‘It’s Crazy Energy’: Gaudet Makes History In Keeneland Auctioneer’s Stand

Gabby Gaudet reads pedigrees at the 2020 Keeneland January Horses of All Ages Sale.

At any given renewal of the Keeneland January Horses of All Ages Sale, the soundtrack of Hip 1021 being put on offer usually registers as background noise to most beyond the seller and potential buyers. This time around was quite different.

The voice was familiar. Anyone who has watched televised horse racing over the past few years has seen and heard Gabby Gaudet reporting and prognosticating from racetracks around the world. It was where her voice was coming from that was getting attention.

When she read off the pedigree highlights for Hip 1021, a newly-turned yearling Speightster colt, Gaudet became the first woman to have a speaking role in a Keeneland auction – either as auctioneer or announcer. The historic nature of what would otherwise have been a routine event wasn’t lost on Gaudet, but being one-third of what’s essentially the auction’s air-traffic control team presents enough to focus on without having to worry about the context.

“I had it in the back of my mind, but I kind of shut that off, so to speak,” Gaudet said. “Being a woman aside, I’m a professional. I’ve worked in this industry for several years now, and I just want to do a good job, whether I’m a male or female. I want to go up there and do myself proud. I had other pressures that I was considering.”

Much of the Keeneland auction staff has worked together for decades, which typically leads to a smooth presentation because all the information that needs to be processed has become routine. Asking anyone to jump on that moving treadmill for the first time would be a daunting task, regardless of gender, and many newcomers don’t realize it until they’re in the chair and there’s a horse in front of them.

“The phone will ring, there will be late outs, late update slips, so you’re kind of dancing the dance up there, and it’s a lot more than just reading the page,” Gaudet said. “You have to work alongside the auctioneer, and sometimes he’ll want to come back to you. It’s crazy energy, just nothing that I’ve ever experienced. It’s a different way of preparing. It’s kind of good because you have no time to think, really. You’re so honed in and focused on what’s immediately in front of you.”

Both Gaudet and the Keeneland auction team knew this, so when longtime track and sales announcer Kurt Becker approached Gaudet during last year’s November Breeding Stock Sale with the idea of reading pedigrees in January, both sides knew it was going to take serious preparation. Gaudet was already familiar with Keeneland’s staff as an on-air talent for the track’s simulcast feed and as a reporter for TVG during the sales, but getting on the stand would require a completely different skill set.

Like mastering any skill, this meant study, repetition, and simulation. Gaudet read pedigree after pedigree, both to get them locked in her brain and to nail down her timing and cadence. In the days leading up to her debut, the auctioneers would simulate the back and forth of the stand to help build the chemistry needed to keep the show moving.

For a job where so much of the description involves talking, Gaudet also listened.

“She was with us for probably two full days, sitting in our office,” said Ryan Mahan, Keeneland’s head auctioneer. “She’d listen to tapes of Kurt and John and kind of get the rhythm down. She was used to scripts and listening to someone in your ear, and this has got to be so reactive. It was difficult for her, but you didn’t know it because she prepped, and she’s used to prepping.”

Mahan, a 43-year veteran of Keeneland’s sales team, said Gaudet’s likable personality made her a candidate to succeed in the chair, on top of her willingness to put in the year-round work to stay on top of the pedigrees.

“We go through great efforts here to make people feel comfortable, and she makes people feel comfortable,” he said. “There’s no ‘in your face.’ Some cattle or car auctions are always in your face, ‘bid, bid, bid.’ With us, we want you comfortable and we want it to move at a good pace, which she did. A lot of new announcers struggle with that. They want to get everything in, and they talk themselves into a corner, and it just goes and goes. We worked with her on that, be short, be concise, and make sure all the information’s out there.”

Being an auction announcer requires the kind of confidence in one’s own voice to keep moving forward, even if there are outside distractions, or if a mistake is made reading the pedigree page. Even if it’s wrong, something said must be said with authority, or else the flow of the auction risks being thrown off, which could affect bidding.

Gaudet admitted finding that confidence and authority was a struggle early on, even during the first of her two shifts on Wednesday during the auction’s third session. She credited Scott Hazelton, a fellow TVG employee and himself a relative newcomer to the Keeneland auctioneer’s stand, for working with her during the leadup to the sale and for backing her up on the stand in case she had questions.

“I was just there as a fallback, which honestly, she didn’t need at the end of the day,” Hazelton said. “She knocked it out of the park. For that being her first experience up there, she absolutely rocked it.”

Having the most recent experience of being the new person on the stand among Keeneland’s regular crew, Hazelton was in a unique position to tell Gaudet what to expect when the microphone goes live for the first time.

“You really just have to put your head down and go,” he said. “There’s nothing like hearing your voice on the sound system. It’s an empowering feeling. On television, if you make a mistake and need to back up and correct yourself, that’s fine. You do it all time. This is different, because you don’t get that opportunity to go back and correct yourself, so I said ‘just go and get into a rhythm.’”

Social media in the bloodstock sphere exploded with pictures and video of Gaudet on the stand, and watching her scroll through the seemingly endless list notifications on her phone’s home screen after the last horse went through the ring on Wednesday.

“I had a pretty profound reaction to all the people that reached out and were so proud of me,” she said. “I really didn’t go into it thinking it would be a big deal, and it seems like it really has impacted people, and they’re really proud of it, and really happy that Keeneland has made this decision as well.”

A big part of that impact stemmed from the fact that a female voice in the auctioneer’s stand isn’t just new for Keeneland, but it’s practically never seen on a global scale when it comes to major Thoroughbred auctions.

So, what took so long for someone to put a woman in the stand and behind a microphone? Bob Elliston, Keeneland’s vice president of racing and sales, couldn’t speak for other companies, or for Keeneland itself before he joined the staff, but he said Gaudet made herself a prime candidate for a necessary position regardless of who she was.

“I don’t know that a female ever presented herself to that opportunity with the skill set and knowledge and passion that Gabby has,” he said. “That’s the most significant auction stand in Thoroughbred sales, and the folks who occupy that are professionals around the country in their disciplines. That’s the standard we hold to whoever’s going to be auctioneering or reading, and she has that. She demonstrated her passion for the business, she demonstrated her acumen for the pedigrees, and she had the desire to do that, and those things all married up.”

There have been plenty of notable horse racing figures who have announced during the Keeneland sales that ended up being one-off appearances, but Gaudet said she planned on being back on the stand for the company’s April 2-Year-Olds In Training Sale. Mahan echoed that sentiment, noting the ringing endorsement she received from both the auction crew and the public.

Now that she’s got a positive first experience and a little bit of muscle memory in her column, Gaudet said she was up for the challenge.

“With experience, I think I’ll have a little more confidence and conviction in how I can announce these horses, and be able to play off the auctioneer,” she said. “It’s an orchestra, and with more experience, you get more comfortable. It’s just figuring out the tempo and important points to hit on.”