Keeneland Yearling Sales : Nijinsky II Colt Brings Record $13.1 Million

When the bidding for a bay son of Nijinsky II went to $10.3 million at Keeneland’s yearling auction Tuesday afternoon, auctioneer Tom Caldwell said to the crowd in the pavilion: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Caldwell was right. With two horse trainers--Ireland’s Vincent O’Brien and California’s Wayne Lukas--orchestrating the bidding on behalf of their well-heeled clients, the colt was sold for the record sum of $13.1 million. The successful bidder was Josh Collins, who represented an international group of five men--British soccer pools operator Robert Sangster, Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, John Magnier of Ireland’s Coolmore Stud, O’Brien and Danny Schwartz, a Palm Springs man who has been a horse partner with the others for about 10 years.

The whole thing took about 10 minutes, with the bidding so furious at the end that the operator of the electric scoreboard on the pavilion wall had trouble keeping it straight.

The $13.1 million price broke the record of $10.2 million that was set in 1983 when a Northern Dancer colt was bought by the four free-wheeling Maktoum brothers from Dubai, an oil-rich state on the Arabian gulf.

Sangster & Co. were the underbidders on the $10.2 million yearling, but this year they set their sights on the Nijinsky colt early and seemed determined not to quit bidding until they bought him.

The horse--designated as hip No. 215 out of a two-day sale of 295 thoroughbreds--was no secret. For several days, every megabuck buyer at the sale had been to Keeneland’s barn 14 to look at the colt, whose sire, Nijinsky, was the last winner of the English Triple Crown, in 1970, and whose dam, My Charmer, also foaled Seattle Slew, who swept the American Triple Crown in 1977. The Kentucky-bred colt had been consigned to the sale by the three men who own My Charmer--Kentucky breeders Warner Jones and Will Farish and Bill Kilroy of Houston.

Before Tuesday, Sangster had noted to himself that the Nijinsky colt would bring between $8 million and $15 million.

“He is a beautiful specimen,” O’Brien said, “and out of a beautiful broodmare. We were sure he was the best yearling at the sale.”

Another My Charmer foal, Lomond, won England’s Two Thousand Guineas, one of the Triple Crown races, for Sangster. “We’ve bought everything out of that mare,” Sangster said. “Why make a change? Buying this horse is not a gamble.”

This from a man who bought last year’s Keeneland sale topper, a Northern Dancer colt, for $8.25 million and found that the horse had a foot problem.

According to Lukas, however, Tuesday’s record-breaker has the bloodlines that are valuable even if O’Brien never gets him to the track in Ireland. “His residual value . . . would be $10 million,” Lukas said. “And that might be a conservative estimate.”

The bidding on the Nijinsky colt started at $1 million. Besides Collins, with O’Brien sitting alongside, and Lukas, others in the early bidding included the Maktoums and Allen Paulson of Encino. The Maktoums were not a factor late in the bidding.

Lukas was representing some of his familiar clients--Gene Klein, the former owner of the San Diego Chargers; Bob French of Midland, Tex., and Melvin Hatley of Norman, Okla.

From $1 million, the bidding quickly moved to $8 million in just about a minute. The increases were coming in chunks of $500,000 until the price reached $9.5 million. The jumps slowed to $100,000 then, with Cot Campbell, the Atlanta man who manages Dogwood Stable, making the last bid other than Collins and Lukas at $10.1 million.

“When it keeps snowing, after awhile it doesn’t matter how deep it gets,” Lukas said in characterizing the bidding. “After it got to $8 million, it could have gone to the moon--anything was possible.”

The stark digits on the scoreboard moved to $10.5 million, $10.7, $10.8 and then $11 million. “Be bold,” Caldwell said as the Lukas group huddled to the auctioneer’s far right at $11 million.

Lukas signaled $11.1 million, and then the raises came in $100,000 or $200,000 amounts until the figure hit $12.5 million.

At that point, Caldwell said: “How about (somebody bidding) $13 million, and we can stop all this?”

Caldwell’s request was answered by Lukas, with the big push in his group coming from French, who, sitting a few seats away, gave his trainer the thumbs-up sign several times along the way.

After the Sangster combine went to $13.1 million, French wasn’t finished, but Lukas, Klein and Hatley were.

“We gave it our best shot,” Klein said later. “But the rest of us said that that was enough.”

Lukas, whose horses earned a record $5.8 million in purses last year, bought 28 horses at Keeneland and another Kentucky sale this month and had a special reason to try to land the record colt.

“We’ve lost a large number of the big sales horses to Europe in recent years,” Lukas said. “We wanted to keep this horse here. We had already bought a lot of singles hitters. This colt would have been our cleanup hitter.”

While Lukas, a former basketball coach, used a baseball analogy, a philosophic Klein resorted to football terms to describe his feelings.

“We might have missed out on the long passer,” Klein said, “but we’ve bought some horses here who can grind it out and still score.”

Before the record breaker, this year’s sales topper, at a Keeneland auction that was running about 30% behind last year’s record average of $544,000 a horse, had been $2.6 million. One horse after the $13.1 million sale, a Northern Dancer colt was sold for $7.5 million, but actually that was what’s called a buy-back.

Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills and consignor of the yearling, bought his own horse--minus Keeneland’s 5% commission--because he thought the colt was worth more than the bids were running.

As Lukas walked out of the pavilion into Kentucky’s late-afternoon sun, Steve DiMauro, another trainer, tried to give him some perspective.

“Look at it this way, Wayne,” DiMauro said. “At least you guys still have $13 million that you haven’t spent yet.”