By Jessica Martini
Fasig-Tipton Midlantic concludes its 2022 calendar of auctions with the one-session December Mixed and Horses of Racing Age Sale Tuesday at the Maryland Sate Fairgrounds in Timonium. Bidding for the first of 286 catalogued horses begins at 11 a.m. The auction opens with an offering of weanlings and broodmares and continues with a selection of yearlings before concluding with horses of racing age.
“We have had a lot of interest,” Fasig-Tipton Midlantic's sales director Paget Bennett said ahead of Tuesday's sale. “We have a bunch of weanlings by Kentucky sires and that always piques everybody's interest. And some of our covering sires are flavors that everybody is after. So I think we have enough of what it takes to get people to come to the sale.”
Bennet continued, “You never know what you have until you see who is walking around the sales grounds and the people you want to see on the sales grounds at a mixed sale are here.”
This will be the fifth year the December auction will offer horses of racing age, but the section really took off when it was dominated by the dispersal of Joseph Besecker in 2019. Besecker's race horse offerings also topped the December sale in 2020 and 2021. The prolific owner will offer 25 racehorses through the Northview Stallion Station consignment Tuesday.
“[Besecker] kind of gave the racehorse section the shot in the arm that it needed,” Bennett said. “So between Besecker and [Three Diamonds Farm's] Kirk Wycoff and his son adding horses this year, I think people realize there is a spot to sell here at the end of the of the year–if they don't go south and turf racing just stopped at Laurel a week or so ago. The horses still have some conditions on them, so people can buy them and go right on, if that's what they choose to do.”
Fasig-Tipton continued to add horses with current form to the catalogue in the week before the auction as Besecker's Bazinga C (Exaggerator), who finished third in the Safely Kept S. at Laurel Nov. 26 was added to the line-up last Thursday.
“From what I'm hearing, everybody is needing racehorses,” Bennett said. “They can go south with them. And we've had people from California inquiring about horses. Our representative out there called me to say people were desperate for horses out there.”
The Fasig-Tipton Midlantic season opened in May with a record-setting 2-Year-Olds in Training sale and graduates of the Timonium sale ring continue to find success on the racetrack.
“It's been a pretty exciting year,” Bennett said. “The 2-year-old sale was amazing. And the yearling grads have done really well. It's nice to see when a horse jumps up and does something big and you say where did he come from, and it came from Midlantic. It speaks a lot and we are very proud of our accomplishments and look forward to having more.”
Fasig-Tipton Midlantic will be hosting a second 2-year-old sale in 2023, with the inaugural June sale slated for June 28. The under-tack show for the auction is scheduled for June 26. With the absence of the Fasig-Tipton Gulfstream Sale on the 2023 calendar, the June sale will give sellers another opportunity to work their horses over a dirt track and in an area with strong regional racing programs.
“We turn so many horses away for the May sale and the number of horses we turn away is a sale in itself,” Bennett said. “People had inquired whether we would have a second sale last year. We weren't able to make it happen last year, but it was something we wanted to put on the calendar for 2023 and it just worked out. I think it will be a win-win for a lot of people. If you don't make May, you can make later June. Or for horses that are broken and trained up here, they don't have to feel like they are behind the eight ball with winter weather. With all the racing options around here, with Colonial Downs, with Delaware and the Delaware-certified program and the Pennsylvania-breds and sired stakes that they just created this year and ran for the first time, there is just a lot of interest. The venues are making it interesting and appealing to buy horses to run in these areas.”
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