It’s about 28%. People often asked themselves how much Markus Jooste’s buying power boosted prices at the Cape Premier Yearling Sale and last weekend’s Convention Centre auction – the first without him – provided the answer with the average plummeting 27.8% and the aggregate by 28.2%.

Jooste also owned a quarter of the company and almost half the sale’s biggest vendor. He may have fallen from grace as heavily – and almost as painfully – as a skydiver with a faulty parachute but his absence has hit the breeding industry hard.

In a business that – uniquely – has two and a half years between covering and recovering, losses take a long time to work their way through.  Thankfully those reports of the Hong Jockey Club switching some of its purchasing from Australia to South Africa have proved correct.

Hopefully it will succeed with its publicly-stated aspiration to find an acceptable solution to the quarantine restrictions. That would be the silver lining that this country’s breeders now need more than ever.

By Michael Clower