“The full package.” That's how consignor Tom Blain of Barton Sales describes Teona (Ire) (Sea The Stars {Ire}) and it is hard to disagree that the five-year-old has everything a breeder would look for when attempting to buy a first-class breeding prospect.
A winner of one of the key middle-distance tests for top-class fillies in the G1 Prix Vermeille, she is also out of a Group 1 winner, the Pretty Polly S. victrix Ambivalent (Ire) (Authorized {Ire}), with mother and daughter both being by outstanding Derby winners. The cherry on the top for Teona is that she is being sold in foal for the first time to none other than Frankel (GB). Her resultant foal is thus bred on the same cross as G1 Grand Prix de Paris winner and new sire Onesto (Ire).
“She's a Group 1 winner herself out of a Group 1 winner,” Blain says. “And she's by Sea The Stars, who's one of the greatest horses we've seen in the last 20 years. We're very honoured to sell her on behalf of Rabbah Bloodstock.”
Trained, like her dam, by Roger Varian in the colours of Ali Saeed, Teona was a winner at two and progressed throughout her three-year-old season to add the Listed August S. and Prix Vermeille to her tally of wins, before bowing out with a third-placed finish in the GI Breeders' Cup Turf.
Blain adds, “Ever since she got here, she's been very straightforward. She's like a lot of the good fillies in that she knows what she wants. She marches around the place like she owns it. But she's very good looking, she's got a very good action, she's very correct, she's a good size. She's the full package.”
The Sceptre Sessions were introduced to the Tattersalls December Mares Sale for the first time last year as a way to showcase the potential jewels of the four-day sale. Last year, almost 46 million gns – more than half of the total turnover of the mares sale – was spent on 71 lots, led of course by Alcohol Free (Ire) (No Nay Never) at 5.4 million gns.
This year, across the Monday and Tuesday early evening sessions at Park Paddocks a total of 83 well-credentialed fillies and mares will be sold under the Sceptre banner.
Blain continues, “When the world descends on Tattersalls in December for the new Sceptre Sessions, that is what people want. You want to buy mares from good pedigrees and you can't get much better than winning Group 1s, and being a Group 1 winner and out of a Group 1 winner. I think that's fairly unique and should be what the international market wants.”
Of Teona's cover to the champion sire-elect Frankel, he adds, “He's the best stallion in the world at the moment. And the combination of a Frankel cover out of the Sea The Stars mare, for me, is incredibly exciting. I hope everybody else feels the same and comes to try and buy her.”
The five-year-old Teona is one of five fillies or mares being consigned by Barton Sales to the Sceptre Sessions, along with the Group 2 winner and Group 1-placed Rogue Millennium (Ire) (Dubawi {Ire}), Group 2-winning juvenile Polly Pott (GB) (Muhaarar {GB}) and Zain Claudette (Ire) (No Nay Never), and the Listed winner Wonderful Times (Ire) (Golden Horn {GB}) from the family of the celebrated matriarch Rafha (GB).
“We've got others like Rogue Millennium who are fantastic racehorses,” Blain says. “She is obviously a fantastic race filly. She won the Duke of Cambridge this year at Royal Ascot and she was second in the Irish Champion Stakes, along with a lot of other good performances this year. She's owned by the Rogues Gallery, who are a relatively new racing syndicate, and Tony Elliott, who who heads that up, has done a fantastic job buying these horses, and Tom and Jackie Clover have done a brilliant job with her.
“We've got a nice draft, so I'm really excited, and we can't wait to sell them.”
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