What price will a champion racehorse make when put through the sales ring as a broodmare.
That is the question Bob Peters faces when Arcadia Queen is sold at the Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale at the Gold Coast later this month.
The former Tony and Calvin McEvoy-trained multiple Group 1 winner Sunlight broke the record last year when purchased for $4.2 million.
Last week Peters sold Celebrity Queen for $2.5 million at the Chairman’s Sale in Sydney, a price in excess of what he was expecting.
Peters said the market would decide Arcadia Queen’s value.
“I had some very big offers to sell her when she first came off the track, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with her then and I left it for a while,” Peters told RSN.
“I was very tempted to breed with her, but we’ve got lots of them coming along and she’ll help the profit and loss on the sale of horses’ column.”
Arcadia Queen won eight of her 16 starts, with three of those victories coming at Group 1 level, before injury halted her career.
It was found Arcadia Queen was suffering inflammation of a tendon along and a tear in some fibres.
The decision to sell Arcadia Queen was agonising for Peters who had deal with an upset wife, daughters, granddaughters and grandsons.
But he said there was still large numbers of Arcadia Queen’s bloodlines in his ownership.
“There’s a lot of this family around and we’ve got most of them,” Peters said.
“Not a lot of them get sold.
“I’ve got a full-sister that is probably our best yearling and looks a lot like her and we’ve got a full-brother that is a weanling and I’m tempted to try and make a stallion out of him.”
