Horse People: Thoroughbred Culture in Lexington and Newmarket

6. Auction

c h a p t e r s i x AUCTION Thoroughbred auctions are tremendous entertainment, and they take place in some beautiful settings. Keeneland has perhaps the most beautiful pavilion of all, with a copper roof, green seats, and a rural setting among cherry trees on bluegrass. The auction takes place on a raised stage, lit up by spotlights, before an audience, and is structured by a unique set of (mostly unrecorded) rules: it is pure theater. This point was reinforced when I sat and watched preparations for the biggest sale I had attended to date at Keeneland. What took place was a rehearsal for the performance that evening. Horses of different colors were brought onto the stage and the lights were adjusted accordingly. Chestnut, gray, and brown ponies borrowed from the track, looking utterly incongruous and shabby, were led from backstage to make their entrance. Men fiddled with angles and filters until each of them sparkled. Some of the ponies attracted bids from the audience of stand-ins and the electronic bid board was tested to capacity. The highest price I ever saw at Keeneland was for a little brown pony taking part in a rehearsal.∞ The auctioneer, the only voice that addresses the audience, conducts the sale in a patter that takes some time to understand. In the UK, an ordinary speaking voice is used by the English and Irish auctioneers, though the phrases they use are conventions that must be learned. In the US, auctioneers use a singsong dialect that further isolates the Thoroughbred sale from other kinds of exchange. The trips and falls of the auctioneer are strange to the ear and impossible for the uninitiated to understand . As in the UK, certain phrases are meaningful and give signals to experienced bidders in the audience, including whether the reserve price of a horse has been reached. In both places, bids may be taken from outside the auditorium, so although 100 h o r s e p e o p l e the auction takes place in public and is presented by participants as transparent, its conventions ensure that it is sometimes impossible for people to see who is bidding. This is simply the most obvious obfuscation in a market that embraces ambiguity. The bloodstock auction is an event which has rules that are known to many, but not all, of its participants. In recent times, this aspect of the auction has attracted criticism from the racing press and from individuals who have been exploited by an uneven distribution of knowledge. What some see as the corruption of the auction is an essential part of its attraction to many others. The auction is a game, or a sport, as is racing, and many of my informants were highly reluctant to see either stripped of its moral opacity. One of the prime attractions of racing, breeding, and bloodstock auctions to participants is that such competitive activities create and enact distinctions between people who are otherwise similar.≤ The yearling market, which takes place several times a year in Lexington and Newmarket, is considered to be the ‘‘bellwether’’ of the industry, the market that best reflects the health of the industry as a whole. It is also the most exciting and valuable market, with the greatest impact upon stallion fees. Yearling sales take place in the autumn and follow a circuit that takes in Tattersalls in Newmarket, Goffs in Ireland, Deauville in France, and Keeneland and Fasig Tipton in Kentucky.≥ Mare owners selling yearlings, bloodstock agents, and buyers come together on this circuit. Mare owners have spent the summer preparing their yearlings for sale and getting their mares back into foal. Buyers have been racing last year’s purchases and perhaps even nurturing stallions of the future on the racecourse. Come the autumn, and the end of the flat season in the Northern Hemisphere, the action moves to the sales pavilion. tattersalls and keeneland In England during the eighteenth century, several firms of auctioneers held regular sales of racehorses in London at Hyde Park Corner. The first was Beevors, founded in 1753, coinciding with the genesis of the Thoroughbred and the creation of the General Stud Book. In the 1770s Beevors became Aldridges. These firms were a far remove from the traditional Smithfield horse traders. They were distinguished not only by the function and quality of their stock but also by the aristocratic pretensions of their personnel. This was one of the means by which they reinforced...