EUROPE (by Christopher Hector) looking at the new crop of champion young stallions: Throughout Europe, breed administrators are under severe pressure as the numbers of mares covered continues to drop and the Warmblood breeding industry’s economic downturn continues. Perhaps this pressure may have contributed to some of the slightly ‘left field’ licensing decisions, as the various commissions try desperately to discover the stallion that will re-ignite the mare owners’ passion to breed....
The Trakheners have always seemed to march to the beat of a somewhat different drummer, but this time their revamped stallion licensing set the trend for the rest of Germany when they crowned Sir Sansibar their champion – one of five sons of the Sprehe-based stallion, Millennium, that they licensed. Sir Sansibar was subsequently sold for €300,000 ($374,008) to Austria’s Eva-Maria Aufrecht which, given the prices for Millennium colts at all the subsequent licens- ing auctions, was something of a bargain... although sometimes there is just a tiny suspicion when we see the massive auction prices that there might have been an agreement between the buyer and seller to inflate the numbers as a handy marking tool.
![Albert Sprehe and his two amazing champion stallions by Coupe d'Or (left) and Milleni- um [Trak] (right).](http://breedingnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Siegerhengste.jpg)
