Amo Racing targets Royal Ascot colts at Goffs Breeze-Up Sale

Kia Joorabchian has sharpened Amo Racing’s brief at the breeze-ups. At Goffs, the target is not volume for its own sake but a small number of colts Kevin Philippart de Foy can aim at Royal Ascot, a cleaner shopping list that says as much about restraint as it does about ambition.

That matters because Amo is no longer buying from a position of panic. Joorabchian skipped the Tattersalls Craven Breeze-Up Sale and spent time in Ocala at OBS instead, while last year’s yearling business left the stable with a more balanced two-year-old group. With the team better stocked, Amo can wait for the right type rather than chase every sharp-moving juvenile with a flashy breeze. In a market where overpaying is the easiest mistake to make, that discipline is the edge.

Goffs is the place Amo keeps coming back to. The operation has already hit with Power Blue, Arizona Blaze and Graceful Thunder through the Doncaster route, and the sale’s recent record gives the strategy real weight. Goffs says its Doncaster breeze-up graduates have produced 11 Royal Ascot winners in the last 10 years, while the 2025 renewal produced another set of numbers that underline the market’s heat: 206 catalogued, 168 offered, 141 sold, turnover of £11,813,000, an average of £83,781, a median of £37,000 and a top lot of £1,000,000.

Power Blue is the clearest example of why Amo is shopping there. He landed the Group 1 Phoenix Stakes at the Curragh in 2025, beating stablemate True Love, and became the first Group winner for sire Space Blues. Arizona Blaze has developed into a Group 3 winner and Group 1-placed sprinter, while Graceful Thunder, now a five-year-old mare, has three career wins. Those are the kinds of returns that make a breeze-up purchase look less like a gamble and more like a calculated move.

The timing adds another layer. Goffs brands the sale as the Royal Ascot 2YO Sale, and its 2026 catalogue contains 233 entries, with breezes set for 21 April and the auction on 22 April at Doncaster. Amo’s retained trainer move, sealed when Philippart de Foy was appointed at Freemason Lodge in July 2025, gives the buying plan a clear home base; he had trained just shy of 200 winners in Britain then, with a peak of 61 winners and more than £860,000 in prize-money in 2023. Lover Girl’s recent juvenile win has already offered a timely sign that the pipeline is live. The message is plain: Amo is still spending, but now it is spending with a map.