Best of the West horse auction draws national bidders
Oct. 3—A woman from the Show Me State made a long trip to get the horse she wanted.
"I came all the way from Eureka, Missouri," said Paula DiCampo after buying SM Oreo Dream for $135,000 during the Best of the West sale on Oct. 1 at the Aiken Training Track.
The amount was the auction's top price.
"No, not really," said DiCampo, when asked if she was surprised by how much she had to pay for the 9-year-old draft cross gelding. "I knew he was worth a lot, and I thought he would go for a little bit more than that. But my daughter kept encouraging me and saying, 'You deserve this.' And I'm like, 'You know what, I do deserve it.'"
Mozaun and Sarah McKibben of Arizona consigned SM Oreo Dream, called Oreo for short, to the Best of the West sale.
"He pulls a cart, so I'll drive him," said DiCampo of her purchase. "I'm also going to ride him. I'll be doing hunter paces with my daughter."
DiCampo saw Oreo's photograph in a Facebook post prior to the auction and immediately was impressed.
"He was big, he was beautiful and he was black and white," DiCampo said. "I was like, 'I've got to have that horse,' so I told my partner, Rik Joern, 'We're going to this sale.'"
DiCampo's home is more than 700 miles from Aiken. She had to change some vacation plans in North Carolina a little bit to make it here.
"I said, 'You know what, we can go to Aiken first. Then we can continue on with our trip to the Great Smoky Mountains,'" DiCampo said.
The catalog for the Best of the West auction had more than 50 horses in it and also a mule named Jasper.
Most of the animals offered for sale were Quarter Horses, including Gotta Big Star, who commanded the auction's second-highest price of $100,000.
Ted and Blair Cummings of Ridge Spring purchased the 6-year-old gelding from Kevin Raber of Ohio.
Ted did the bidding while Blair sat beside their horse adviser, Bradley Honeycutt, nearby.
"I didn't think my husband would go as high as $100,000," said Blair, who cried tears of joy afterward. "I'm going to be 64 years old, and I just went through breast cancer. I wanted something that would be fun to ride."
She described Gotta Big Star as "so talented, so kind and so calm."
Before the sale, Honeycutt rode the gelding.
"He took him out on the roads," Blair said. "Dump trucks went by and cars went by. Nothing bothered him (Gotta Big Star)."
The Cummingses own an insurance agency, and they also have a 31-acre horse farm with a 22-stall barn.
They lived in Aiken prior to moving to Ridge Spring.
During 2021's inaugural Best of the West sale at the Training Track, a Friesian cross gelding named Buckeye's Lakota brought the top price of $190,000.
The auction was held outdoors in the Training Track's infield.
This year, the sale was in a large tent in the barn area because of the threat of bad weather from Hurricane Ian, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on the South Carolina coast Sept. 30.
While bidding, prospective buyers had the opportunity to watch the horses being ridden. Some of the riders carried flags, snapped whips, twirled ropes and shook tarps to demonstrate how calm and well trained their animals were.
"We had high points, and we had low points," said the Best of the West sale's director, Ike Sankey, who lives in Wyoming. "I was surprised there was so much fluctuation in the prices of the horses."
Training Track President Bill Gutfarb said the Best of the West sale is a good event for the thoroughbred training center on Two Notch Road because "it gives us exposure.
"We make a little money on it (from leasing the facilities)," he continued, "but it's really exciting to get people out here so they can see the track and see what's going on."
