Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: It’s Moore’s Time, Again

[Wandering Eyes]

“There are decades where nothing happens,” said Lenin. “And there are weeks when decades happen.” By the notoriously slow-burning standards of Thoroughbred breeding, however, for Amy Moore it has felt more like a decade when centuries have happened.

The way it began, in a sprint maiden at Saratoga on 16 August 2015, could hardly have been less auspicious. The previous September, as she prepared to surface from a 30-year immersion in employee benefits law in Washington D.C., Moore had bought a Blame filly at Keeneland. The idea was that someday this would be the first broodmare on the little Virginia farm she had promised herself in retirement.

Working up to this debut, the filly had actually been showing plenty of ability–enough to start second favorite. She finished tailed off. Moore was mortified, felt like slinking away from the racetrack “with a paper bag over my head.” What a waste of $170,000.

Scroll forward 10 years, to the day: 16 August 2025. Same racetrack, another sprint maiden over the dirt. It's Our Time (Not This Time) wins with preposterous ease, by 17 3/4 lengths, melting the stopwatch even so. Where did this monster come from? Everyone checks the card. Breeder: South Gate Farm, Virginia. Amy Moore! Surely she hasn't done it again?

For that Blame filly, of course, has since become celebrated as Queen Caroline. Winner of five stakes in Moore's colors, after switching to turf, she duly arrived on the 126-acre farm at Millwood in 2019 as one of just two mares in the founding band. She had been sent to Violence, the first mating Moore ever arranged.

The resulting colt, Forte, won the GI Hopeful Stakes days before Queen Caroline's second foal, a colt by Uncle Mo, appeared at the September Sale. He duly made $850,000, while Forte proceeded to confirm himself champion juvenile at the Breeders' Cup.

Just about the only thing that had gone awry was that Queen Caroline had lost a Not This Time foal that spring. But now that Moore had funds, she could return to Keeneland in November for an in-foal mare to fill that void. And, in fact, one of the things that put triple stakes winner Shea D Summer (Summer Front) top of her shortlist, at $260,000, was the fact that she happened to be carrying a first foal by none other than Not This Time.

“I thought he was really an up-and-coming stallion,” Moore recalls. “And also a good match for this mare. She's a compact, sprinter type, 15.3hh, and Not This Time is a taller, stronger, scopier horse. I thought they'd complement each other well. And Shea D Summer met all my criteria. Number one, for me: a mare has to have raced successfully. I know a lot of people do have success with unraced mares, but a small program like mine can't be discovering whether or not they'd have had ability if only they'd been sound. She was versatile, too: she won on a fast dirt track, and on a wet dirt track; she finished second on turf. And she was also a young, attractive mare.”

She had blood, too: out of an Empire Maker half-sister to the dam of one champion juvenile, Air Force Blue (War Front), while the next dam is sister to another in Flanders (Seeking the Gold).

Shea D Summer followed what has become standard procedure for Moore: sent into the trusted care of Patricia Ramey at nearby Upperville, where she delivered a colt; then to Kentucky, along with her foal, to be covered by Bolt d'Oro; and then back to South Gate.

Amy Moore with Shea D Summer | Sara Gordon

“The colt was very attractive and well-balanced,” Moore recalls. “And had his mother's mind. She's a very calm, sensible, pleasant mare and her foals have so far had her temperament, which is a big plus. We swim yearlings, as part of our program to prepare them for the sale, and he was a good swimmer. He was just no trouble, always did what was asked.”

Also as usual, the colt entered John Stuart's consignment for the 2024 September Sale. His Bluegrass Thoroughbred Services had been among several agencies tried by Moore, when first cutting her teeth with a few weanling pinhooks. “And he was the one that stood out,” Moore explains. “Not just for his very candid advice, but also for providing a lot of help besides selling horses. He would come from Kentucky to Virginia to see how my sales yearlings were coming along, and give me advice about how to prepare them. We've just had a good working relationship all the way along, so over time I've consolidated my business with John and his son Sandy.”

Gratifyingly, the Not This Time colt cleared the investment in his dam straight off, realizing $425,000 from Elza Mitchum.

“I was very pleased by that,” Moore says. “Like his mother, he's not a big horse. When he went to the sale, he was just a respectable size, certainly not a great big yearling. But I kind of like a smaller horse. I think they're sounder and come to hand more quickly.”

This one has proved a case in point for Tom Amoss.

“I keep tabs on them by following their workouts, and he was working very well,” Moore says. “In fact he worked a bullet at Saratoga, before that first start, so I actually thought he should have been shorter odds. It looked like he could run.”

In the event, it turned out that It's Our Time could fly. Safe to say that his half-sister by Bolt d'Oro would have been promoted from Hip 1722 if the catalogue for next week's September Sale were compiled now.

“She's a very nice filly,” Moore affirms. “She looks a good bit like him: on the smaller side, just as he was, so someone's got to be willing not to insist on a 16-hand yearling. But she has that same temperament, too, which I think stands them in good stead.”

Incredibly, Moore has produced Forte and now It's Our Time from just nine foals of racing age–plus a third 'TDN Rising Star' in Crimson Light (City of Light). For all the help she values, from the Stuarts and others, she's plainly bringing something pretty special to the equation herself. Not that there's anything extraordinary in her grounding: plenty of others have shown ponies and hunters as kids, while she is reliably self-deprecating about her principal attribute showing yearlings in her youth. (“I was popular because I'm short,” she says. “I could make a small horse look bigger.”) Perhaps, then, the secret is the mentoring she received from Jim and Faye Little, who had a stable locally in North Carolina, where Moore grew up, before moving up to Washington and getting into Thoroughbred pinhooking.

“Jim was a track coach,” she explains. “And I do think that experience helped him. He just had a very good eye for an athlete, horse or human. In each case, I think it's more about the way they move than how they're put together; about how the parts work together as a whole. I definitely learned a lot from Jim about conformation, about picking out the athlete.”

Bizarrely, those first nine foals have all been colts. This time, however, the three she is sending to the September Sale are all fillies.

“So this is the first time the question has arisen, whether I should keep a homebred filly as a future broodmare,” Moore says. “And I decided that the best thing to do is send them to the sale, see how they do in the market, and if they don't bring a price that I think appropriate, then I'll keep and race them.”

The other pair are both out of mares acquired at the 2023 Keeneland November Sale after the pragmatic if painful decision to cash out Queen Caroline, in foal to Flightline, for $3 million to John Stewart's Resolute Farm. Lorena (Souper Speedy) was a five-time stakes winner round Woodbine and cost $160,000 in foal to Essential Quality; Strong Beauty (Overanalyze), whose black type score came among Louisiana-breds, carried a Jackie's Warrior foal at $110,000. The resulting fillies are catalogued as Hips 805 (“big, strong, robust”) and 1751 (“smaller but very well made, quite flashy and attractive”) respectively.

Bolt d'Oro yearling filly out of Shea D Summer at South Gate Farm | Sara Gordon

Even now, there are only eight mares at South Gate and that is evidently as many as Moore intends to accommodate. She never planned to change the world, coming here: it was just a reward that had kept her going through all those years behind a desk.

“I enjoyed practicing law, but I was practicing at a level of intensity that didn't admit many other activities,” she reflects. “When I retired, I wanted to have some land. I'd been living in the city for 30 years and wanted to be a farmer. And since horses were what I knew, horses were what I would farm.”

But knowing them as she did, didn't some part of her fear that she had used up all her luck in one go, with Queen Caroline? Could she seriously hope for lightning to strike a second time?

“Well, I figured I could live at a lower level of good luck!” Moore replies. “I really enjoy the farm life. Racing is fun, also, but I think I'm more of a breeder and raiser than I am a racer of horses. I'm delighted when they have success for somebody else. I certainly didn't expect to have another potential Forte quite so soon, but let's see where he goes from here. I'm just very happy that he has started as well as he has.”

So much, after all, depends on the interventions of fate–as she found even finding this farm.

“I looked at a lot of places up and down Loudoun County,” she recalls. “But they were all house and no barn. You'd have some huge mansion, many times larger than I needed or wanted, and then a low dark barn and no fencing. But when I was looking at yearlings in 2014, and bought Queen Caroline, I needed someone to vet them for me and was recommended Dr. [E.C. 'Pug'] Hart. And when I was trying to find a farm, down the line, it turned out that Pug and Susie were moving. So I came and looked at their place and it was perfect: a covered free walker, a horse swimming pond, lots of double-fence paddocks. So I was lucky there, too.”

So the guy who vetted Queen Caroline also ended up providing her pasture. But if Moore appears to have some kind of Midas touch, nor has she ever lost sight of what first animated the whole project. That passion for the horse, dating back to her girlhood, means that Moore essentially derives as much gratification from the quieter, daily joys of farm life as from showstoppers at the sales.

“I had a colt that I couldn't sell because of some X-ray issues, so I raced him locally,” she says. “He started out last year at Colonial Downs, but it was like he thought the other horses must be afraid of something. He didn't want to get anywhere near whatever was chasing them, and kept back in some other county! But then he ran in a $12,500 maiden claimer at Laurel and battled the whole length of the stretch to get his nose in front just on the wire. That was a tremendously exciting moment. And you can get that, lower down the scale. There's a lot of satisfaction every day, just being in a beautiful place and surrounded by beautiful animals.

“I've been very lucky. But I know that as fast as you can go from the bottom of the valley to the top of the mountain, you can find yourself going back down even faster. Luck counts for a lot in the horse business, and I've certainly been very fortunate. But I have greatly enjoyed my good fortune.”

The post Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: It’s Moore’s Time, Again appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

View the full article