Hip 27, a filly by Tonalist bred by John Lauriello and raised in Fort Edward, sold for $290,000 at Midlantic spring sale. Fasig-Tipton Photo.
By Tom Law
John Lauriello waited on some news at his home in Birmingham, Alabama, Tuesday afternoon before receiving an unexpected update about a filly he bred who sold at an auction almost 800 miles away.
“I work in commercial real estate, restaurants things like, business retail, shopping centers, so you can imagine what things have been like the last few months,” Lauriello said Wednesday afternoon. “Last week I’m with a client who I’ve been with for 40 years, most of the day Wednesday and all day Thursday. He calls me Friday at 5 o’clock our time and tells me ‘my granddaughter and I just tested positive for the virus.’ ”
Lauriello, who grew up in Amsterdam, N.Y., before moving to Alabama as a teenager, and his wife Beth immediately went to a nearby medical clinic after hearing that news for their own Covid-19 test. The results of the test wouldn’t come until Tuesday, the same day the second session of the delayed Fasig-Tipton Midlantic spring 2-year-olds in training sale went on in Timonium, Md.
Lauriello didn’t have a direct link to the sale, but an indirect one in a filly by Tonalist he bred from his winning Harlan’s Holiday mare Holiday Apple. He sold her almost a year before for $75,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic Eastern fall sale through Sarah Sutherland and Shack Parish’s team at Indian Creek after she RNA’d for $45,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga New York-bred sale.
“So we’re at home waiting for the results and Jamie LaMonica, who I’ve worked with for a while, emailed me (Tuesday) and goes, ‘I hope you saw the sale results, your Holiday Apple filly sold for $290,000 … Sackatoga Stable bought her.’
“So I’m all excited, not that my wife and I don’t have the virus, I’m all excited about the sale. Here we are all worried about the virus and we didn’t even think about the sale, but at that moment I’m jumping up and down. You can imagine what that’s like, a 72-year-old guy jumping up and down. The next thing I know my wife is on the phone and she’s jumping up and down, our test for the coronavirus comes back negative. What a day.”
What a day to say the least.
The Tonalist filly sold early in the opening session and wound up the third most expensive New York-bred at the sale, behind a Tiznow colt who brought $375,000 and an American Pharoah filly that sold for $325,000.
Kip Elser’s Kirkwood Stables sold Hip 27, the Tonalist filly bred by Lauriello, and Hip 451, the American Pharoah out of the Any Given Saturday mare Choice Pearl.
Lauriello’s bases his breeding operation out of Todd and Michele Graves’ Hickory Hill Farm in Fort Edward. He owns seven other broodmares along with Holiday Apple, who produced a filly by Collected this year and was bred back to Leofric. She’s also the dam of a yearling colt by Super Saver that Lauriello co-bred with the Super Saver Syndicate.
“I’d met those guys, the Sackatoga guys, at Pennells in Saratoga,” Lauriello said. “They’re a good group of guys, they’re fun, they love to drink and eat. Plus they’ve got another great horse running this year in Tiz the Law.
“We sold her last year for $75,000. We did fine, got my money back, put a little in my pocket. I knew the guys buying her were pinhookers and I wish them well. This group buying it, from what I read, they’ve never paid over $180,000 for a horse, ever. Then they go to this one for $290,000. It shows they liked the hell out of her.”
