The formal juvenile sale season in North America comes to a close with the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co.’s June sale of 2-year-olds in training and horses of racing age, condensed into two sessions on June 17 and 18. Before the lucrative summer racing meets, featuring a number of stakes for the division, kick in, this is the final chance to pick up a juvenile from the first crop of the popular Yaupon at public auction, with that stallion recently recording the winner of a prominent early-season stakes.
Yaupon, who stands at Spendthrift Farm, won three graded sprint stakes, highlighted by the Grade 1 Forego Stakes at seven furlongs at Saratoga. There, he defeated a field that included five other Grade 1 winners, including champion Whitmore, despite Firenze Fire trying to savage him in the stretch. He was thus expected to impart speed to his progeny, and that was seen when his first runner, Sassy C W, blew the field away by 5 1/4 lengths under a hand ride in a Churchill Downs maiden race on April 30, earning the simple chart comment “rocket ship.”
“I think the sire is going to be very, very precocious,” said trainer Larry Rivelli, who purchased Sassy C W for $375,000 at the OBS March sale for Carolyn Wilson and Patricia’s Hope LLC. “I would put him along the lines of [leading freshman sire] Vekoma last year – one of those, everything you look at, they all have speed. Most of them do. Most of them really do. He was a good horse. He was a runner.”
Sassy C W advanced to the Astoria Stakes on June 5 at Saratoga, where she overcame a stumbling start to take control quickly and give her sire his first stakes win. She won by three lengths, with the rider wrapping up through the final yards.
“Right off the bat, that’s Yaupon’s first stakes horse and first stakes winner,” said Mark Toothaker, stallion sales manager for Spendthrift. “The bar is way up here for him because they’ve sold so well and are the talk of all the sales, so it’s great to get off to a good start with a stakes winner immediately. She broke a step slow and rushed up there and went on about her business. She’s talented and we’re thrilled to death to see her get a stakes win. They just keep going – great weanlings, yearlings, and now 2-year-olds – so the expectation has been high. Hopefully this keeps happening.”
Indeed, Yaupon, by sire of sires Uncle Mo, has had his foals sell for a solid return on investment at every stage of his nascent career. His 36 first-crop weanlings that were sold in 2023 averaged $130,889, more than four times his introductory stud fee of $30,000. He upped his average to $165,349 for 129 yearlings sold last year. Entering OBS June, he has had 53 2-year-olds sold at public auction this year for an average of $232,623 – up to 7.7 times their stud-conception fee.
Those Yaupon juvenile sales are led by a $1.3 million colt to Kaleem Shah at the OBS April sale. He was selected by Steve Asmussen, who also trained his sire.
“You walk up on him, and he has so many characteristics of his dad, temperament wise,” Asmussen told OBS. “We went back and looked at him multiple times and I liked him more every time I saw him.”
Yaupon is represented by eight juveniles set to sell at OBS June, accounting for early catalog outs. Two of those turned in sub-10-second times for their furlong breezes during the under-tack preview show on the Ocala Training Center’s all-weather Safetrack. A colt from the family of Kentucky Derby winner Super Saver and several other Grade 1 winners breezed in 9 4/5 seconds.
“He’s always been very classy, very easy to train,” consignor Julie Davies told OBS. “He likes his job and he’s very straightforward, a pretty mover.”
Also breezing in 9 4/5 seconds was a filly whose granddam is champion Soaring Softly. Yaupon's other lots at OBS June include another colt from the family of a Kentucky Derby winner, with Mine That Bird appearing on the catalog page.
Overall, there are 856 hips cataloged for the two-day sale, which last year had 1,042 in the catalog over three days. The majority of lots cataloged are unraced 2-year-olds, with a handful of older horses of racing age.
During the five-day under-tack preview show, a colt by Nyquist and out of Chilean champion Paquita Coqueta stood alone with the fastest furlong time, at 9 3/5 seconds. A colt from the first crop of Beau Liam had the fastest quarter-mile, tying the track record at 20 1/5 seconds. Two juveniles breezed three furlongs; one worked a half-mile; and 35 galloped during the show.
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