THE TWO-YEAR-OLD IN TRAINING SALES HORSE

By Dean Arnold

Spring is here and that means two-year-old races are just starting to blossom on race cards from coast to coast. Right now, trainers across North America are bringing two-year-old colts and fillies into their barns as they arrive from training tracks, training farms, and even straight from the sales ring. Look for key indicators to accurately predict strong efforts from training sales entrants.

Each year from February to April, the big players in the horse auction business, such as Fasig-Tipton, Ocala (OBS) and Keeneland offer two-year-old horses in training. Some youngsters are not quite ready to head to the racetrack and compete, while others strut their stuff by running blistering public workouts at ‘under tack’ shows in the weeks leading up to the auction. 

Many of these horses are purchased with the intention of making a quick return on investment. Keeneland will card 13 races at its current spring meet with purses in the neighborhood of $60,000, while Santa Anita, Gulfstream Park, Aqueduct, Churchill Downs, and Belmont Park will soon follow. If a precocious two-year-old has shown the talent to win at first asking in its auction workouts, trainers will take dead aim on winning a maiden special weight purse, and then immediately look for a five or five-and-one-half furlong two-year-old stakes race in May or June. Nothing makes an owner happier than watching an expensive little phenom quickly become a stakes winner.

With this in mind, use the combination of auction prices, trainer stats with debuting horses, and the tote board to guide your play in these races. The entries will seldom have more than a couple of workouts showing in their past performances. Instead of trying to interpret the indications of talent hidden in the workouts, check to make sure that the trainer wins with at least 15% of his/her debuting runners. Then look at the auction price listed in the past performances. The auction location and date will be listed along with the sales price, so you can quickly identify if the horse was purchased as a two-year-old. If the horse was purchased as a yearling or earlier, then the connections have had plenty of time to work with the young horse and train it ‘their way’. But if the horse was purchased just a couple months, weeks, or even days ago as a two-year-old, the trainer is only entering their new acquisition if he/she thinks that the horse is ready to go without their input; in other words, ‘off the rack and ready to wear’.  

Pay particular attention if the auction price of the horse exceeds $200,000. In these cases, the horse showed enough talent to be worth a considerable sum, and therefore the owners would not be hasty with their investment. If the runner needed more time to develop before competing, the runner would be allowed to wait. When the prices climb to half a million and beyond, you can bet that if the connections are ready to put their investment on the track immediately after buying it, then they also expect an immediate return. These are not runners that pay longshot prices. In fact, if the horse is going off at double-digit odds, it should raise a red flag that no one is interested in wagering on such a talented runner. In these cases, only play the horse at high odds if another animal is getting all the attention and is odds on, since the betting public is probably just piling on and skewing the odds board. But when there is no clear favorite, and the expensive auction horse is getting no play, stay clear.

Requirements to Play the Two-Year-Old In Training Sales Horse:

– Search for race two-year-old races at abbreviated sprint distances ranging from four-and one-half to five-and-one-half furlongs

– Identify the entrants that were purchased at two-year-old in training sales

– Eliminate horses from trainers that win with less than 15% of their debut runners

– Pay particular attention to expensive runners while those in the $200,000 through $500,000+ sales prices range should be given extra consideration

– Play longshots that fit this criteria only if another runner is an odds-on favorite

Be sure to check out Dean Arnold’s handicapping book, A Bettor Way, on sale now through Amazon.

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