Country Day

After our exhaustive survey of Bluegrass stallions, good manners demand at least a browse through the alternatives available elsewhere in North America. But this must be a very different exercise, and a pretty unsatisfactory one too. The Kentucky market is entirely coherent, with hundreds of stallions clustered within a few miles of each other at fees to suit all budgets. Regional stallions, in contrast, serve regional mares. If you're in Ohio, you're not going to van a mare down to Too Much Bling (Rubiano). If you're in Texas, equally, you...

Everyone in this business understands that each day of joy tends to be earned by a month of strife. Seldom, however, do horses spin us between extremes at quite the giddy rate experienced by Richard Klein this summer. Klein, whose stable builds on long groundwork by his late parents Bert and Elaine, had been struggling to draw attention to his homebred stallion Country Day (Speightstown). It was tough going for him at Crestwood, competing with all those big Kentucky farms, and this year Klein took the decision to transfer the...