After 30 Years, a Fasig-Tipton Saratoga First for Stautberg

[Wandering Eyes]

Caroline Stautberg has been selling her yearlings at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale for three decades now, but the Maryland breeder will record a personal first when the boutique auction opens next week. Through the Bluegrass Thoroughbred Services consignment, Stautberg's Willow Oaks Stable will offer the very first horse through the ring Monday when bidding starts at 6:30 p.m. Hip 1 is a daughter of Vekoma out of Tapit's World (Tapit) and a half-sister to graded winner Il Miracolo (Gun Runner).

“It's been 30 years since my first Saratoga sale and I haven't missed a year, but I've never been in the first 10 [hips],” Stautberg said with a laugh. “So I guess it was my turn. Thankfully, she is a filly with a nice page and I think she will sell herself. And this is a sale that people are pretty well there when it starts. It's not like some of those sales that start at nine in the morning and you know nobody is there. I'm not jumping up and down about it, but it could be worse.”

In addition to her graded-winning half-brother, the yearling is a full-sister to a now 2-year-old filly who sold to Charlotte Weber's Live Oak Plantation for $575,000 at the 2024 Saratoga sale. The trio are out of graded-placed Tapit's World, who was acquired for $175,000 at the 2015 Fasig-Tipton November sale.

Stautberg admitted that purchase a decade ago harkened back to the mare who provided her with her biggest success as a breeder, Fun Crowd.

Stautberg and her late husband, Jerry, purchased Fun Crowd for $115,000 at the 2002 Keeneland November sale. Eleven yearlings sold out of the mare for over $2 million, including Grade I winner Funny Moon (Malibu Moon).

“What a mare, that Fun Crowd,” Stautberg said. “She was really a great mare. When she died, I got the prettiest tree that I could find and had a stone made and she is buried on the farm with a really, really pretty tree marking her stone. She was something else. I just didn't have any idea, really, of how lucky I was. Davant Latham found her for me. And he is still helping me pick out broodmares. She wasn't that expensive because she hadn't raced. But she had a great pedigree and, man, did she produce.”

Latham recalled that purchase when he and his client were bidding on Tapit's World in 2015.

“Davant and I watched her in the ring,” Stautberg said of Tapit's World. “He said, 'The only reason you love her is because she reminds you so much of Fun Crowd.' And she did. She was a chestnut with a white blaze and a couple of white socks. She went through and she RNA'd, so I said, 'Come on.' We ran back to the barn and we offered the price they wanted and they took it.”

Funny Moon | Horsephotos

With just seven broodmares, Stautberg will offer almost her entire foal crop–four yearlings–at the two-day Saratoga sale next week.

“I sold one at the January sale and [Fasig-Tipton] accepted all five I had left,” Stautberg said. “But one of them had an abscess, so she is going to have to wait until fall.”

The group, all consigned by Bluegrass Thoroughbred Services, includes four fillies and one colt.

“For the last two years, I've had all fillies and only one colt,” Stautberg explained. “It happened again this year. You feel so sorry for that colt all by himself. I live in Monkton, Maryland, so he has to ship up by himself. My farm manager, Darin Martin, is bringing up the fillies, but he can't come with them. He has to have his own transportation.”

Other than the filly out of 15-year-old Tapit's World, the other yearlings in Willow Oaks' Saratoga offerings are out of mares Stautberg has acquired in the past two years. Hip 64 is a filly by Uncle Mo and is the first foal out of stakes-placed Champagne Ivy (Shackleford). She was purchased in utero for $210,000 at the 2023 Keeneland November sale.

Hip 74 is a filly from the first crop of champion Epicenter out of graded winner Cosmic Burst (Violence). Stautberg acquired Cosmic Burst for $260,000 at the 2023 Keeneland January sale.

Rounding out the group is a colt by Mandaloun (hip 147) out of multiple stakes winner Lucky Stride (Declaration of War). Lucky Stride was purchased for $170,000 at the 2022 Keeneland November sale.

“I am 84, almost 85, and I keep saying I don't need to buy any more, but I just can't resist,” Stautberg said of the recent purchases. “I get the catalogue and I see something and I say, 'I think I will hang around for that one.' I keep adding, but I think maybe this is it.”

Stautberg sends her mares to Kentucky to foal and be bred back before mares and foals return to Maryland.

“I have watched them all grow up,” Stautberg said of the yearlings she will offer at auction next week. “You get very attached to them. I went over this morning to Oklahoma [training track] and saw one that I sold last year, a Twirling Candy filly, and she's so happy and doing so well. And that just makes you feel so good.”

Stautberg and her late husband used to raise Black Angus cattle and steeplechasers on their 600-acre Willow Oaks Farm in Monkton, but a trip to Saratoga in the mid-1990s changed the trajectory of their operation.

“[The late steeplechase trainer] Tom Voss was a neighbor,” Stautberg recalled. “My husband and I came up and stayed with Tom and [his wife] Mimi. “We went to the horse sale and ended up buying a yearling that Tom had picked out to be a steeplechaser. In the meantime, the Bluegrass Thoroughbred partners had a party where I met John Stuart and Peter Bance. So all of a sudden I said, 'I know a bloodstock agent'–this was probably 1994–and I said, 'Let's buy one.' My husband was an automobile dealer and he said, 'No, one won't do it. We need more than that.' So we ended up with four. I think my first sales were in '95.”

Willow Oaks will be offering its 30th class of yearlings–beginning with the first hip through the ring–at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale next week and Stautberg's love affair with the upstate New York town is still going strong.

“I usually come up before the sales,” Stautberg said. “I love the racing and I love the people and I love the restaurants. I love everything about it. You are a person here, not just a number. I think the Fasig-Tipton people do such a good job and I am very happy here.”

The Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale will be held next Monday and Tuesday at the Humphrey S. Finney Sales Pavilion. Bidding commences each day at 6:30 p.m.

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