New Year, New Horizons for Simeones

From selling the top-priced 2-year-old sold at public auction in North America to relocating to the mountains of Nevada, it has been quite a year for Thoroughbred breeders Sal and Colleen Simeone.

The Simeones, who operate Sienna Farms near Ocala, Fla., (not to be confused with Kentucky's Siena Farm), lit up the bid board at the 2016 Fasig-Tipton selected juvenile sale at Gulfstream Park, when a son of Tapit   was purchased by Woodford Racing and Robert LaPenta for $1.8 million.

The price paid for the colt, consigned by Albert Davis’ Old South Farm, was the most in North America for a 2-year-old in training and second worldwide to a Frankel colt sold at the Arqana sale in France.

Neither the Simeones nor Davis have any horses among the 160 cataloged for this year’s Gulfstream Park sale scheduled for Feb. 27 at 4 p.m. ET, but will be represented in Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company juvenile sales in March and April.

Now named South Beach, the Florida-bred colt represented a rare opportunity for hands-on breeders like the Simeones to have a horse that could fetch seven figures at public auction. Not only was he sired by North America’s leading sire, but was from the immediate female family of Hard Spun, the King's Bishop (G1) winner and promising young sire who also placed second in the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (G1).

Sal Simeone said he knew from the time the colt was delivered he had a lot of upside and turned down offers ranging from $500,000 to $600,000 for him when he was still a foal.

“Everybody said, ‘Man, you ought to take it, because anything can happen,'” he recalled of the advice he received. “I knew this horse was special, but it was pretty tempting to take it.”

Eventually entered in the Keeneland September yearling sale, the colt was overshadowed by other Tapits in the auction and was bought back for $1.1 million.

“A million and one to me was a lot of money, but I was like, ‘This horse is worth a lot more than that,’” Simeone said.

Going into the 2016 2-year-old sale, Simeone eschewed overtures from large consignors who wanted to sell the colt on his behalf. But the breeder stuck with Davis, a hard-working Florida horseman who had three horses entered in the auction.

“Albert’s a great guy. He gets the most out of what you’ve got”, Simeones said.

Rather than jazzy marketing, the colt’s great looks and way he handled the stress of being shown, scoped, and vetted leading up to the sale attracted all the right players and he was the buzz horse on the sale grounds.

“I sold this horse on its own merits,” the breeder said. “I was really happy at the end.”

Fast forward a year later.

Sal and Colleen Simeone have trimmed their horse herd, put the approzimately 400-acre Sienna Farms on the market and relocated to Nevada.

“It’s a beautiful piece of land, and if I have to I'll keep it and sell it in five or 10 years,” Simeone said of the Florida property, about half of which was dedicated to the horse operation and the other half consisting of a cypress forest.

Simeone said the couple’s new location is near Minden, Nev., near the center of Carson Valley, just east of Lake Tahoe, and South of Nevada's capitol in Carson City.

Acknowledging he doesn't "have quite the system I had in Florida,” Simeones is converting a training center previously used for Quarter Horses to a training track for his 2-year-old Thoroughbreds, with a belief that conditioning in the higher altitude will benefit the horses.

“The training track is on a flat butte at about 7,000 feet,” he said. “If you train much higher, you risk getting your blood too thick and 5,000-7.500 feet is about the ideal.”

Although he was raised in New York, where he started a computer software company that he still owns, the 59-year-old Simeone said he has been around horses most of his life and that the new setting in a remote and mountainous area of Nevada fits in with his priorities.

“Since I was 9, horses have been the main thing in my life,” he said. “Minden is a real horse town, with a lot of cowboys and horse people.”