Taylor Made/WinStar Purchase Interest in Speightstown

Speightstown, a lightly raced multiple graded stakes winning son of Gone West, will be retired at the end of 2004.

A deal to purchase an interest in the 6-year-old horse was announced today by Taylor Made Farm and WinStar Farm. He will be owned by those two Kentucky breeding farms in partnership with his current owner, Eugene Melnyk.

It was not announced at which farm Speightstown will stand in 2005. His stud fee will also be announced later.

Speightstown is unbeaten in three starts this year, having won the Churchill Downs (gr. II), True North Breeders' Cup (gr. II) and Artax Handicaps.

In all, he has made 13 starts, with eight wins and earnings of $537,056.

Bred in Kentucky by Aaron and Marie Jones, Speightstown was sold for them by Taylor Made at the 1998 Keeneland July yearling sale. He was purchased by Melnyk for $2 million. Speightstown was produced from the Storm Cat mare Silken Cat, who was the Canadian champion juvenile filly in 1995.

"Speightstown's win in the True North Breeders' Cup Handicap, where he carved out fractions of :43 3/5, :55 1/5 and 1:08 flat, was as good a performance as you'll ever see from a horse. He is one of the top sprinters, if not the top sprinter in the country," his trainer, Todd Pletcher, said in a release."

"We are very excited about Speightstown's prospects as a stallion," Doug Cauthen of WinStar said. "With Speightstown's brilliance and conformation, he is very similar to Gone West's successful sons Elusive Quality, Grand Slam and Mr. Greeley. With Elusive Quality siring 11 first-crop stakes winners including Smarty Jones, Grand Slam with a first-crop Breeders' Cup winner and Mr. Greeley with five grade 1 winners, you have got to be excited about this horse's chances as a sire,"

Speightstown is inbred to two well-known daughters of Secretariat. Gone West is out of the Secretariat mare Secrettame, and Silken Cat's sire, Storm Cat, was produced from the Secretariat mare Terlingua.