Tide might be turning for Dawn Approach with emergence of Musis Amica

For all the important dispersals that have taken place in America over the years, there still remains a nostalgic sense of awe of how that belonging to the Hardin family's Newstead Stud played out at Fasig-Tipton during a November evening back in 1985.

It was the mid 1980s, the bloodstock market was booming and nowhere was that better illustrated than that night in Kentucky where 43 horses belonging to Taylor Hardin's elite Virginia-based enterprise grossed $37,186,000 for an average of $885,381. Various dispersals have turned over greater totals since then - the Edward P Evans dispersal of 2011, for instance, grossed $62,347,000 for 220 horses sold - but the fact that those 17 mares from Newstead returned an average of $1,473,535 was truly staggering. So was the demand for the 20 stallion shares, led by an interest in Seattle Slew that made $2.4 million to Allen Paulson. Perhaps even more remarkable was the $1.075 million paid by Peter Brant and Carl Icahn's Foxfield for a share in Northern Dancer, then rising 26-years-old. In all, 12 lots made a million dollars or more.

The main dispersal itself was powered by demand for two Newstead families, in particular that belonging to multiple Grade 2-winning Sea Bird mare Kittiwake which accounted for $18.25 million of the night's turnover. There was her champion multiple Grade 1-winning daughter Miss Oceana, who led the way at a record $7 million to Foxfield (she died less than three years later). Another daughter, Grade 2 winner Larida, fell to the Icahn - Brant partnership at $4 million, seemingly a record figure for a barren mare. Her Seattle Slew filly foal, meanwhile, realised $2.5 million to the BBA; named Magic Of Life, she went on to win the 1988 Coronation Stakes for Stavros Niarchos before becoming an important producer. As for her Kittiwake herself, she made $3.8 million as a 17-year-old in foal to Alydar to Joe Allbritton's Mint Tree Stable.