Pinhooker Scores With $325,000 Summer Front Colt
From The BloodHorse
It wasn’t of the magnitude of his big score with a seven-figure pinhook last year, but Kentucky horseman Davant Latham made a healthy return on a Summer Front colt who was sold for $325,000 during the Aug. 6 first session of The Saratoga Sale.
Consigned as Hip 94 by Gainesway on behalf of Latham’s Midway Thoroughbreds LLC, the colt was the only yearling cataloged by Airdrie Stud’s first-crop yearling sire and was bought by agent Steven W. Young for an undisclosed client.
The price represented a nice profit on the $170,000 Latham paid at the 2017 Keeneland November Breeding Stock Sale but fell short of his breakout horse at last year’s Fasig-Tipton’s Saratoga selected yearling sale, where Kerri Radcliffe purchased a colt by Orb for $1 million that Latham and partners had bought for $310,000 as a weanling.
Summer Front is a millionaire son of top stallion War Front and entered stud at Airdrie near Midway, Ky., for a $15,000 stud fee.
“(Saratoga) was a bold place to bring (the Summer Front colt), especially since he was bred on a $15,000 stud fee, which is one of the cheapest fees in the catalog,” Latham said. “We had to pay $170,000 for him, which shows you how beautiful he was as a weanling. This is a boutique sale where outstanding individuals do well. We brought the colt up here and he did well, and Gainesway did its usual outstanding job of preparing and presenting him. There was every reason to believe this horse could do what he did.”
Latham said he had the Saratoga sale in mind when he bought the colt and quickly shared his plan with Fasig-Tipton president Boyd Browning, Jr. and the late Bill Graves, who directed the sale company’s yearling sale selection process.
“When I bought the horse in November, the second or third person I talked to was Boyd, and the next person I talked to was Bill Graves. I said I bought this horse thinking about Saratoga, and they both said, ‘Oh yeah.’”
The colt bred in Kentucky by Gunpowder Farms is from the First Samurai mare Samurai’s Honor, a daughter of multiple grade 3 winner Trip. A hard-knocking daughter of Lord At War, Trip earned $888,733 and went on to produce stakes winner Passport. Trip is the granddam of multiple grade 1 winner Bolt d’Oro and multiple stakes winner Sonic Mule.
