Two days after winning the Grey Goose Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies (gr. I), undefeated Awesome Feather sold for $2.3 million Nov. 7, early during the Fasig-Tipton Kentucky November select mixed sale in Lexington.
Multiple Eclipse Award-winning breeder and owner Frank Stronach purchased her in the name of Adena Springs and plans to continue to race her.
“I just hope she carries on,” said Stronach, who described Awesome Feather’s 2 1/4-length Breeders’ Cup victory as “pretty impressive.”
A 2-year-old daughter of Awesome of Course out of the stakes-winning Gone West mare Precious Feather, Awesome Feather has won four other added-money events in her six-race career. Running at Calder Casino & Race Course, she captured the J J’sdream Stakes and swept the three-race filly division of the Florida Stallion Stakes – the Desert Vixen, Susan’s Girl, and My Deal Girl.
“She looked so nice; she has a good disposition; she was very calm,” Stronach said. “Her record speaks for itself.”
Hidden Brook consigned Awesome Feather, who was cataloged as Hip No. 10, to the Fasig-Tipton auction for her breeder, Fred and Jane Brei’s Florida-based Jacks Or Better Farm.
“She’s a tremendous filly and I’m glad she’s staying in our country,” Fred Brei said. “What else can I say? Frank will get her where she needs to go.”
“We don’t race much out of Florida,” Brei continued, “and when it comes to going up North, where certainly she belongs in the grade Is that will be coming up when she’s a 3-year-old, it’s just best for the filly and best for us that she’s in somebody else’s hands. The fact that it’s somebody who is going to race her here (in America) is important to us. You always want them to stay home where you can watch them. It isn’t that you don’t want people from all over the world to buy horses, but she’s a baby. I want to be able to watch her for the next couple of years. Hopefully, we’ll go to the Breeders’ Cup and do it again with another horse.”
Awesome Feather, while being trained by Stanley Gold, earned $1,495,746. An Eclipse Award as outstanding 2-year-old filly is probably in her future. She is a half sister to the winner Brooks ’n Down (by Montbrook), who finished second in the 2008 Naked Greed Stakes at Calder and third in the 2009 Oak Hall Stakes at Evangeline Downs.
“It (the price) is never enough,” Brei joked, “but it was enough to make me smile. It wasn’t much over the reserve. I probably wouldn’t have let her go for under $2 million.”
