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Alright, let’s talk about Tepin, and everything that went down with that story.
In case you missed it, the death of Hall of Famer Tepin was revealed by trainer Aidan O’Brien during a series of post-race interviews after Tepin’s daughter Grateful won the Group 1 Prix de Royallieu at Longchamp.
It was later confirmed to the Paulick Report that Tepin had died in 2023 – potentially over a year and a half ago, depending on when it happened. If Grateful hadn’t become a Group 1 winner, and Aidan O’Brien hadn’t mentioned Tepin’s death in passing as a result of it, we might have never know if or when Tepin had died.
In the wake of the story being published, there were several cries of “Bad Journalism” for reasons ranging from why it took so long to report her death, to why there weren’t more details.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there was some “Bad Journalism” in the piece that I will own up to, and to do so, I wanted to go over what happened that day, and how the story got put together. In the process, let’s talk about what farms do – and should – owe the public when a famous horse dies.
So, word got around of Tepin’s death in the Keeneland press box on Saturday afternoon after someone noted that Aidan O’Brien had been quoted in a publication mentioning it. At the time, that’s all any of us had to run with.
Now, let’s talk about Tepin’s owner, and why that made this all a complicating factor. Tepin was purchased by the Coolmore partnership for $8 million at the 2017 Fasig-Tipton November sale, and she spent most of her remaining years as part of their Irish broodmare band.
Coolmore has a history of not going public with notable broodmare deaths. Vertigineux, the dam of the mighty Zenyatta, died in 2014, but her death wasn’t announced by Coolmore until June 2015. That was nearly a decade ago now, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe their hand was forced after some degree of social media pressure. Like Tepin, we might have never known when of if Vertigineux had died if the ball hadn’t bounced the right way.
To their credit, Coolmore has been one of the leaders in the Horse Country tours, and the fan access they’ve allowed to Triple Crown winners American Pharoah and Justify has been admirable. That said, they have a broodmare band featuring some of the world’s greatest racemares, and they don’t provide much for public check-ins on social media or elsewhere. Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta are unique and extreme examples of fan outreach for famous racemares, but there is a sliding scale that can provide comparable levels of information and satisfaction.
The second complicating factor was that Tepin was in Ireland. If she’d have died in the U.S., the chances of the news getting out, either by word of mouth or Jockey Club records, were higher. Because Equineline records are not as comprehensive when a horse leaves the country, a gap in a mare’s produce record could mean she’s died, or it could mean she just went on a cold streak producing foals, and it’s taken longer to be logged into our system.
So, with all of this information in hand, this brings us to the big question – What did Coolmore owe us here in regards to Tepin?
The shortest and simplest answer here is they owed us nothing. [But that’s not the only answer.]
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