Typical. A day spent circulating among the great, the good and the downright shady but the star of the show may as well have been on Pluto.
At 6.50 p.m. yesterday evening, a colossal £1.2 million was paid for a yearling filly by the great but recently deceased stallion Mr Prospector. And no one apparently knows who forked it out.
The bidding to turn the deep bay filly, with an egalitarian "150" sticker slapped on her rump, into the highest priced yearling filly ever sold in Ireland took no more than five minutes.
Consigned from Pat O'Kelly's Kilcarn Stud, the unsuspecting one-year-old horse had been universally touted as the star of the first day Orby Sale. When her price started climbing at £100,000 jumps, every eye in the place started craning.
As Goffs' chairman Philip Myerscough "ba-da-ba'd" his way through the auctioneering, John Magnier stood quietly at the side. Sheikh Hamdan was nowhere to be seen.
The collective "who the hell is it" query was almost tangible except nobody dared move or talk to avoid any embarrassing admissions about not having a cool million in their arse pocket, "just at the moment."
The problem was no one was looking where the action really was. Standing next to Myerscough on the rostrum was Goffs' financial director Bill Hartley who had a phone glued to his ear and was bidding for the person on it.
In the auditorium, the German agent Roger Alles, bidding for the splendidly named Helmut Von Finck, pluckily kept going past the million pound mark but no more than the rest of us, he didn't know that the phone next to Hartley's ear was going to win.
Officially, the person at the other end represented a company called Overseas Holdings. "Who's that?" asked a sniffing press room afterwards. "Can't tell you," replied a Goffs' spokesman.
The same reply to similar questions provoked laughing threats about tracing the call to the Cayman Islands. "What's her name going to be - Ansbacher?" queried one cynical hack. "Can't tell you."
Whatever handle the filly eventually receives will be of little interest to Miss O'Kelly who had sold the previous record holder in 1997, the 950,000 guineas purchase who became known as Ajhiba.
O'Kelly's day was only getting better since earlier she had consigned a colt by Spectrum who made a cool half a million pounds.
Bought by Magnier and Michael Tabor, the half-brother to Second Empire will be trained by Aidan O'Brien. The bidding was done by Demi O'Byrne who stated: "This is the nicest horse I've seen in Europe this year and I've not seen better anywhere in the world."
Continuing the global theme, Goffs decided this year, with the coming of the Euro, that they would stop bidding in guineas and bid in plain old pounds.
It didn't stop the boards whistling through figures that would keep small African countries comfortably above the breadline for a decade but in the distorted logic of buying untried yearlings, this year's sale was proclaimed low key.
That may be so but there was another £500,000 colt in the full brother to the Irish Derby winner Desert King submitted by the Irish National Stud. The Magnier-Tabor team gave best here to Syrian owner Wafic Said after a protracted struggle early in the day.
