Would you pay $275 000 for sex?

Imagine after an illustrious sporting career you retire to a nice place in the country. Here the finest ladies from across the country visit and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to sleep with you.

It is a world some men may dream of. For one super stud it is a reality.

His name is Fastnet Rock, and yes, he is a racehorse.

Fastnet Rock has the highest stud fee of an Australian stallion in 2013 at a whopping $275,000.

No one could dispute that the racing industry is an expensive business, especially when they look at the money paid for the promise of a foal that hasn’t even been born yet.

Coolmore owned Fastnet Rock’s stud fee has jumped an extra $55,000 from $220,000 last season making his fee exactly twice the amount of the next horse on the list, Redoute’s Choice, who stands at stud for $137,500.

So what do you get for your $275,000? Hope, dreams and a good pedigree mostly.

In Fastnet Rock’s case he has already sired 12 Group One winners. The stallion himself had an impressive career as a Champion Sprinter at 3 years of age VolumePills.

Fastnet Rock worked hard in the 2012 season serving 208 mares; he was pipped at the post however by another stallion, Snitzel, who served 249 mares last year.

If Fastnet Rock serves the same number of mares this year he is set to make $57,200,000 for Coolmore who have another 12 Stallions at stud in Australia and another 51 stallions standing at stud across the world.

Snitzel and Fastnet Rock weren’t the only busy boys last year, a total of 786 stallions covered 22,534 mares and from that 15,540 live foals were produced.

New South Wales has the biggest slice of the action with 259 stallions out of the 786, followed by Queensland with 197, Victoria with 189. Western Australia has 86, South Australia 31 and Tasmania 22. The Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory have the lowest number of racehorse stallions with 1 each.

At the end of the day breeding can only account for so much. A quality sire and a high stud fee is no guarantee you’ll get a winner. As the old joke goes; “I knew a champion swimmer once, his brother didn’t even wash”.