Deauville's August Sale: 240 million euros and one buyer who dominates

A month after the Summer Sale, Deauville hosts a very different sale. Arqana's August Sale (Vente d'Août) is the meeting place for elite yearlings, young horses that have never raced and are bought on their pedigree, their physique, and a measure of intuition. It is the most prestigious sale on the French calendar.

A yearling is said to be "one year old," but that's a convention rather than a measurement. Thoroughbreds all share an official birthday on January 1st, regardless of their actual foaling date. The yearlings presented at Deauville in August were born between January and May of the previous year, which gives them a real median age of 17 months, in a range from fifteen to nineteen months. A year and a half, then, rather than a year.

We applied the same method as for the Summer Sale, over the same years, from 2021 to 2025. The contrast between the two markets is striking.

A market four times bigger, ten times more expensive

Across five editions, 1,057 yearlings were sold with a named buyer, for 239.7 million euros. That is 4.4 times the Summer Sale's turnover, achieved with fewer horses.

The median price says it all: 150,000 euros, against 17,000 euros in July. Seven lots sold out of ten exceed 100,000 euros, versus only 6% at the Summer Sale. And only four horses were sold for under 20,000 euros across five years, less than 0.5% of the total.

The growth has been steady: 38.8 million in 2021, 46.4 in 2022, 52.8 in 2023, 46.9 in 2024, and 54.8 in 2025. The sale has therefore grown 41% over five editions.

Another notable difference is the sell-through rate. 65% of the lots offered find a buyer, against 56% in July, with an identical buy-back rate of 15%. A more selective catalogue sells better.

Godolphin, far out in front

Here are the ten biggest cumulative budgets across the 2021-2025 editions.

Godolphin, the racing operation of Dubai's ruling family, spends on its own 9.4% of the sale's turnover, more than double the runner-up. Its 31 yearlings over five years cost an average of 728,000 euros apiece.

One case is worth pointing out: Amo Racing enters the top 10 with a single edition of presence. In 2025, the stable bought four yearlings for 4.95 million euros, including one at 3 million, the highest price of the period. A single buyer can therefore break into the tenth spot of a five-year ranking in one day.

The lesson from the budgets: there is no consistency here

This is the deepest difference from the Summer Sale, and it doesn't show up in the totals. Let's look at Godolphin's spending year by year.

Between 2024 and 2025, the budget is multiplied by twenty. Al Shaqab Racing, fourth in the ranking, is simply absent from two of the five editions. Oliver St Lawrence, second in the ranking, bought nothing in 2025.

At the Summer Sale, six of the ten biggest buyers are present every year with comparable budgets. At the August Sale, only half are present at all five editions, and their spending varies enormously from one year to the next.

What a large stable spends in one year says almost nothing about what it will spend the next. That's true at the August Sale, and much less so at the Summer Sale.

This instability has a practical consequence for a seller: counting on a big buyer's presence because they were there last year is a bet, not a forecast.

On the sellers' side, an even stronger concentration

While buyers are spread out, sellers are far less so. Across these five editions, the Wertheimer operation dominates by a wide margin, under its two names: 40.9 million euros across 87 yearlings listed under Monceaux, plus 23.3 million across 64 lots listed under Écurie des Monceaux, the stud and the racing stable of the same family. Combined, that comes to 64.2 million euros across 151 yearlings, more than four times the second-ranked seller, Capucines, with 14.9 million across 69 lots.

In other words, a handful of consignors control a very large share of the top-end supply. This is a factor that comes up repeatedly in our price analyses: the consignor, meaning the person who presents the horse at the sale, is one of the most discriminating variables in the final price, on a par with the colt's sire.

Two sales, two different trades

The table below summarizes the gap between the two Deauville meetings, over exactly the same period.

Note that the top-10 concentration is almost identical in both sales, around 30%. So it isn't concentration that distinguishes these markets, but the entry ticket and the nature of what is being bought: an already-proven performance on one side, potential on the other.

The figures in this article cover the 2021-2025 editions of Deauville's August Sale, based on public results published by Arqana, and only concern sold lots with a named buyer. Note that there was no August Sale in 2020, replaced that year by a select-format sale adapted to the health context.