Horses owned by the late Cynthia Phipps will be offered at the 2008 Keeneland January horses of all ages sale in Lexington. Claiborne Farm will handle the dispersal.
Sixteen of Phipps' horses are cataloged for the auction, which begins Jan. 7, and they include her homebred grade I winner Versailles Treaty, who is in foal to Unbridled's Song, and four of Versailles Treaty's daughters: Palais Versailles, Rhineland, Supreme Council, and a daughter of Empire Maker born in 2007.
Versailles Treaty is the dam of grade II winner and stallion Saarland, who finished second in the 2003 Metropolitan Handicap (gr. I).
Phipps died in October as the result of injuries suffered in a fire at her Manhattan apartment. She was a member of one of racing's foremost families.
Her father, Ogden Phipps, raced homebred Hall of Fame member Buckpasser, and her mother, Lillian Bostwick Phipps, was a leading member of the steeplechase community and raced Hall of Fame members Neji and Oedipus. Her brother, prominent breeder/owner Ogden Mills "Dinny" Phipps, is chairman of The Jockey Club. An aunt, Barbara Janney, raced homebred Hall of Fame member Ruffian with her husband, Stuart S. Janney Jr.
"She ran her operation like my father and I ran ours," Ogden Mills Phipps said. "She gave her horses wonderful names. She spent a lot of time on it, and she enjoyed that part of it. I sometimes had to go look in the encyclopedia to see what in the devil they (the names) meant, but they always had something to do with the breeding."
Other horses bred and raced by Cynthia Phipps included champion and grade I winner Christmas Past and grade I winner Gold Fever.
Ogden Mills Phipps said "four or five" of his sister's 2-year-olds will be offered at the Keeneland sale of 2-year-olds in training. Bill Harrigan is preparing those horses for the auction.
