The Hard Case Showcase

The concept of the First Season Sire Showcase is worth persevering with but Inglis's inaugural attempt in Sydney last week was a disaster and it needs more than a little tweaking to be made work.

It cannot be a showcase when weanlings 'make' as little as $1,000, $1,500, $3,000 and $4,000, sired by stallions whose fees are as high as $30,000. If I were using this vehicle as a promotion for my stallion I would be doing everything I could to keep these misfits out of public gaze, or persuade my clients to do likewise.

They were a ragtag mob of weanlings. Results as published by Inglis show 35 of the 86 offered were passed in - that's nearly 41%. I estimate 26 sold for prices measurably above the nominal 2007 service fee, seven were right on the mark and 18 didn't make the service fee or even close to it. So that's 53, or 61%, which couldn't find a home or took a hit. That's not a showcase. That's a cull sale.

The problem is 1,200 weanlings had been catalogued and sold at the Gold Coast and Melbourne before this Sydney sale, many of them by first crop sires. So there's no novelty value in a last-cab-off-the-rank weanling sale devoid of physical types and strong pedigrees.

If Inglis are inclined to try this again, then they either have to persuade the owners of better weanlings to bypass those other sales, and/or impose a selection standard so the quality is more even and give buyers something to get their teeth into. Possibly most important of all, a sale like this should come first, ahead of the others, perhaps as a one day appendage to the earlier Easter Broodmare Sale.