‘The breeze-up market is very mature in America’: Byron Rogers on the breeze-up scene in Australasia

Cover image courtesy of Inglis

Each of Inglis and Magic Millions have hosted their breeze-up sales this month, with New Zealand Bloodstock (NZB) heading into its Ready to Run Sale in a handful of weeks.

It’s a slice of the market that probably hasn’t taken off in Australasia as it has in other parts of the world. In North America, for example, breeze-up business is booming. Nearly 850 juveniles were consigned to the OBS March Sale of Two-Year-Olds in Training this year, and a further 1222 went through the company’s Spring Sale in April.

By comparison, Australasian numbers are modest. On October 10, the Inglis Ready2Race catalogue featured 226 horses, the Magic Millions 2YOs In Training Sale 151, and the NZB Ready to Run Sale will offer 383.

Traditionally, the breeze-up sales have had their fans and, in Australasia, it’s fair to say that more and more outfits are emerging to specialise in them. They’re a pinhook playground and, from an industry perspective, they can be a sign of things to come. If consignors do well in them, they’ll have more money to tip into the yearling market that follows.

In North America, the breeze-up environment is highly specialised, and ex-pat Australian Byron Rogers knows it well. Rogers, a prolific bloodstock brain, has lived in the US since 2008, and at least some of his business annually is directed at the breeze-up market, both in France and America.

“The breeze-up market is very mature in America,” Rogers said, speaking to The Thoroughbred Report. “It’s been going on since the 1970s, so it’s been 50 years since they’ve been conducting breeze-ups in North America. Time has established all the infrastructure, techniques and know-how of doing these sales up here, and I won’t say that’s been lacking in Australia, but it’s one of the things where Australia probably hasn’t had that core group of people dedicated solely to the breeze-up concept.”

Rogers recalls the early 2000s when the likes of Rick Worthington were keen on establishing a breeze-up culture in Australia. Without widespread support at the time, it didn’t take off.

“I think the biggest problem was the use of jump-outs and barrier trials, and bloodstock agents being able to use those to sell horses straight out of them,” Rogers said. “There are no barrier trials here in North America, and no published gate work of any kind, so I’d say that’s been the major impediment to growth in the 2-year-old breeze-up market in the Southern Hemisphere.”

Without barrier trial and jump-out data, the wagering market might look very different in this part of the world, and looking after the various participant groups in the sport, including punters, is vital. As such, it’s unlikely that gate practices are going to change any time soon, especially in Australia.

However, according to Rogers, there are other problems with how the breeze-up sales are set up down here, so let’s consider them.

Timing is everything

Across Australasia’s three major breeze-up sales, there is a notable gap between gallop sessions and the sale ring. It varies from auction house to auction house, but in the case of Inglis, which was first off the blocks this month, timed breeze-ups commenced on September 18 ahead of the eventual sale on October 10.

Similarly, Magic Millions hosted its first gallops on September 28, with the sale occurring on October 24. It meant there was a sizeable chunk of time between buyers viewing a breeze-up and buyers buying that horse in the sale ring. NZB’s gallops are over a month ahead of its sale.

Is this helpful? Rogers isn’t so sure.

“The gap between the breeze and the sale taking place was originally created to give sales companies and consignors the time to get DVDs and videos up into Hong Kong and other parts of Asia so that buyers could see them,” he said. “But that was 20 years ago and we don’t live in that age anymore.

“The ability to put stuff up online, and have it digested by buyers anywhere in the world now, has taken away the time requirement. It’s something I don’t really understand in Australia.

“You lose momentum, and you also give other buyers an opportunity to come in and buy that horse privately before the sale, hence the catalogue could potentially be losing some of those better horses.”

This is a valid consideration. At the Inglis Ready2Race Sale on October 10, the catalogue had 47 withdrawals out of 226 horses catalogued. At the Magic Millions 2YOs In Training Sale this week, there were 41 withdrawals from a catalogue of 151 horses.

Would less of a gap between gallops help the catalogues to mitigate high numbers of withdrawals?

At Ocala in Florida, arguably the beating heart of America’s breeze-up scene, every juvenile is breezed individually in a mammoth few days of gallops, which then spills into the auction ring almost immediately. Everyone is in the same place at the same time, handicapping horses who have all galloped in the same conditions.

“When you come to a North American sale and you’ve got 1000 horses breezing over four days, and they sell two days after that, it creates momentum,” Rogers said. “People are working the sales ground, really trying to find what they can find.

“In Australia, that delay between the breeze and the sale day is a legacy of an era that probably needs to be taken away at this stage. It doesn’t need to exist if you want to improve things.”

Location, location, location

In North America, the major breeze-up sales occur in the same location. There is no such thing as gallops in different states on different racetracks, and it takes away a huge number of variables.

In Australia, Inglis has breeze-ups at Cranbourne in Victoria, at Taupo in New Zealand and at Hawkesbury, while Magic Millions conducted sessions at Seymour, Newcastle and the Gold Coast (NZB hosted its gallops at Te Rapa only).

The disadvantage to this is that final times can vary according to weather and surface conditions on the day. Also, the tracks can handle differently, but all times across all respective sessions are what are loaded into the final catalogue.

In North America, on the other hand, all horses are tackling identical conditions, making it easier to handicap the results and, at its most basic, what you see is what you get because you’re buying a couple of days later.

“The New Zealand sale has been the most successful down there because all horses are breezing in the one place at one time,” Rogers said.

“That’s been a negative for Australia, having the breezes spaced out over a number of different tracks. It’s very hard for the buyer to then handicap each particular track, to work out how that horse worked on that track. There might not be enough horses galloping to create pars of what the performance was like and how that horse went.”

The vast distances between places could be the wisdom behind breeze-up sessions interstate in Australia. However, you could argue that America is just as vast.

If Magic Millions, for example, could guarantee a catalogue of 500-plus horses, would it be reasonable to expect a week-long breezing and selling session on the Gold Coast, in place of the one-day session and four individual breeze-up schedules in three states?

Also, it’s worth considering when it comes to breeze-ups that Magic Millions this week provided a pantheon of information on all of its horses’ gallops, including stride data. It means buyers weren’t just analysing an overall time posted to the catalogue.

“In my opinion, you lose more than you gain the way things are done in Australia at the moment,” Rogers said. “It used to make sense 20 years ago, but it doesn’t really make sense today.”

Too late in the spring?

There are other variables at play in the way the breeze-up market is structured in Australia. For example, are there testing considerations, with significant gaps between gallops and the sale ring?

Also, are surfaces worth mentioning? In New Zealand, NZB has made a point of marketing its upcoming sale around its turf gallops. In Australia, both Inglis and Magic Millions conducted breeze-ups on both synthetic and turf surfaces.

With a significant space between breeze-ups and sales, is the window open for injury and issues?

However, one of the pressing issues for Rogers is the timing of the Australasian sales in the calendar year. In his opinion, they’re too late, with races like the Breeders’ Plate and Gimcrack S. already run. The North American versions are occurring in the early spring, but in Australasia they are occurring in mid- to late-spring.

“If you’re really looking at the breeze-ups as a selling proposition, you should be considering the opportunity for the horses coming out of the sale to take their place in some of those early juvenile races,” Rogers said. “The current sale dates are taking all those early 2-year-old races in Australia out of play completely.

“Maybe if the sales were better placed, in terms of their relationship to even the first official 2-year-old barrier trials, you could get a greater impact if you had horses going into those and straight onto the racetrack. At the moment, in my opinion, the sales are too late.”

Were Australasian sales to mirror their North American counterparts, they would occur in September. There would be a handful of disadvantages to this, but would it help the concept get a firmer grip down here?

“I think it would,” Rogers said. “I think it would help everyone if the sales were earlier in the spring.”

Food for thought

With all this in consideration, it would be easy to conclude that the breeze-up sales in Australia aren’t working. In fact, that’s far from the truth.

The breeze-up scene has matured out of sight in this part of the world the last few years, and today the sales are much more than a parking lot for unwanted yearlings. They’re a specialised nursery, and one that more vendors are moving into, and in which more vendors are specialising.

Taking the Inglis Ready2Race Sale on its own, the year-on-year aggregate has grown steadily from $11,642,000 in 2020 to last year’s $16,720,000. Top price in 2020 was $610,000, while last year, it was $750,000.

However, if there is a need to question things, this year might be the time.

Inglis’ aggregate this month was down to $10,998,500, and the clearance rate was troubling. At Magic Millions, the clearance rate was respectable at 77.27 per cent, but its aggregate was $5,081,500. That was over a million dollars down on its equivalent figure of 2022.

Last week, The Thoroughbred Report spoke to breeze-up vendor Dean Harvey of Baystone Farm, who said it was worth having the conversation of one Australian 2-year-old sale, not two. He said it would be good for everyone, including the sales companies, but particularly for buyers and vendors who would all be in the one place at the one time.

“It’s been spoken about very loosely,” Harvey said. “You’re always trying to improve things. It’s something that’s been thrown out a couple of times, and especially if the clearance rates could be improved a bit.”

It’s fair to say that the Australian breeze-up market isn’t a patch of the beast that it is in North America, and whether it could ever be is a good question. The horse population is smaller down here, the human one too, so comparing apples and oranges probably isn’t fair.

Nevertheless, Rogers is convinced that it could be better. He doesn’t shop the breeze-up market in Australia, leaving that side of his business to North America and France, where it’s flourishing.

“I love the breeze-up scene,” he said. “I was raised in Australia and I worked for Arrowfield, so that’s my background. A lot of the stuff I like is the sprinter-miler type and, in Europe, they tend not to go for that sort of speed horse. But they’re the types I tend to gravitate towards, and they’re the types of horses you can often find in these good breeze-up catalogues.”