Written by Matthew Sandblom
Cover image courtesy of The Image Is Everything
While there are endless dramas about the Australian non-functioning Pattern committee, to me a more pressing issue is the state of sales catalogues.
The way catalogues are currently produced actually puts way too much focus on black-type results (i.e. Pattern) anyway. What you see on a catalogue page currently, is worse than any airbrushed, photoshopped, filtered photo you will see on an influencer’s Instagram page! All the vendor wants you to see is whatever black-type relations the yearling has, no matter how tenuous and many times removed from the actual horse being sold.
This approach made some sense when Inglis and the other sales companies kept most of their records on handwritten index cards stored in filing cabinets, but it makes no sense today when all the information is online somewhere, as long as you know where to look. I’m not just talking about printed information there are tens of thousands of photos and videos online.
The problem is that you have to dig around in so many different places to find all the information you need for each horse. It's a big undertaking and you're going to need staff if you want to prepare all this information yourself for a catalogue like the 1400-plus strong at Magic Millions in January. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to, with a single click, see sales prices and photos of the mare's previous foals? Or be able to click on another link and see the unedited pedigree for the mare. And another to see race performance of the mare herself.
Matthew Sandblom proposes changes to the current catalogue. | Image courtesy of Magic Millions
There is plenty of other very useful information, beside black type, that may well help the yearling sell better if it was included. Many mares have performed well in non-black type races that often rated better than their black-type counterparts. Why not have these ratings included on the page? Which also implies that we need a more consistent ratings system than just benchmark ratings, such as Timeform ratings used in Europe.
I know the breeding industry can be pretty change resistant and many will worry about buyers finding more reasons not to buy the horses they are selling if they have all this information. But buyers want to buy horses and this extra information is just as likely to give them reasons to buy a horse because of some extra bit of information they come across. Perhaps they see a replay of the mare beating a horse they had a connection with which had plenty of ability. Or they see a pattern in the unedited pedigree that they have had success within the past.
Only about 2.5 per cent of horses are going to win at black type. While there is a positive relationship between mares who have won black type having a higher-than-average chance of producing black-type winners, this is only one bit of information that is relevant when considering buying any particular horse.
Let's give the horse buyer a lot more information at their fingertips, so that they can find a good reason to buy almost any horse, not just the obvious ones with the pages full of black type.
