O’Casaigh buys 90% interest in Early Voting after fertility recovery

Dr. Padraig O’Casaigh bought a 90% interest in Early Voting after helping restore the Preakness winner’s fertility, giving the international reproduction specialist a majority stake in one of Taylor Made’s most closely watched young stallions. Taylor Made kept the son of Gun Runner at $12,500 S&N and standing near Nicholasville, Kentucky, where his first-crop market has already started to build.

The deal grew out of a difficult first chapter at stud. Early Voting bred 191 mares in his first season, then showed fertility problems and was diagnosed with anejaculatory syndrome, a rare condition in which a stallion can show normal libido but cannot ejaculate. O’Casaigh, whose work includes veterinary medicine and academic research at the University of Auckland, treated the horse with chaperone protein therapy and restored his reproductive viability. By the next season, Early Voting was getting 86% of mares in foal, and Taylor Made’s 2025 listing put his fertility rate at 89%.

That turnaround gives the ownership change real commercial weight. Taylor Made said Early Voting’s first yearlings included a $700,000 colt, a $525,000 colt at Keeneland September and a $525,000 co-sale topping filly at the Fasig-Tipton New York Bred Yearling Sale. For a stallion who entered stud in 2023, those results helped turn a medical rescue into a market story, and they left Taylor Made with a freshman sire whose books can now be built around both performance and proof of recovery.

O’Casaigh said proceeds from the stallion’s stud fees will help provide financial assistance for veterinary school students, tying the purchase to a broader philanthropic purpose. Early Voting remains the only Classic winner by Horse of the Year Gun Runner, and his 2022 Preakness win still anchors the profile that made him attractive in the first place. With his fertility stabilized and his yearlings already commanding six and seven figures, the stallion’s value now rests on whether Taylor Made and O’Casaigh can keep converting that repaired health into sustained demand.