Flatter: The end-game battle between Breeders’ Cup & sales

And so Thorpedo Anna finishes fourth in the Grade 1 Spinster, and the 2024 horse of the year may be retired before defending her victory in the Breeders’ Cup.

And It’s Our Time comes in fourth in the Champagne (G1), and Napoleon Solo wins the damn thing, and they will skip the Breeders’ Cup.

And Sierra Leone, who looked like he might finish his career this winter in the Pegasus World Cup Invitational (G1), had his retirement date moved up to Nov. 1, when he will race for the last time in his own Breeders’ Cup defense.

Ed DeRosa’s fair odds for Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Not to look like I am an old man, even though I am, but back in my day, horses’ slow days were spent with a two-minute lick. Now they all look like their careers are two-minute drills.

This part of the year should be a time of celebration. The anticipation of the Breeders’ Cup should be like the adrenalin rush of driving 100 through the desert between L.A. and Vegas. Not that I am confessing to anything here. Instead, autumn in horse racing has become a walk through a minefield of retirements.

Patch Adams? Got it. He was hurt. Condyles do not grow on trees or some such saying. But the number of horses unfit for the Breeders’ Cup feels like it is being crushed by the weight of those who are so fit that they dare not have hair out of place before they are marched through a Kentucky sales ring next month.

The half-billion dollars’ worth of yearlings who were gaveled to new owners last month at Keeneland have become the new talking point in the conundrum of what ails racing. As a lightning rod for criticism and debate, that pile of auction green is the new black.

Never mind how breeding to race long ago turned into racing to breed. Now it is suggested that the trend has tilted toward racehorses being bred to sell. No need to race them, right? We already have seen that, especially with broodmares who never got into a starting gate in the afternoon. Their bloodstreams simply became conduits for their pedigrees.

In the case of Patch Adams, WinStar’s Elliott Walden admitted to BloodHorse that he could have come back at age 4, but he already was ticketed for retirement this fall. That means he also was ticketed to be the centerpiece of what really has been a more than 50-year trend to get to the breeding shed while the getting is good. Secretariat blazed a lot of trails in his career. When his $6.08 million syndication deal popped eyes in 1973, it was a pioneering moment for a ritual that became commonplace long before we could spell Y2K.

But Patch Adams, like all those September yearlings, became the latest poster child for the 21st-century breed-to-sell template. Racing, shmacing. Get ’em into the ring.

One debate that has been on the social-media boil has been between Tom Ryan, who runs the big SF Racing partnership, and Tony Cobitz, the wordsmithing X auteur who goes by Tinky. Thank you to Rail Talk guys Joe Bianca and Jon Green for that nugget.

Allow me please to oversimplify. Ryan believes the financial obligations of a breeding operation like WinStar compelled it to sell Patch Adams in order to reinvest in a racing industry where the dollars are getting tighter by the day. Tinky counters that that is a disingenuous argument, because rushed sales are a money grab that have eroded the structure of racing, and that a racehorse’s durability has become an unnecessarily lost asset.

I know Ryan, and I am sure he would want to add to what I just wrote. I have not met Tinky, but I appreciate his passion. And his vocabulary. He had me wondering if ad hominem was a better use of those letters in a game of Scrabble than ham monied.

Much as I want the racing world of 50 years ago to spring back to life, that just ain’t happening. In that way I agree with Ryan. That does not mean we should not call out counterproductive trends. Eventually, though, if there were no horse racing, then even the ditsiest of my fellow blonds can discern there would be no sales. That is unfortunately the direction where we are headed. So on that score I am one with Tinky, a phrase I never was taught in journalism class.

Now that I have found a comfortable seat atop the proverbial fence, here with a lifetime of inflation is my 25 cents’ worth. The gilded edges of racing need to shrink. If there are not enough horses to fill big stakes, then there should be fewer big stakes. Hell, if we got rid of the grading system, which did not exist before Secretariat’s time, would that be all bad?

Lacking that genie in a bottle who will come out and blink a perfect solution, this will be resolved in a Darwinian way. The fittest will survive, and the rest will not. This does not bode well for all those graded stakes being run at house minimums in California, where the game will dry up if someone does not find that slot-machine spigot. Try looking in the Cajon Pass. Everyone gets lost there.

Like all of us earthlings on a real-life budget, racing has to live within its means.

Oh, about those Keeneland yearlings. There is the idea that it is not the buyers who should have had the focus last month. Gabby Gaudet, the former FanDuel TV analyst now working for Keeneland, suggested the sellers could hold some important sway.

“If the breeders are able to have a successful sale, that’s more money back into their operation and their farm,” she said. “Hopefully they are able to invest more in broodmares and going back and breeding them, and in turn at next September’s sale or the year after that, will be able to increase the foal crop.”

Hope springs eternal.

Speaking of contraction, about my idea to roll the Breeders’ Cup back to seven races in one day. That is a topic for another day. Soon. Very soon.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.