With 26 Frankel yearlings in the catalogue, another huge spending spree could be afoot in Newmarket on Tuesday
R
acing continues its nervous wait for next month’s budget and the potential impact of changes to the tax regime around gambling, meaning the sport’s senior figures may hope that the chancellor’s attention is elsewhere when the Book 1 sale at Tattersalls, Europe’s most exclusive yearling auction, gets under way at the firm’s historic sales ring in Newmarket on Tuesday.
You can explain until you are blue in the face that breeding and racing are not the same thing, or that the elite top tier of the yearling market, like the market for limited-edition Ferraris or 1,000-acre country estates, has always been wholly detached from what the rest of us would call day-to-day reality. The simple fact of it is that the numbers flying around at Tatts this week will be jaw-dropping, both for the average individual on the Clapham omnibus and the average politician in Westminster, many of whose constituents are still gripped by the cost-of-living crisis.
A total of 345 yearlings were sold at last year’s Book 1 sale, generating a record turnover for the three-day event of 127m guineas (£134m), a 33% increase on the previous year’s figure of 95.3m gns (£100m). A significant factor in the total was an astonishing spending spree by Kia Joorabchian and his associates in the Amo Racing operation, including Evangelos Marinakis, the Nottingham Forest owner, and the Qatar-based Al Shaqab, which eventually ran to 22.9m gns (£24m) and saw 25 lots led out of the ring to join Amo’s ever-increasing string.
