David Serchuk, 02.04.08, 7:20 PM ET
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Sometimes stallion sperm just isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Sure, the stuff can fetch $300,000 a shot, but that's chump change compared with its mid-1980s peak when thoroughbred stallions commonly earned $500,000--in '80s dollars--for doing what comes naturally. Talk about deflation.
To add insult to injury, it doesn't even always work. You can easily spend the gross national product of a small Caribbean nation attempting to breed a championship racer, only to see it languish on the track.
It's maddening. Despite the best efforts of art and science, you cannot buy the Kentucky Derby. What makes a champion thoroughbred remains as elusive as ever. The least-heralded nag can, and on several occasions has, won the fabled race. On the flip side, some of the priciest horses, bred by some of the world's richest people, simply can't compete.
It turns out that horses are a lot like people. Some are overachievers that live to run and win, while others are underachieving slackers.
"That's what keeps people like me, from a modest background, going," says Thomas Gallo, a thoroughbred-besotted horse buyer and seller from Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "I can produce a horse that can outrun one somebody spent millions to breed."
And he has. One horse born and raised on his farm, Commentator, has earned over $1 million in purses in its career so far. Still, the closest Gallo's gotten to the Kentucky Derby is watching it.
"It's a very unique and energizing business," he says. "It's the only business where a person like you and I can own a piece of an athlete and take a real active participation in a sport. You wake up every morning with dreams of winning the Kentucky Derby, and you have as good a chance as anybody." In fact, horses are so unpredictable that even siblings can be very little alike. Or, as one breeder said to Gallo, "Mrs. O'Neal only had one Shaquille."
At the moment we are in something of a horse boom. Thoroughbred sales totaled $1.46 billion in the U.S., Canada and Europe in 2005, and stratospheric prices are being paid for certain promising young horses. In 2006 a strapping, 2-year-old colt named the Green Monkey sold at auction for a record $16 million. Unfortunately, he has only earned back a little more than $10,000 in purses, and it looks unlikely that he'll be coveted as a breeding stallion.
Even these millions, however, pale against the money spent by other, even better-heeled, or better-sandaled, horse folks. Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, has reportedly spent $1.4 billion on horses, building perhaps the greatest stable in the world. (We estimate his personal fortune at $16 billion But despite such spending, Maktoum has yet to win the Derby.
Surely it must irk the sheik to know that many Derby winners were bought cheaply as colts. Seattle Slew, who won the Triple Crown in 1977, was such a gawky, clumsy colt that he was nicknamed Baby Huey and initially sold for just $17,500. More recently, Derby and Preakness Stakes winner Funny Cide sold as a youth for $21,000.
Although it's impossible to predict which colt will grow into a champion, people still try. One obvious way to try to tilt the odds is by paying huge stud fees for stallions with the best records as sires. Of course, paying big money guarantees nothing. In essence, you're buying past performance. And as with stocks and mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Perhaps the most valuable breeding stallion of all time is Mr. Prospector. Only a moderately talented racer himself, by the time he died in 1999 he'd fathered 165 stakes winners and had stud fees that reached as high as $500,000. But even this fabled stud fathered just one Derby winner, Fusaichi Pegasus, who won in 2000.
The top living stud is Storm Cat, who's sired 158 stakes winners. Storm Cat was the top horse from 2002 through 2007, when he earned a stud fee of $500,000, grossing his owners at Overbrook Farms $100 million in that span. But even Storm Cat saw just 13% of his foals win stakes races, and no Derbies.
It's just this unpredictability that keeps the sport exciting for veteran breeders.
"Every time a baby stands up for the first time, and nurses to its mother, you look at it and say, 'Could this be the one?' " Gallo says. "And you just never know."
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