While no one wishes to relive the horrors of the COVID pandemic, the unique challenges it presented produced some positive changes, including online sales and online bidding.

They kept the bloodstock trade ticking over during difficult times and have now become a permanent fixture, with vendors appreciating lower costs and easier logistics, while buyers needn’t leave the house, thanks to greater information and imagery provided.

Online bidding at public auctions allows remote buyers to partake, but it is also sometimes utilised by those in attendance, which is a potential negative, as Goffs CEO Henry Beeby acknowledges.

“It just annoys me because it slows things up, to be honest. In the early days, we did speak to one vendor who was standing in the ring bidding for every single lot online, and I said, ‘I don't want you to do that anymore,’ and to be fair to them, they said okay and didn’t.

“I just thought it was just unnecessary; silly. You want to have the facility to offer anybody who's a bona fide bidder the ability to bid on a horse, but you also don't want people misusing it.”

The anonymous nature of online bidding can also be a negative for rival bidders – which is part of the appeal for those utilising the facility. The opposition have no idea who they’re bidding against, preventing them from reading their rivals or evaluating the competition.

Of course, you can’t always identify bidders in the ring, either – they can be skulking in the shadows or hiding behind a pillar. Seeing who signs the docket is key, once the buyer isn’t acting through an agent, but that’s not possible with online buyers.

I suppose their identity doesn’t matter in many ways – the highest bidder wins, but it does matter, at least in my opinion, if the horse is bought to resell.

Curiouser and curiouser

A number of buyers use pseudonyms, sometimes chosen as a harmless private joke, but often in order to protect their anonymity.

The Bloodstock Industry Code of Practice was introduced in 2021 and among a number of rules put in place was that prospective buyers could request the identity of horses’ owners, and this remains the policy at Goffs and Tattersalls, I have confirmed.

The owners are not informed if an enquiry has been made (they are notified if vets view files in the repository), but owners are aware of the policy as it’s included in the conditions of sale, Beeby informs me.

“Just to use a high-profile example, Kia [Joorabchian] said in an interview recently, that he thought that he should know more about who owns the horses. He wasn't mentioning us, but I rang him and I said, ‘Kia just so you know, if you want to know who owns a horse, just come into the sales office or email us. We'll tell you.’

“Somebody emailed us last week about the Orby Sale, gave us a list of horses and said, ‘I want to know who owns these,’ and it’s not a problem.”

Auctioneers can satisfy onlookers’ curiosity if they call out the buyer’s name from the rostrum, though this isn’t possible if the auctioneer doesn’t recognise or see the bidder. I’ve always been curious as to whether the auctioneer can see who is bidding online, and whether there is a protocol about identifying them aloud.

“It's a very good question, and something that sort of irritated me when this was starting was people using it as a cloak of anonymity,” Beeby responds. “We're all into transparency in the modern world, aren't we?

“We have a rule for Goffs sales - I don't know what happens anywhere else. In exactly the same way as if you buy a horse in the ring, when you're presented with the purchase form, you can you can use a pseudonym for the press - it specifically says ‘name in press if different from above,’ and we have the same thing online.

“I've given the instruction to all our auctioneers that they have to announce who the horse has been knocked down to, but in the same way as the person standing in the ring, online bidders may be using a pseudonym, and people might not know who that is.”

Practicality

Tattersalls managing director Matthew Prior highlighted a reason for identifying the successful buyer in the ring, but not online. “If the successful buyer is bidding in person, whether their name is called from the rostrum is generally left to the auctioneer’s discretion,” he explains.

“There’s obviously an element of acknowledging and thanking the buyer, but there’s also a practical reason we do it, in that it helps the runner identify who has bought the horse and get the purchase confirmation signed.

“With the online bidding, our practice since it was introduced has been not to announce the successful bidder. Initially, the technology was fairly basic, and it wasn’t always clear to the auctioneer who the online bidder was.

“There’s also less of a practical need to identify them from the rostrum because we already know who they are from their online account and so there’s no purchase confirmation for them to sign in that respect.

“I suppose it’s also worth saying that the buyer’s identity isn’t always disclosed in the ring anyway. An agent, for example, may be buying for an undisclosed client and in that respect, online bidding isn’t that different. I suppose, as the technology continues to develop it’s something we’ll continue to keep under review.”