangelo sold 48 hips apart on the first day of Book 3 of the September sale in 2021, while last year’s Eclipse champion two-year-old colt and subsequent Florida Derby victor Forte went under the hammer at the auction two days later, in the first session of Book 4.

Then there’s dual Grade 1 heroine War Like Goddess, who clinched her third consecutive Grade 3 Bewitch Stakes on the track at Keeneland in April. She was not sold at just $1,000 when offered in Book 6 in 2018, the 3,904th hip out of 4,538 catalogued that fortnight.

It might seem cruel of me to point out the futility of trying to organise so many lots by quality, when Breathnach and his team put so much work into it, but I doubt they’d mind.

All the more reason to be there for the full two weeks of selling – from September 11 to .23 this year – I’m sure they’d say.

That brings Good Morning Y’all to a close. Thanks to all the studs and sales houses in Kentucky who welcomed me so warmly over the last week, with special mention to Ed Prosser and Chauncey Morris for organising the trip.

It won’t be the last I have to say on the US breeding scene in the coming weeks, though, as I have lots of leftover material. I haven’t had time to mention meeting the whited-out wonder Tapit; rags to riches champion sire Into Mischief; the almost amusingly affectionate American Pharoah; or the breathtaking equine xanadu that John Sikura has built from nothing in 18 months at Xalapa.

I’ll be right with you, as they say in America.

What do you think?

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