The Legend of Snaafi Dancer
Written by Patrick Moquin
In the warm light of a late summer evening in 1983, a hush settles over the Keeneland Sales Pavilion in Lexington, Kentucky. The scent of polished wood and fresh hay lingers in the air as a young colt steps into the auction ring. He is a striking figure: a deep brown coat that catches the light like burnished copper, and a bold white blaze that splits his face with regal certainty. Even among the hundreds of horses being seen that season, this one makes people pause.
The crowd leans in. Beneath the glare of the overhead lights, the usual poker-faced buyers — owners, breeders, power brokers of the Bluegrass — seem paler than usual, caught between awe and calculation. The colt, for his part, looks back at them with quiet curiosity, as if trying to understand what all the fuss is about.
Born the year before to impeccable bloodlines, the horse has spent his first months far from the spotlight. He was raised by a little-known breeder — an outsider in a world ruled by lineage and legacy — who has placed all his hope and imagination into this foal. To him, the colt is nothing short of a miracle. What the man doesn’t know, can’t know, is just how far this moment will echo.
The auctioneers begin their rhythmic patter, their voices overlapping in a ritual as old as the sport itself. The colt circles slowly, his name still unspoken, but his pedigree already well-known. Whispers turn to silence. Then, the bidding begins.
At first, offers come from every direction — sharp nods, raised catalogs, subtle gestures passed between the seats. But soon, the field narrows. Two buyers remain. Their signals quicken, their rivalry sharpening with each nod, each escalating number. The crowd becomes still — no longer participants, but witnesses.
Through it all, the colt remains composed, unaware that in a matter of minutes, his life — and theirs — is changing.
Until that night, his world had been quiet.
Donald T. Johnson is sick of the coal mines. For nearly two decades, he’s toiled underground in Pike County, Kentucky. He’s about to leave his career as a mine operator with a small fortune. A self-made millionaire, ready to chase a dream. It’s 1974. While horses have long since been replaced by cars as symbols of American success, the dream of raising a champion never died in Kentucky. Johnson, emboldened by his wealth and the grit it took to earn it, sets his sights on the world of thoroughbred racing.
Johnson has more than enough money to set funds aside for a modest breeding operation. For a man of his stature, it could have started as a high-rolling hobby. If fortune doesn’t favor his little stable right away, he can still capitalize on small successes and scale up over time. If it all goes up in smoke, he can go back to Pike County with plenty in the bank and a few stories to share from another world. But that isn’t Johnson’s style.
He isn’t in it for the hobby. He’s in it to breed the best racehorses in the world.
He takes his profits from Crescent Coal Company and puts them into the newly-founded Crescent Farm, a facility covering about 1,000 acres in Lexington. He likes to refer to it as a “scruffy pig farm,” but the truth is that it was land befitting a blue blood of the sport.
The sprawling green fields can comfortably allow hundreds of horses to graze on the grounds. The central building, a gem of wood and glass nestled among the rolling hills of the Bluegrass, made an appearance in Architectural Digest. By 1985, the farm’s full cash value is listed at $5.6 million — a modern-day figure of $16.6 million.
Johnson is the first to admit that he has no idea what he’s doing, but his new stables land him squarely in the middle of the most important racing industry in the Western hemisphere. He begins to make friends.
From Crescent Farm on Bryan Station Road, Johnson can drive a mile in any direction and end up at the doorstep of a historic horse breeder. He is even closer to John Gaines, longtime owner of Gainesway Farm, who becomes an early partner and confidant.
Over the course of a decade, Gaines, with his square-rimmed glasses and tidy suits in the winner’s circle, has already earned a reputation as a rising horseman in the business, taking over much of his father’s operation and founding the thoroughbred division of Gainesway. Still in his 40s when he meets Johnson, Gaines is becoming known as a terse individual who treats his passions seriously. A student of art and literature in his spare time, his search for understanding extends far beyond the thoroughbred market he is slowly mastering.
The talented head of Gainesway frequently partners with other breeders, which seems to come from an honest effort to exchange ideas and grow. Known for his shrewd operating skills and firm decision-making, his innovations over four decades helped to shape the industry as it is understood today.
And so with Gaines’ help, Johnson slowly begins to learn the art of breeding racehorses, the theory behind it, and the less elegant manner in which the practice is carried out. He finds that a breeder may spend months contemplating the racing careers and pedigrees of prospective sires — male breeding horses — and dams to their foals. Many breeders are chasing a kind of perfect harmony — a foal with the ideal genetic blend of stamina and speed, one that matures into a flawlessly built racehorse.
In the end, however, the act of breeding remains a direct, sometimes aggressive act between two horses, and the resulting offspring rarely lives up to expectations. If Johnson wants to break into the industry, he has to begin thinking realistically. Gaines shows him the way.
Perhaps even more importantly, Gaines introduces Johnson to Keeneland Sales, the organization responsible for some of the largest thoroughbred auctions in the world. To this day, horses that sell for large sums in the Keeneland Sales Pavilion in Lexington are regarded as stars before they ever step foot on a racetrack.
In Johnson’s first few years, Gaines helps him purchase approximately 25 broodmares — or female horses kept for breeding. The pair sells dozens of foals together at Keeneland. Johnson slowly begins to develop a respectable operation.
Five years pass, and Crescent Farm is beginning to find its footing. Under the quiet mentorship of John Gaines and others, Johnson is learning quickly, shaping himself from a curious outsider into a capable breeder. Then, sometime around 1980, he makes the decision that will define his legacy — a bold move from a man still green in the eyes of the industry. He reaches out to the legendary Canadian horseman E.P. Taylor, inquiring about the price of a small stake in one of his sires.
If Gaines has helped steer Kentucky’s racing scene into the modern era, Taylor has done something even more seismic north of the border. Over nearly half a century, the Canadian businessman transformed his country’s thoroughbred industry. He is a towering figure — not only a wildly successful breeder and owner, but also a visionary organizer whose influence reshaped the sport in Canada from the ground up.
Back in 1973, it is Taylor who persuaded Penny Chenery to enter Secretariat in the Canadian International — as the last race of his career. The Triple Crown winner’s appearance at the new Woodbine Racetrack in Ontario helps earn the venue international recognition. When Johnson approaches Taylor to propose a long-term partnership, he is reaching out to a titan of the sport.
Agreeing to a small annual deal, Taylor’s Windfields Farms allocates time in their prized stallion’s breeding schedule each year to one of Johnson's broodmares. Johnson will later sell that share for five times the price, but before he does, his broodmares give birth to three foals.
They were sired by a horse named Northern Dancer.
A bay stallion known for his startling speed and a crooked white blaze down his face, Northern Dancer had become the first Canadian-bred winner of the Kentucky Derby in 1964. He finished his career on the track as a superstar, winning 14 races in 18 career starts. He made a seamless transition to the breeding shed in 1965, and after more than a decade as a stallion, he was well into one of the most successful stud careers in racing history, consistently producing stakes winners each year.
In buying a share of Taylor’s prized stallion, Johnson is simply looking for well-regarded sires to cover his broodmares. Northern Dancer fits the bill and is already one of the best in North America. But almost immediately after Crescent Farm buys in, the sire becomes the focal point of the most lucrative spending period in the history of horse racing.
By 1983, several of Northern Dancer’s progeny have sold for millions, and by the end of the decade, his offspring nearly fill the entire list of the 10 most expensive yearlings ever purchased at Keeneland. In this sense, when Johnson arrives at the Keeneland July Select Sale in 1983, he isn’t bringing a striking brown yearling with a white blaze matching his father. “Hip No. 308,” as he was designated at the sale, is a colt by Northern Dancer. That single detail all but guarantees a sale in the hundreds of thousands, if not far beyond.
Maybe Johnson has taken Gaines’ lessons to heart. Maybe he’s lucky. The fact of the matter is that the retired coal tycoon has invested in the most highly regarded sire of the decade just before his reputation soared. As his star yearling walks through the Keeneland stalls, however, the breeder isn’t proud or boastful.
In another world, Johnson may have spoken about the coal business in bold and certain terms, but his interviews as a breeder reveal a softer edge and an awareness of his own powerlessness. In a short time, he has been humbled by his second profession. Regularly hounded by reporters after settling his yearling at Keeneland, he doesn’t express much more than relief.
“He was running around and kicking and bucking,” Johnson says to a gaggle of reporters about his horse shortly before the sale. “I was scared to death he was going to hurt himself. That's the thing that worries you. Not so much what they're going to bring, but that something might happen to them. People don't realize that every one of these yearlings represents a lot of heartaches for these breeders.”
Anyone in the know could have guessed what crossed Johnson’s mind when he thought of heartache. Two years before, the first of his three Northern Dancer yearlings had to be pulled from the sales ring because of a throat obstruction. In 1982, the second, a full brother to that colt, died six weeks before the sale because of an intestinal virus. Unprepared for the tragedy, Johnson had not insured the horse.
“He has a frustrating insistence on letting nature take its course,” his wife tells people.
Uninterested in heartless payouts, Johnson is seeking a legacy at a cost, and his fortunes are again out of his control in 1983 when Hip 308 arrives at Keeneland as a minor celebrity. Johnson firmly states that he is the best horse he has ever bred.
But he’s anxious, fretting over the yearling with his staff while hundreds of prospective buyers are stopping by to make their final inspections. Monty Hinton, a retired horseman who was working as a bloodstock agent, is sharing stable space with Johnson when Hip 308 entered the sale at Keeneland.
“You knew he had a good horse,” Hinton says, looking back on an era of horse racing ruled by untethered speculation and his foggy memories of Johnson, the new man in the ring doing his best to keep up. “But you have no idea until you go in the ring. He was valuable and he was going to bring a lot of money, but you just don't know how much.”
There are two sides to every pedigree, and in this case, the yearling by Northern Dancer has an impressive dam to match — a mare named My Bupers, who never made it to the track but was highly regarded as a broodmare, having produced 1976 American Champion sprinter My Juliet.
There are other encouraging signs for Johnson, too. Though many buyers stop by Hip 308’s stall before the event, many more came to Crescent Farm to look at him beforehand. He is regarded as a good-looking type with signs of early development. He isn’t exceptionally tall, but Northern Dancer was on the smaller side himself and passed the trait on to most of his offspring.
Beyond glowing pedigree analyses and positive physical inspections, Hinton sees owners and trainers sifting through the feed at the horse’s stall to better understand his diet. They aren’t looking for reasons to buy the yearling. They are trying, and struggling, to find flaws.
Two men find the yearling particularly interesting. Their shared appreciation for similar runners has already caused a rift between them. As they step into the Keeneland Sales Pavilion, they are seated nearly 40 feet apart. On one side is British magnate Robert Sangster; on the other, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the powerful Crown Prince of Dubai. All in attendance understand that this sale could turn into the next chapter of a deepening rivalry. They stand, locked in silence, each surrounded by a tight ring of advisors, eyes trained forward, every gesture weighed and calculated.
Across the ocean, Sangster is fighting to hold onto his position as the dominant force in British racing — a kingdom built on risk, instinct, and deep pockets. But for the first time, the foundation is shifting. For the first time, he is beginning to lose.
Sangster made his fortune running Vernons Pools, his family’s gambling business, which controlled a significant portion of the United Kingdom’s betting market for decades. The gambling culture teaches Sangster how to turn a moment into a market. He inevitably turns his attention to horse racing with a stone-cold understanding of value, and in the early 1970s, he forms a partnership that indelibly changes the sport.
From 1945 to 1968, Coolmore Stud is a small farm in County Cork, Ireland, converted from an agricultural operation to a modest thoroughbred outfit. But when Sangster joins forces with Coolmore’s young breeder John Magnier and his father-in-law, highly regarded Irish trainer Vincent O’Brien, the path is cleared for the barn to become an industry powerhouse.
The trio — known as “The Brethren” — has a deceptively simple strategy: they plan to use Sangster’s money to corner the market on choice bloodlines at yearling sales. They target Northern Dancer’s progeny specifically. O’Brien then trains and races these horses out of Ballydoyle, his training grounds in nearby County Tipperary. When they retired as champions, Magnier arranges for them to breed at Coolmore for exorbitant stud fees.
“Top thoroughbreds are an international currency,” Sangster says to any reporter who will listen at the 1981 sale. “Like antiques.” His bids have become the highlight of every auction in recent years, the status of his yearlings growing merely because he purchased them.
Between 1977 and 1984, Sangster is Britain’s Champion Owner five times. The award is given at the end of each season to the owner with the highest earnings. But as the 1980s progress, the ground begins to shift. Sangster suddenly faces stiff competition in the sales rings.
His status as the financier within The Brethren worsens his anxiety. In his best years, O’Brien seems capable of training any horse into the winner’s circle. Magnier, the breeder, already has enough bloodstock in his barn to turn a profit for decades. But Sangster’s money is supposed to keep Coolmore moving forward when Sheikh Mohammed begins appearing at auctions with plans to build an elite thoroughbred operation of his own.
In the beginning, Sheikh Mohammed’s plan to become a leading thoroughbred owner is as simple as Sangster’s. With the help of his brothers, powerful political leaders in their own right, and virtually unlimited wealth from oil, he buys existing thoroughbred farms in Europe and makes them new bases for his racing empire-in-waiting. One of these is Aston Upthorpe Stud in South Oxfordshire, England, which becomes famous as the face of his outrageous bids at auction. With a European infrastructure in place, he plans to beat Sangster at his own game.
Sheikh Mohammed’s behavior in the sales ring sparks a rivalry almost immediately. By the time Johnson brings his yearling to auction in 1983, Sheikh Mohammed and Sangster are already in the habit of bidding one another up to absurd prices. It is a victory to outbid the other man, but it is also a victory to make the other man overspend. The interactions are tense and political in nature, but they can also be unreasonable and even farcical.
In 1981, when Sheikh Mohammed parks his private Boeing 727 within view of the auction house across the street, Sangster jokes to the press that he hid the plane from view by parking the Goodyear Blimp in front of it. (The blimp had actually been diverted by weather.)
In that year’s auction — one of the first direct conflicts between the two men — two horses become key battlegrounds. Both are bred by E.P. Taylor himself and sired by Northern Dancer. The two yearlings sell within minutes of one another.
In the first bidding war between Sangster and the Al Maktoum family, the Englishman goes further than he ever has before. Sheikh Mohammed pushes him even further, pulling focus from the man who has run English horse racing for a decade. Sangster responds to the challenge and won’t be denied in front of a captive Keeneland audience. He eventually wins the auction for $3.5 million, a new record at the time. The Brethren thought highly enough to eventually name the horse Ballydoyle, honoring O’Brien’s famous training facility.
Soon after the record sale, Aston Upthorpe wins its own bidding war, buying the other Northern Dancer yearling for $3.3 million. It’s a sizable consolation prize. The Al Maktoum family calls the horse Shareef Dancer, an homage to his sire combined with the Arabic word for “noble” or “highborn.”
As is always the case, results on the track determine the true victor. Ballydoyle races four times for Sangster, winning once before retiring. Shareef Dancer has a similarly brief career, but in a brilliant three-year-old season, the colt is named the United Kingdom’s Champion Middle Distance Horse. Sangster might be outspending Sheikh Mohammed, but in 1981, the Emirati ruler picks the right horse. With time, his desire to beat the Englishman only grows.
After weeks of swirling speculation and whispered predictions, Hip 308 — the son of the legendary Northern Dancer and the unraced mare My Bupers — steps into the Keeneland sales ring on the night of July 19, 1983. It is late, near midnight, the final stretch of the auction’s second and closing day. Some have worried the timing would hurt the colt’s price. They are wrong.
The bidding opens at $1 million.
In that moment, the colt ceases to be just a promising yearling. His fate becomes bound to something far larger — a clash of ambition, wealth, and pride playing out beneath the vaulted ceilings of the pavilion.
Shareef Dancer’s victory in the Irish Derby is less than four weeks before the 1983 Keeneland July Sale and it’s certainly fresh in Sangster’s mind when Hip 308, another son of Northern Dancer, passes the previous sales record of $4.5 million in 45 seconds. The price eventually rises to $6 million, at which point only Sangster and Sheikh Mohammed remain in the bidding. Several people in the crowd are audibly shocked, then fall silent as the price continues going up.
Sangster and O’Brien pause and huddle before moving forward with each bid. Intensely focused within his circle, Sheikh Mohammed counters almost immediately, with a curt nod to his bidding representative each time. By some accounts, Robert Acton, Sheikh Mohammed’s stud manager, begins calling over to Sangster’s group as their deliberations grow longer.
“You're never going to beat us,” Acton says, jeering openly at his nearby rivals. They’re certainly close enough to hear him. “Why try?”
The two sides continue their pitched battle, and auction officials joke that Keeneland isn’t prepared to keep track of the incoming bids. They are right.
A few more frenzied minutes pass, and at the very end of his rope, Sangster agrees to a bid that would have been considered impossible five years prior. It isn’t driven by logic or even reason, and it's likely that he knows that. Sangster is sending a silent message, dripping with pride and defiance, a bold-faced dare to his incomparably wealthy rival. Sheikh Mohammed doesn’t hesitate to make his final response. He is sending a clear message of his own.
When the gavel finally falls and Hip 308 is led back out of the ring, the electronic bid tracker above reads that he had sold for $200,000. It is inaccurate. The tracker is limited to a seven-digit display. Northern Dancer’s newest debutant has sold for $10.2 million.
Sheikh Mohammed immediately walks out of the Keeneland Sales Pavilion without uttering another word. A man in his group repeatedly yells, “We got him!” He navigates in silence through the waiting press to his limousine, which takes him straight to his plane. He is in the air within an hour. Later that summer, his newest yearling follows.
It’s a legacy-defining night for Johnson — the coal-country horseman whose moment had been delayed by two years of bad luck. From the day he bought into Northern Dancer’s stud book, he had unknowingly positioned himself at the epicenter of a brewing storm: a high-stakes rivalry between two of the most powerful figures in global racing. As their feud ignited, Johnson became one of its earliest — and most fortunate — beneficiaries.
On that July evening, he isn’t just a former coal magnate dabbling in thoroughbreds. He is now the breeder of the most expensive yearling ever sold at public auction. Hip 308 is his, in name only. Whatever dreams Johnson still holds for the colt’s future, they are now out of his hands.
As the gavel falls, the son of Northern Dancer stands quietly, a bystander to his own story. Moments later, he is led from the ring, loaded onto a trailer, and flown overseas. He will never return to Lexington — not as a runner, not as a stallion.
He will soon be named Snaafi Dancer, and for a time, he will train as if the world is watching. But on the night of the sale, under the blinding lights and towering scoreboard at Keeneland, he is already overshadowed — literally — by the glowing red-orange numbers overhead. A symbol of wealth, of hope, of rivalry.
He has never asked for any of it. He has never promised anyone anything.
As Sheikh Mohammed returns to the United Arab Emirates, his $10.2 million yearling is being shipped to England, where he enters the care of trainer John Dunlop.
Dunlop has been the head trainer at Castle Stables in Arundel, Sussex, since the late 1960s. After a decade of steady success, his career soars when he becomes the primary trainer for Sheikh Mohammed’s European racing interests.
Many people have likened the Kentucky Bluegrass to a land divinely intended to nurture equine life. The stories are different in Europe. Castle Stables stands as a stark reminder of the true origin of the Sport of Kings, when royalty bent the forces of nature itself over centuries to create a new pastime.
In the shadow of Arundel Castle, the home of the Duke of Norfolk, Sheikh Mohammed’s $10.2 million colt settles into a new world under grey skies and ancient stonework. His trainer is as much a part of the landscape as the ancient structures. Dunlop, perpetually dressed in immaculate flannel suits and handmade oxblood shoes, holds himself to a standard befitting his station.
In his early days, cantering through light workouts, the colt’s new team is cautiously optimistic about his progress. Dunlop remains silent, but staff around the barn publicly praise the colt for a smooth transition to the training track. His name comes about during this hopeful time, making the usual nod to his sire and coupling it with “Snaafi.”
At first, some reporters misspell the name as “Snaffy” in their articles. When they ask what the word means, the secretary at Dunlop’s stable responds that the word means “elegant.” Most people at Castle Stables are English; the truth is that they don’t seem to know what it means. It is more accurately a Gulf-dialect Arabic word for “reliable.” Either way, it’s a rough translation.
For all of the attention that young horses receive at high-profile auctions, the thoroughbred industry is closely guarded. Once that moment in the spotlight is over, horses return to an intrinsically private life. Some never re-emerge. And unless they are exceptional, most yearlings that sell at auction are not seen again by the general public until they reach the track as 2- or 3-year-olds. Even then, their activities in the early morning are obscure and are only brought to light by successes and failures in the afternoon’s races.
But his eye-watering sale meant that Snaafi Dancer is a wonder horse, enjoying far more attention than most. Starting around the time he turned 2, in 1984, he is regularly photographed by national and local British publications in anticipation of his upcoming debut.
Dunlop prefers to keep him hidden, only relenting to public interest on a few occasions, allowing the press brief glimpses at racing’s next potential champion. Initial reports suggest that he makes his first start in the summer of his 2-year-old season, a typical window for precocious colts to debut.
Having trained Sheikh Mohammed’s horses since the owner’s first winner in 1977, Dunlop has grown accustomed to working with the ruler’s high-profile juveniles. The trainer is known for handling his horses with decency and respect, but no one in Castle Stables receives unearned treatment as a star. Dunlop might be the only person who never considered Snaafi Dancer in the true context of his $10.2 million price tag.
“We've had a rider on him for some months now, but it's still very early to say what kind of performance he will eventually give,” Dunlop says to a curious and hopeful pool of reporters in April 1984. They’re looking for something more encouraging from the candid trainer. Some of them bury his comments deep in their columns alongside massive spreads of the horse in action.
The trainer’s comments aren’t dismissive. They’re tepid. It’s just a few months before Snaafi Dancer’s prospective summer debut, and while it’s a sign that the horse is developing slowly, it’s not a reason to panic. Reports elsewhere in the stable are positive. Exercise riders and assistants might be noticing that something is off, but they still praise him for his demeanor and easygoing nature in training. But the mood around his stall at Castle Stables is about to darken.
Several months after arriving in Arundel, Snaafi Dancer develops a severe lung infection and is taken off his training regimen. Not long after, his potential return date in the fall is delayed. The 1984 season comes and goes and Snaafi Dancer does not race.
In the meantime, Sheikh Mohammed purchases 29 more yearlings at the 1984 Keeneland July Sale alone, including four sired by Northern Dancer. The total price tag: $16.6 million. Sangster and Coolmore buy 23 yearlings at the same sale and give Sheikh Mohammed trouble at every turn, purchasing four Northern Dancer yearlings of their own for a combined $19 million.
The public hype around Snaafi Dancer has not yet faded, even as Dunlop delays his debut to 1985. In the eyes of racing fans, he still has time to live up to his mythic potential. To Sheikh Mohammed, however, the colt’s stalling progress is antithetical to his blinding passion and ravenous ambition.
The Middle East’s connection to horses goes back millennia. Historians have discovered evidence of domesticated breeding on the peninsula as far back as 2000 B.C. Two Arabian horses, shipped to England in the late 1600s and early 1700s, are credited as founding sires of the modern thoroughbred bloodstock. Known as the Godolphin Arabian and Darley Arabian, both were born in the Middle East.
To this day, Sheikh Mohammed’s personal life revolves around his passion for horse racing. In 2019, the Emirati leader released a book of 18 poems dedicated to his lifelong love of horses. He regularly releases similar poems to celebrate events like the Dubai World Cup, formerly the richest race in the world and hosted by the Sheikh in the U.A.E. since 1996.
The Gulf ruler’s desire to gain worldwide recognition in the thoroughbred racing industry, created in England long ago with Middle Eastern horses, is informed by his upbringing and culture. His ambitions, fueled further by endless wealth, may be greater than any horseman who has ever lived.
Donald Johnson took his coal money and spent it trying something new, forming a connection with nature above the ground. John Gaines, born and raised in the industry, wanted to bring American racing into a new age. E.P. Taylor, disappointed by the state of the sport in Canada, rebuilt his nation’s racing identity from the ground up. Sangster, along with the other founding members of Coolmore, worked together to become the natural inheritors of a pastime once confined to the English aristocracy.
But for Sheikh Mohammed, the effort to become a preeminent owner is inescapably a quest of reclamation, a dream of restoring Middle Eastern horse racing, specifically in Dubai, to its rightful place within the Sport of Kings. With hundreds of colts entering his barns each year — getting the ruler ever so slightly closer to that goal — Snaafi Dancer is unknowingly in a race against time.
Entering his 1985 season, reporters began to grow concerned about Snaafi Dancer’s prospects. He’s 3 years old, so there is still time for him to recover and begin his career in earnest, but in addition to questions about his soundness, Dunlop’s comments about the horse grow increasingly critical and call his abilities into question.
“He is hardly a racehorse yet. ...” Dunlop says in April 1985. The press is no longer intensely curious to report on the debut of a future champion. There is still some hope in their lines of questioning, however, and the trainer is quick to douse it. “He is progressing. But he is still backward.”
To complicate matters further, at some point in late 1984 or early 1985, Snaafi Dancer begins to grow unexpectedly, just as he is supposed to begin settling physically. It further slows his development.
“He's like a teenaged boy who has suddenly shot up and has been left rather weak as a result,” Dunlop explains to a dwindling pool of reporters. The hopeful writers armed with flowery and lionizing prose begin looking for fresher stories. Photographers, once eager to capture a champion-in-waiting, stop taking regular visits. The only people left to ask about the horse now are looking for a different, more disappointing story. They’re all too happy to hear Dunlop explain that growth and improvement don’t always mean the same thing, that a $10.2 million wonder can lose his way. They jot down the trainer’s spiraling words with blunt strokes.
Dunlop’s comments become fatalistic, and there is no longer praise coming from staff around the stables. Sheikh Mohammed always has other horses coming in, and many of them are preparing for successful debuts. In many ways, Snaafi Dancer is fading into the morning fog, lost under the massive shadow of Arundel Castle. Maybe Dunlop knew from the beginning that he never belonged there.
Any thoughts about Snaafi Dancer debuting that summer will end when bad luck strikes the entire stable. Dunlop’s string of nearly 200 horses is sidelined by a crippling virus. Only fear of mass contagion could have abated the barn’s collective disappointment in Snaafi Dancer’s struggles. “The virus,” as it is simply called by everyone there, significantly harms Dunlop’s horses. It’s a panicked period throughout the region, as the virus spreads to other barns nearby. And Snaafi Dancer is wasting away in the middle of it.
Dunlop’s established runners regress significantly on the track. Other horses’ debuts are also postponed. The virus eventually forces Dunlop to completely shut down his barn for part of the summer of 1985.
Snaafi Dancer’s lung infection returns, likely triggered by the lingering virus, and with it come troubling signs of deeper physical issues. Unspecified leg ailments begin to surface, serious enough that insiders quietly acknowledged he may not ever race at all. What were once been brushed off as minor delays are now casting long shadows over his future.
Then, in July — almost exactly two years after his record-shattering sale — Snaafi Dancer’s name reappears in headlines, but not for the reasons anyone had hoped. After suffering two years’ worth of setbacks out of the public eye, his failings are laid bare for the entire industry to see. The myth begins to collapse, and the colt who had once symbolized the pinnacle of bloodlines, ambition, and global rivalry is instead mentioned as a cautionary tale.
At the 1985 Keeneland July Sale, Sangster and Sheikh Mohammed go to battle again, though this one is conspicuously more indirect. Snaafi Dancer, trapped and possibly quarantined in his stall at Castle Stables, is already an afterthought for the Sheikh, who this time acquires 16 horses for $13.6 million. This year, however, he doesn’t go for the big one.
A yearling colt sired by Nijinsky II, the 1970 British Horse of the Year and a son of Northern Dancer, is the star of the 1985 auction. Sangster’s syndicate does not enter a bidding war with the Al Maktoum family, but they do engage with a group led by American trainer D. Wayne Lukas. By this point, Keeneland has ensured that there is enough space on the bid tracker to display an eight-digit price. This time, Sangster can’t be deterred.
The Coolmore financier outbids all other challengers to buy the horse for $13.1 million. If he had done so a few years prior, it would have been a major victory over his Arab rivals. Even in 1985, the room explodes in applause when the gavel falls, though it’s probably more out of relief than anything else. Overall sales at the auction are down significantly from the previous year. The truth is that the industry’s boom period has peaked and will soon end.
The reason Sheikh Mohammed steps aside during the record-breaking yearling sale is that he had already cut a deal, occasionally referred to as “the Treaty of Dubai.”
Two months prior, the Al Maktoum family had invited Sangster and other members of the Coolmore group for a U.A.E. summit. Details of the meeting have never been revealed, but at auctions going forward, both parties stop bidding against one another so heavily. Yearling prices at auction drop abruptly, depressing the market after years of growth. The $13.1 million sale will remain the record for 21 years.
Sangster’s prized colt, which goes on to be named Seattle Dancer, also has his career delayed by a virus at Ballydoyle, but he eventually goes on to win two stakes races in five career starts. He has a moderately successful stud career and dies in Japan in 2007. He outlives Sangster, who dies in 2004 due to complications from pancreatic cancer.
No longer sparring with Sheikh Mohammed, Sangster gradually steps away from the auction ring and spends the last decade of his life breeding his own horses and selling them. There are rumors that he falls into debt in the late 1980s, but he sells Vernons Pools in 1988 for a reported $183 million and escapes the depressed auction market relatively unscathed.
While Seattle Dancer’s sale spells the beginning of the end for the 1980s breeding boom, Snaafi Dancer is a world away in Arundel. Most articles reporting Seattle Dancer’s $13.1 million sale mentioned the $10.2 million folly two years prior.
“That price tag has been a millstone ‘round his neck since the beginning,” Dunlop says. He’s disappointed to admit it to reporters, who are likely asking questions about Snaafi Dancer at the end of interviews about better horses in his stable.
Late in his 1985 season, Snaafi Dancer is formally retired. Disregarding the horse’s price to the very end, Dunlop wishes to spare him the embarrassment of racing. He simply considers him too slow to feasibly compete. His final words on the horse read like an obituary.
“Snaafi Dancer was handsome and a great walker. He wasn't nearly so good when it came to running. Frankly, he couldn't pick his feet up at a gallop,” Dunlop says. “Of course, everyone at Castle Stables was disappointed, but it has happened before that a magnificently-bred horse is fundamentally useless.”
Following his retirement from training, Snaafi Dancer is shipped to Spring Farm Stud outside a town called London in Ontario, Canada, and begins his career in breeding. Dr. John Brown, a breeder and veterinarian, purchases a 23% stake in the horse in order to have him shipped to his farm.
Though Brown does not disclose the amount of money he paid for a share of Snaafi Dancer, he is more than happy to put down a fraction of what he would have had to pay in 1983. There is also minimal competition, and Brown jumps at the opportunity to bring him back across the Atlantic.
“We got a lot of publicity. It made me far better known in the industry,” Brown says, looking back on his early days after more than four decades at Spring Farm. “I was relatively young at the time, and we had publications from Britain and the States ... contacting us wanting the story.”
Though Sheikh Mohammed no longer cares enough to breed the horse in-house, there is still plenty of potential for Snaafi Dancer to make significant money at stud, particularly in Canada, Northern Dancer’s home nation. Regardless of his own racing failures, a direct connection to the first Canadian-bred Kentucky Derby winner makes him the representative of an immensely successful bloodline.
Many sons of Northern Dancer go on to have successful stud careers in their own right. Nijinsky II, arguably Northern Dancer’s most important descendant, was an 10-time stakes winner in Europe before he went to stud. Other influential sires had far less luck on the track. Danzig, for instance, won all three of his low-level starts in America but had to retire early due to knee problems. He went on to sire 188 graded stakes winners and helped carry Northern Dancer’s bloodline into racing today.
With the right genetics, there is sure to be interest in Snaafi Dancer’s offspring in Canada. At Spring Farm, it becomes Brown's job to deliver them.
Brown purchases his stake in Snaafi Dancer without ever seeing him, though he is brought to Ireland for a medical and fertility examination before making his trip over. The Canadian breeder claims that the horse received a clean bill of health before arriving in Ontario.
When he first appears at the barn as one of Brown’s breeding stallions, the owner does not notice anything remarkable about Snaafi Dancer. After two years of passive and cloaked comments at Castle Stables, Brown finally offers a candid assessment of the horse. He is lanky in the wrong places with a strange gait. It makes sense to the breeder that the horse never made it to the track, but now that pressure is relieved. He has a new job.
For what it’s worth, Brown discovers that the horse has an exceptional sex drive compared to other stallions he’s worked with. The breeder also notices that the horse is aggressive with mares, typical behavior for young stallions new to breeding.
Offering a reasonable $5,000 stud fee for Snaafi Dancer’s 1986 breeding season, Brown easily manages to fill the book with 40 clients whose mares would deliver Snaafi Dancer’s foals. At the time, covering 40 mares in a season was considered successful, far removed from the modern day when a stallion may cover more than 200 in the same five-month span.
Brown’s new stallion grows accustomed to his life at stud, and for the first time in a whirlwind of three years, he finally seems settled. But several months after the season ends, an obvious problem becomes apparent. Of all the mares with which he has bred, only one gets pregnant and carries a foal to term. All stud fees paid to the farm that do not result in a pregnancy have to be returned.
“If he'd been fertile, he would've had an opportunity to develop some sort of proof of his offspring,” Brown says, looking back on his time with the horse ruefully. There were taxing times ahead and he remembers them well. “To have two or three foals in the best of years, he couldn't do it.”
In a follow-up medical examination, Brown finds that, while Snaafi Dancer’s sperm count is normal, deformities in individual sperm structure make it nearly impossible for him to impregnate a mare. The source of the issue remains unclear, but the reality for Brown is that the horse’s sperm can only survive 20 minutes in vitro. It’s a clear sign of virtual infertility.
When Sheikh Mohammed learns of the latest failure of Snaafi Dancer, he divests his remaining interest in the horse. For all his care and passion for all things equine, the Emirati ruler never releases a poem about his $10.2 million horse.
Perhaps he wants to forget. Perhaps he doesn’t need to. After his backroom deal with Sangster in 1985, Sheikh Mohammad immediately takes over as the Champion Owner in Britain and wins the award every year — with one exception — from 1985 to 1993. His only loss is in 1990, to his brother, Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
His success only continues. In 1992, Sheikh Mohammad opens a new private racing stable for his family, which becomes an international operation in 1994, and begins fulfilling the Gulf leader’s lifelong quest to restore horse racing’s prestige to its Middle Eastern roots. Since then, the stable — named Godolphin, after the Godolphin Arabian stallion that helped shape the modern thoroughbred — has claimed more than 5,000 victories and earned 16 additional Champion Owner titles.
Alongside Godolphin is Darley Stud, his breeding operation named for another of the Middle East’s foundational sires. Together, they’ve made Sheikh Mohammed the most successful owner in the history of modern British racing. Though the world may know him as the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, and the ruler of Dubai since 2006, it’s possible that no title means more to him than this one: architect of horse racing’s return to its ancient home.
Far from the Keeneland Sales Pavilion and even farther away from the Arundel Castle, Brown and Snaafi Dancer are left alone as the 1987 breeding season looms.
Instead of filling another book for Snaafi Dancer in 1987, Brown and his team explore possibilities to help him breed in a more controlled setting. Instead of 40 mares, they hand-pick seven that they can care for around the clock.
Brown chooses extremely tight windows for his stallion to breed in order to give the mares their best chance to conceive. With near-constant vigilance and care, Brown’s team manages to produce three more Snaafi Dancer foals, born in 1988. One sold for $20,000, a modest but reasonable price, at a Keeneland auction in January 1989.
The breeder proves that it is possible for his stallion to reproduce, but with such a low yield for so much work, Brown comes to terms with the fact that it isn’t feasible to carry on. After the season, he sends Snaafi Dancer away to Script R Farm in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. The stables are owned by Ray Roncari, who had purchased a 50% share of the horse some time after Sheikh Mohammed divested his interest.
“It didn't bother me that much,” Brown says about Snaafi Dancer’s troubles. Like any successful breeder, he’s realistic. “I just accepted the fact that he was [infertile]. We did the best we could with it, so let's move on. So that's what we did.”
While Snaafi Dancer crumbles further under the expectations of his bloodline, the market for American thoroughbreds continues to decline through the end of the 1980s. The U.S. government institutes a new tax code in 1986, which takes away many breaks and write-off opportunities for racehorse purchases. A national recession hits in the early 1990s, worsening matters for the industry.
In 1992, Johnson, Snaafi Dancer’s breeder who entered the business as a multi-millionaire, succumbs to the struggling breeding market and declares bankruptcy. Although he entered the business with a fortune from coal 20 years prior, by the time he is forced to sell Crescent Farm, his annual revenue has plummeted by more than 90%. He owes more than $12 million to various lenders in Kentucky.
Gainesway Farm, where Johnson was introduced to the industry in the 1970s, is listed as one of the creditors in his bankruptcy filings. John Gaines, his old mentor, sold the farm several years prior.
Johnson is one of many breeders and owners who leave the business around this time. His lasting legacy is always the $10.2 million laughing stock of Snaafi Dancer. Others weather the storm and recover, but Johnson cannot.
While his father, Northern Dancer, sired 411 winners and 147 stakes winners in his breeding career, Snaafi Dancer impregnated a total of just four mares. Winloc’s Snaafison, Snaafi Dancer’s only offspring from his first breeding season and also his only male progeny to race, competes eight times between 1990 and 1992. He never wins and never produces any of his own foals.
Really Snaafi, a female born in 1988, races five times in May and June 1991. She never wins and never produces any foals.
Winloc’s Dancer, the other female born in 1988 who is sold at auction for $20,000, goes on to have the lengthiest career of the three. She races 16 times and wins a maiden claiming race at Turf Paradise in Kentucky in April 1992. She never produces any foals.
Snaafi Dancer’s fourth foal, a male, is the most obscure. He is never named and likely did not live to see a year. He was born in April 1988 and there are records that Spring Farm sold him for $1,238 at a local auction in October of that year. But the family of the owner who purchases the horse does not remember doing so, and Brown remembers that one of the mares Snaafi Dancer impregnated eventually lost her foal.
On November 16, 1990, the great Northern Dancer is euthanized after suffering a severe colic, or intense abdominal pain. He lived one year longer than E.P. Taylor, who owned him for his entire life. The horse is brought back to Windfields Farm in Ontario, his old home, in a specially built coffin and buried the same day. His career earnings at the track are $580,647, with millions more coming at stud.
The fates of Snaafi Dancer and his four descendants are unknown.
By the time Snaafi Dancer settles into an obscure life under the care of Roncari in Connecticut, several publications begin to erroneously claim that he has been sent away to South America. In a sense, it’s freedom. Very little is ever asked of him again.
Details about Snaafi Dancer’s life after his departure from Brown’s farm are extremely sparse. For a few years, Roncari goes through his own trials with the horse. A popular and prominent figure in his Windsor Locks community, Roncari is also known as a dedicated horseman. He can’t help but look at Snaafi Dancer and see an unfinished project now and then.
He allows him to graze freely with female horses, hopeful that the matter can be resolved naturally. That remedy fails, so he takes the horse to the Newbold Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania and finally learns that the horse suffers from a genetic disorder. He is missing a single chromosome. There is no practical path forward.
“He’s such a magnificent animal,” Roncari says, watching the horse idle on his farm. Snaafi Dancer seems rather content, but his owner remains frustrated. “You can see the Northern Dancer in him. It’s so sad.”
Snaafi Dancer never successfully breeds another foal.
At some point in the 1990s, Roncari reaches out to Brown, asking if he can geld, or castrate, the horse. The practice is common to make horses more agreeable, especially when there is no plan for them to breed.
Brown agrees to allow Roncari to geld the horse, but does not remember if the Connecticut owner ever went through with it. There are also talks of him becoming a show horse, primarily used for equestrian events, but Brown again can’t remember if it ever came to fruition.
At some point during his tenure in Connecticut, Snaafi Dancer stops serving a purpose at Script R Farm. He is sent down to Florida for a “quiet retirement.” As of 2006, he was presumed to be alive, though it is probable that he has since died. Even less is known about the whereabouts of his progeny, as they did not have the distinction of selling for $10.2 million.
Beyond his connection to humans, often distracted by their own relationships and conflicts, Snaafi Dancer lived a life of his own. He was pampered, exposed to disease, looked after intensely, studied, examined and eventually left alone. He likely died in obscurity, having served little to no purpose to any of the people who invested money and time in him over the course of his life.
Through no fault of his own, Snaafi Dancer joined the innumerable equine masses that never amounted to anything in the sport for which they were designed. Unlike many unsuccessful horses, he is remembered, but only because a small, powerful group of horsemen put an immense amount of faith in him for one brief moment at the beginning of his life. It didn't take long for him to be forgotten like the rest.
Everyone in attendance at Keeneland that day in 1983 was clamoring to see a future champion and progenitor of the sport’s future, and one man bought him with that exact expectation. He looked back at all of them with mild curiosity.
Brown did everything he could to help him. Dunlop respected him too much to race him. Roncari gave him privacy. They didn't know him before the price tag, however.
In 1982, My Bupers gave birth to a son of Northern Dancer at Crescent Farm, a gorgeous Lexington facility belonging to Donald Johnson. In time, the horse was a failure, the farm was sold and the man was forced out of the business.
Of course, Snaafi Dancer’s legacy extends beyond these shortcomings. He brought joy and theatre to the people who cared for him. He was briefly the face of a booming industry and helped a world leader make a statement that shaped racing for decades. He was a physical manifestation of the turning tide.
But those moments don’t belong to Snaafi Dancer. They’re unnatural and foreign to him, created by men from other worlds with ambitions that extended far beyond him. He never promised them anything and they expected the world of him. He is regarded as an embarrassment, but the failure was never his. He was never more or less than what he was. In the beginning, that was enough.
When Snaafi Dancer was born, Johnson couldn’t expect anything of his newest foal. He knew better. He could only hope for a healthy birth, for nature to take a favorable course. Still unnamed, the foal grew up strong in the heart of the Kentucky Bluegrass, and in their fleeting time together, Johnson believed with all his heart that his efforts had produced a wonder. No one disagreed.
Patrick Moquin is a sports writer currently based on Long Island, New York. He is a recent graduate of Fordham University and Columbia Journalism School, where he studied journalism at every step of his academic journey. Along with baseball, his favorite sports are horse racing and Formula 1. He is allergic to horses and got his master's degree before his drivers license.
