The $1.2 million Tapit colt bred to be a Derby horse
Breeder Bob Lothenbach yearned to get to Louisville with him
By Sid Fernando
The $1.2 million Tapit session topper yesterday at the OBS March Sale of 2-Year-Olds in Training wasn’t intended to sell at public auction. It’s one reason why the colt only galloped at the sale instead of breezing, and he was sold only because his successful owner/breeder, Minnesotan Bob Lothenbach, died last November.
After Bob died, I said this to TDN:
What I didn’t say was that Bob’s great ambition, particularly over the last decade, was to win the Kentucky Derby, and each year when we discussed his new matings, he’d say the same thing: “If I get a colt in the Derby, I’m going to fly your entire office staff to Louisville for the race.”
He meant it—he had his own plane. All of us at WTC rooted for his horses, not only to get him and us to Churchill Downs, but because he was one of our favorite clients at the office for these simple reasons: he was considerate, polite, friendly, passionate, modest, and generous, and he paid his bills the moment he was invoiced.
Each year after we’d send Bob the matings reports for his mares, he’d call to discuss every single one of his mares in detail, including those destined for his successful Minnesota-bred program. This process usually took many hours to complete, and one memorable year we did this while he was in the air after departing Las Vegas and I was in a sleeper car on a train headed to Orlando from Brooklyn. That was a challenging call with frequent lost signals, to say the least, but Bob was undeterred and steadfast, and we completed the process deep into the early morning hours.
One of Bob’s favorite matings was the pairing of the Distorted Humor mare Distorted Music with Tapit that led to the colt that David Ingordo of Lane’s End Bloodstock purchased on behalf of the West Point Thoroughbreds/DJ Stable/CJ Stable partnership at OBS. “That one could be my Derby horse,” Bob said last year. “They say he’s a knockout.”
Roger Lyons, originator of WTC’s proprietary LyonsScore system, is a brilliant analyst with a dispassionate approach to matings, and he was the architect of this one. At the time, the Werk Nick Rating for this mating was B+ (although the GeoNick—the nick specifically for N. America—was A+++), but for Roger the nick alone is a blunt instrument. First, Roger noted that the ensemble of sires in Distorted Music’s immediate family—Distorted Humor, Unbridled’s Song, and Sadler’s Wells—had positive strike rates with Tapit. Roger wrote of Tapit with Distorted Music: “2/18 with Distorted Humor (including G1SW Constitution), 3/19 with Unbridled’s Song (G1SW Unique Bella and G2SWs Tacitus and West Coast Belle), and 8/51 with Sadler’s Wells (including G1SW Laragh and G2SW Lani). Tapit’s profile says that he has a strong positive performance relation to the ancestry of this mare, but the pattern of response that is confirmed by nearly every available sire, including exceptions that prove the rule, tells us that she descends from ancestors that have a strong positive performance relation to one another—and comprehensively so. This is the sort of mare to have.”
Tapit is an A.P. Indy-line sire, and we also noted to Bob the success of this sireline with the family: “This mare has a terrific family, and it filled in nicely in 2020 when Moon Over Miami, by Malibu Moon, became a SW of $540k. We’d been recommending Bernardini for this mare because, like Malibu Moon, he’s a son of A.P. Indy—sire of G1SW Music Note under the second dam. Moreover, A.P. Indy’s sire Seattle Slew has a SW under the third dam, giving this line success over three dams now.” [One of the Bernardinis from Distorted Music was She Can’t Sing, a Grade 3 winner of $883,558 who was sold as part of the Lothenbach dispersal for $1.1 million at last month’s Fasig-Tipton February sale.] This mating also involves inbreeding to Unbridled, which has been a feature in some important Tapit graded winners. Everything in this pairing lined up well on paper.
What all of this means is that this wasn’t a simple commercial mating designed to produce an expensive auction horse, but one that was planned with purpose to get Bob to the Derby. Ingordo, through prior conversations with me about the Lothenbach horses, knew of this, which made concentrating on the physical horse in front of him at OBS a much easier task.
“I’d sent some people to watch him train at Chad Stewart’s place [Grace Full Oaks, where the Lothenbach dispersal horses were trained before the sale] and got good reports,” Ingordo said. “When we got to OBS, [consignor] Tom [McCrocklin], a friend who trains at the same facility as April Mayberry, said I had to see this colt. We watched him train a couple of days at OBS. He just galloped down here and did everything right. He vetted nicely. He’s a beautiful horse, but he’s not a finished product by any means. He’s lovely, and he looks like what I think a Tapit is supposed to look like; he’s got all the angles, he’s got a frame that he’ll fill into. He was, and I hate to put it like this, but he was an obvious horse.”
No one has to tell Ingordo about Tapit or pedigrees. He was the force behind the purchase of Flightline, a son of Tapit that made $1 million at Fasig-Tipton Saratoga. The buyer of Flightline, like the OBS colt, was LEB (Lane’s End Bloodstock) as agent for West Point, which is run by Terry Finley.
“The process with Terry isn’t overly complicated and that’s why it works so well,” Ingordo explained. “I come in ahead and do all the breeze shows every day. Each night we send the shortlists we have from that day. You know, ‘This one looks the part, that one is nice,’ and, you know, I don’t really want to call it this, but we have two tiers: we bought a Cajun Breeze, for example, that’s a straight-up athlete, an awesome individual, and that’s one level of horse. He’ll hopefully win races and we’ll have fun, but there’s no residual value. And then there’s the colt like the Tapit, who you hope can win the big races and be a future stallion prospect. The way Terry puts these partnerships together—and I know the Twitter geniuses will say ‘why are you doing this or that’—is like a venture capital deal with horses. You’re putting up a lot and buying a lot of these types—and I hate to keep going back to Flightline, but it is to find the next Flightline. Hopefully, you’ll get one or two every so often, but the others will find their own level.
“I read that book ‘Horsetrader’ [about Robert Sangster] on the treadmill this January, and [John] Magnier and Sangster and Vincent O’Brien pioneered that, and Tom Ryan and what he’s done with the SF group is the same thing. They have their team, and we’re doing something similar—maybe a little bit different. We’re all people that are friends and enjoy each other, and we’re hoping to hit a home run together.
“I’m sad for Mr. Lothenbach’s loss, but if this colt were to win the Derby, I’ll be the first, in his honor, to say, ‘Bob, this one’s for you, man.’”
Bob would appreciate that.
Am I seeing it wrong, or is the tapit colt a bit over in the knee?
This article is an incredible find because the only Tapit that Distorted Music had so far, is Sandman. And he is Bob's Derby Horse! No one can tell me he's not rooting from the other side. Sandman is going to have to overcome the 17 post lacking any winners. Sandman might also be Tapit's 5th Belmont winner.