Horse racing: Once the ugly ducklings of the yearling sales, trotters are set to shine today

The son of US stallion Walner, who is Lot 113 at Karaka today, will be popular with buyers. Photo / New Zealand Bloodstock

There was a time when a draft full of trotters would have been a potential disaster for a vendor at a harness racing yearling sale.

That won’t be the case for Logan Hollis and Shane Robertson at New Zealand Bloodstock’s elite standardbred sale at Karaka on Monday.

The boutique sale, which has 133 lots catalogued and only two withdrawn, is traditionally the strongest sale of its type in the Southern Hemisphere and last year, the average topped $62,000 – remarkable when you think it was around $10,000 just 20 years ago.

That enormous growth of value in standardbred yearlings has been driven by the success New Zealand-bred horses had in Australia’s major races until very recently, while many of Australia’s big-spending buyers seem to like buying here.

But of all the surprising trends to emerge from our two standardbred sales days (the other is on Wednesday in Christchurch), the mammoth increase in prices for well-bred trotters has been one of the most dramatic.

And that could reach a new high at Karaka today.

Trotting, as opposed to pacing, was struggling in both New Zealand and even more so in Australia just 15 years ago and the gait was even dropped from the Inter Dominions.

But it has undergone a remarkable renaissance.

Stake money is up, the trotting product can be exported to Europe, whereas betting agencies there won’t broadcast pacing races, and a dedicated band of trotting zealots have imported high-class mares and semen from world-class stallions.

That happy set of circumstances could reach their zenith today when two yearlings by one of North America’s best trotting stallions, Walner, go under the hammer on a day stacked with beautifully bred trotting yearlings.

“We have 12 in our draft and nine of them are trotters,” Pukekohe preparer Logan Hollis said.

“Most of them are for [Victorian-based] Pat Driscoll and there really is some beautiful stock.

“We have a colt and a filly by Walner, while we have a full brother to Just Believe.

“They have been popular and the two Walners will make good money but it is hard to say how much.

“Who knows, the Americans could get involved and then things could really skyrocket.”

Walner stands at US$50,000 ($82,000) in the US this season and has had yearlings sell for US$1 million, with Hollis saying the quality of the trotters in their draft has even created interest among trainers who would usually only look at pacing-bred yearlings.

“But we have some lovely ones of those too.”

Breckon Farms also takes some strong trotting-bred youngsters to today’s sale, including a brother to our best young male trotter, Meant To Be.

“We have a really strong draft including a couple of first sale yearlings out of Group 1-winning pacing mares,” their owner Ken Breckon said.

“It is always important to have that new blood coming through and this is the first draft we have had that really shows the benefit of the enormous development at our farm.”

Woodlands Stud is the other huge standardbred vendor who sell at Karaka and its drafts see a real standout in Lot 46, a colt by Captaintreacherous out of one of New Zealand’s greatest ever mares in Adore Me.

Adore Me’s five foals to have raced have all won and the family is one of the most fashionable in Australasian harness racing, so the colt is certain to make big money.

The sale starts at 1pm on Monday at the Karaka sale complex.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.