Tom Durant’s Flightline colt shatters OBS record at $10.5 million

Tom Durant turned a $575,000 weanling into the spring’s loudest bloodstock headline. His Flightline colt, cataloged as Hip 1056 at Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company and later named Zedan, sold for $10.5 million during the final session of the OBS Spring 2-Year-Olds in Training Sale on April 17, shattering the auction’s juvenile record and landing as the second-highest price ever paid for a 2-year-old at auction in North America.

The colt’s appeal was built in the sales ring and confirmed on the track. During the OBS under-tack show, he worked a furlong in :09 3/5, a sharp clocking that helped ignite the frenzy around a son of Flightline already carrying elite-mare appeal and a heavyweight Florida breeze-up reputation. Donato Lanni signed the ticket for Zedan Racing Stable after a spirited bidding war, and the colt was delivered to Bob Baffert’s barn at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, on April 18, shortly before 9 p.m.

For Durant, the purchase was less about romance than about the mechanics of a high-end gamble. The Texas dealer bought the colt through Classic Equine at the 2024 Keeneland November Breeding Stock Sale, then leaned on Dean DeRenzo and Randy Hartley of Hartley/DeRenzo Thoroughbreds, a partnership he formed seven years ago, to identify the kind of prospect that could move from six figures to seven figures and beyond. Durant, who built his fortune outside a traditional racing family, said the business remains central to how he thinks about horses.

That business is substantial. Durant owns Classic Chevrolet in Grapevine, Texas, along with 16 other Chevrolet dealerships, and GM Authority reported in April 2026 that Classic Chevrolet was the number-one Chevy dealer in the world for the third straight year, following top-sales rankings from 2023 through 2025. The same operator who sells trucks in North Texas has spent decades building a horse operation with equal ambition.

Durant’s racing story began in Quarter Horse racing in the 1980s and shifted to Thoroughbreds in 1997, when Lone Star Park opened in Grand Prairie, Texas. He became one of the track’s defining owners and, through 2024, held the Lone Star record for the most leading-owner titles with eight. That background makes the Flightline colt feel like a familiar kind of Durant move: find the right asset early, trust the people closest to the market, and be willing to pay when the signals line up.

Hartley and DeRenzo were not done there. During the same OBS sale week, they also sold a Jackie's Warrior filly for $2.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a filly at OBS. But even that result was overshadowed by Hip 1056, a colt whose price reset the standard for what a top juvenile can command when pedigree, physical, timing and risk appetite all hit at once.