The viability of the horse business hinges on a precarious equilibrium. Its values have to work out often enough for the rich guy to keep spending, but not so often that the rest of us have to pack up and go home. Very seldom, however, are both extremes embraced so proximately as by Meg Levy last weekend.
On Sunday, the Grade I success of Valiance (Tapit) in the Juddmonte Spinster S. vindicated all the promise, in pedigree and physique, she had evinced as a $650,000 yearling sold through Levy’s Bluewater Sales at Saratoga in 2017.
Earlier that same year, however, Levy had been driving to a rather less glamorous Fasig-Tipton auction: the Kentucky Mixed Winter Sale in February. Somebody got a message to her that a boarding farm, just down the Newtown Pike, was trying to find a home for an abandoned More Than Ready mare. Staring at an unpaid bill of $10,000 and counting, they would take $500 to remove the wretched creature from their books.
Well, it was Levy’s birthday; and the mare was named, of all things, Four Wishes. “Oh, gosh, well you never know,” Levy said to herself. “Why not stop by and see her?”
