Spendthrift Creates 'Safe Bet' for Freshman Sires

B. Wayne Hughes' Spendthrift Farm has introduced a new breeding program for 2019 called the "Safe Bet" program, designed to incentivize breeders to support the farm's freshman sires of 2019, which is their fourth year at stud.

Under the Safe Bet program, if a Spendthrift freshman sire does not have at least one graded/group winner this year, then the breeders who supported him in 2019 will not pay a stud fee. Spendthrift has six freshman sires this year—Wicked Strong , Palace  and Race Day , who both stand for $6,000; and Danza , Medal Count , and Normandy Invasion , who stand for $3,500.

Last year, Spendthrift was represented on the leading North American freshman sires list by top-ranked Cross Traffic , the sire of champion 2-year-old filly Jaywalk, and by runner-up Goldencents , who was represented by six black-type performers, including two black-type winners.

"It's no secret that Mr. Hughes is constantly thinking of ways we can offer breeder-friendly programs for our stallions. The inspiration behind the Safe Bet program largely came from the success of our leading first-crop sires last year, particularly the great things accomplished by Cross Traffic and Goldencents," said Ned Toffey, general manager at Spendthrift. "Breeding to a fourth-year stallion requires making a bet on the early success of the stallion's first runners. It can be very rewarding—as we saw last year—and there's also risk involved. We wanted to remove as much risk for the breeders as possible.

"In recent history, you typically have a handful of freshmen in every class that sire a 2-year-old graded or group winner, and it's usually a very good sign for a sire. Safe Bet assures that a breeder will be investing in a stallion that will have the immediate success of a graded or group winner from his first 2-year-olds to race in 2019. If that does not happen, the breeder won't owe a stud fee. It's that simple," Toffey added.