by Trey Nosrac

“Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant” – Seneca.

Mystical randomness and inexplicable connections happen. If you don’t squeeze into the crowded bus, you never meet the love of your life. A stranger you meet at table #12 at your cousin’s wedding leads to a career. You turn left instead of right. Big things, or little things, are all part of the tapestry of life.

The random wheel also turns in our sport. Last week, in this column, I shared the tale of a broodmare and a foal that came into this world only because the racetracks were closed during the pandemic. This accidental broodmare had a second daughter with an equally strange story. Many quirky events, including you, played a part.

The birth of filly number two caused visitors to her stall to say, “Yikes, or whoa, or yowzah.” She was a striking red color accented by white on her feet. The odd color led me to dig into the pedigree, but I found no history of red horses in the family. When I asked the owner of the breeding farm and some friends about the marketability of red horses, most looked at the ground and muttered something to the effect, “Not great, once in a while, or it only takes one bidder.”

Other troubling red flags flew. The mother of the red filly never raced. The filly had a slightly offset knee, and her only sister was not yet of racing age. And to complete our trifecta of strikes against her, the first crop of the sire of this red filly did not knock the socks off anyone and was proving to be a bit of a liability in the marketplace. Ergo, for the first time, understandably, the select yearling sale rejected our applicant.

Our first choice is always to sell the yearling. We had run about a dozen yearlings through the auction ring. One benefit of being a minuscule operation is that we can bring them home if they do not meet our expected value. This time, not getting into the sale made buying her back a moot point. After dithering, we decided not to put this red horse in any sale.

Instead, we concocted a different concept for marketing this yearling racehorse. We would have the filly broken to harness and get a few hundred miles under her hooves, shoot a little footage of her in action, skip the sales, and place her on onGait to sell at an online auction long after the traditional sales season.

Our thinking, OK, my thinking, was that late shoppers in the yearling market would find a yearling with a good chunk of training under her belt, have an opportunity to examine her, ask questions, maybe even visit, and perhaps even sit behind her. At the auction, the bids would flow. I was proud of my plan, and we followed it to the letter.

The red horse was broken to harness, jogged regularly,
and returned to the breeding farm. We listed a photo, a pedigree, and a paragraph with pluses and minus. We placed what to our mind was a very low starting bid of $10,000, half of our investment to date, and sat back to watch the bidding action.

There was no bidding action, not one single bid.

To recap – this ready-to-go, albeit red, filly was available to any human being in North America or any other nation; one single bid from the sharpest horseman in the land to a stumbling drunk cruising onGait, to a young girl who loves red horses. Anyone, including you, could have pushed the “bid” button, and the red filly was no longer under our ownership.

I was baffled and slightly miffed. My revolutionary marketing plan was a complete failure. I am still not quite sure why the marketplace did not find favor with the package we presented. I felt buyers would at least kick the tires on the “out of the traditional sales season yearling filly.”

But nada, zip, nil, zero. As the “NO SALE” sign on the onGait site winked, mocking us, we decided to try this horse as a racehorse. Some may say we got stuck with the red trotter. Not us. We viewed this universal rejection as a simple twist of fate. Off to a trainer, she went. Seven months later, the red filly, now nicknamed Reba, placed twice in the Sires Stakes and is a lot of fun.

“Fate will unwind as it must!” – Beowulf

Next week – Missed connections.