The Jockey Club will explore ways to increase the foal crop and push commercial breeders to limit the book sizes of popular stallions under new policies that will be prioritized by Everett Dobson, who formally took over the chairmanship of the organization on Wednesday.
In keynote remarks at the end of The Jockey Club’s Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on Thursday, Dobson said that the long-term decline in the North American foal crop, the increasing commercialization of the breeding industry, and lingering concerns over the genetic impact of the dramatic drop in the number of stallions has pushed The Jockey Club to reassess its priorities, citing the private company’s long-term mission – “to improve the breed and support the integrity of the sport.”
The U.S. foal crop has dropped by more than half in the past 20 years, and some states once robust breeding industries are now moribund or non-existent. Dobson called the unceasing decline in the foal crop “the most concerning trend that affects the growth of our sport today.”
But Dobson declined to be specific about how The Jockey Club could reverse that trend, other than issuing a personal vote of support for “regional breeding programs,” which would combine the registries, expenditures, and awards from several neighboring states.
“I’m personally a big fan of that, a big believer in that,” said Dobson, who lives in Oklahoma, a state where Thoroughbred registrations have plummeted 65 percent since 2004. [Dobson also owns a Central Kentucky breeding farm].
Although Dobson noted that average purse levels have jumped to their highest levels in history due to the impact of casino subsidies and a sharp decline in the number of races held, he pointed out that those increases have not had any meaningful impact on reversing the numbers of registered foals.
In part, Dobson said, that is because the costs of breeding and raising a foal have risen “sharply across the board,” while the median price of a yearling sold at auction has risen only $1,000, from $26,000 to $27,000, since 2014. The small-time breeder, Dobson suggested, is being pushed out of the business, in favor of large operations that benefit from economies of scale and high-class bloodstock that draw outsized attention from buyers.
“The breeding of Thoroughbreds has become increasingly commercialized,” Dobson said. “In fact, we’re approaching a point where more than 50 percent of the annual foal crop is sold at auction. As a result, the industry is starting to resemble an agricultural business more than ever before.”
The involvement of The Jockey Club in efforts to increase the foal crop would expand the company’s outreach into an area where it has rarely strayed, at least directly. The Jockey Club is responsible for registering all U.S. Thoroughbred foals, and although its officials have noted concerns about the foal-crop decline in the past, the organization has refrained from intervening in those markets.
There is also some question about how directly the organization might get involved, considering its recent history. Several years ago, The Jockey Club approved a rule limiting the book sizes of stallions, but the organization rescinded the rule after being sued by a collection of powerful commercial breeding farms, even though case law in a similar suit seemed to support the limit.
Dobson said that The Jockey Club will renew a push to limit the book size of stallions, but this time, with a carrot instead of a stick. He also called the rapid run-up in book sizes for leading stallions a “global phenomenon” requiring a global solution.
“Whether you believe we are facing a serious issue or not, it’s critical that we keep the conversation going,” Dobson said. “That’s why I plan to engage directly with leading stallion farms, not only in the U.S., but around the world, to continue this important dialogue.”
Dobson also said that the business plans of The Jockey Club’s constellation of for-profit subsidiaries would be reexamined in light of one clause of the organization’s motto, which he repeated for emphasis: “to improve the breed.”
Lobbying efforts praised
Several speakers at The Jockey Club, including Dobson, credited the racing’s industry lobbying coalition for bolstering support for the permanent approval of 100 percent bonus depreciation in the recent omnibus tax and spending bill passed by Congress. That provision, sought by industries far and wide, will have a significant impact on protecting a critical write-off used by horsemen.
Shawn Smeallie, a veteran Washington, D.C., political operative who was critical in The Jockey Club’s push for the passage of legislation creating the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority in 2020, said that the lobbying coalition was also successful in getting a provision removed from the bill that would have disallowed using investment income to offset losses from racing and breeding operations. He counted that effort as being just as critical as the effort supporting bonus depreciation.
Smeallie urged those attending the Round Table to regularly make their voices heard in Washington, D.C. The Round Table crowd typically includes some of the most influential and richest people in the sport.
“Many of you, I would venture to say the majority of you, have personal relationships with policymakers in Washington,” Smeallie said. “And if you don’t, you probably have the ability to easily develop them. Your voices make a difference with key decision-makers.”
Smeallie acknowledged that the bill included a provision that will have a dramatic impact on gamblers by limiting the offset for gambling winnings to 90 percent of losses.
While gamblers and gambling advocates have fiercely criticized the provision, gambling companies have so far had a muted response, at least in public, while still suggesting that they would support a repeal of the provision, which does not go into effect until the 2026 tax year.
Smeallie said that has he been “told there will be a tax bill later this fall and this fix will be in it.”
Social media influencers here to stay
Racing enjoyed a sizeable blip in its social-media profile this Triple Crown season due to Griffin Johnson, the amiable and humble influencer who was given a share in the horse Sandman as something of a marketing experiment by West Point Thoroughbreds, the racing partnership company.
That experiment seemed to work out quite well, at least according to the metrics used by social media companies to measure views and engagement. In an interview during the Round Table, Johnson, a newcomer to racing at the beginning of this year, attributed the burst in engagement to his “authenticity,” surely an attribute that no one would dispute looking at his social-media feed as he spent the Triple Crown season taking his followers into the somewhat arcane world of horse racing.
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“What people really gravitated toward is that they saw someone who was experiencing all of this for the first time, and so I think a lot of newcomers said, ‘I can just go along with Griffin,’” Griffin said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing either.’”
At the end of the interview, Griffin said that he is now engaged with multiple racing entities on promotional ideas, including the New York Racing Association, Keeneland, and Breeders’ Cup. He outlined a series of events he plans to attend and highlight on his social-media feed, including specific plans for several broadcasts.
Which begs the question: How long does authenticity last? Will the same Griffin Johnson that attracted so many Gen Zers to the sport be able to hold their attention when the plan has a formula, rather than a spontaneity?
Johnson called his latest partnerships a “campaign” to bring racing to younger generations.
“It’s not a one-year plan, it’s not a two-year plan,” Johnson said. “In my mind, it’s a 10-year or 20-year plan, at least.”
Steve Kornacki, the NBC News political correspondent who is another relative newcomer to racing’s social profile since his 2021 debut on NBC’s Derby broadcast, said in his own keynote address that racing has a lot to offer people in its “tradition, pageantry, and characters.”
“This is more than a gambling product,” Kornacki said.
Kornacki has been a lifelong racing fan, he said, having found “a natural outlet in the game” after being taken to the track by an uncle when he was 6 years old, in a story that surely resonates with countless handicappers who got hooked early.
“My mind works pretty well with numbers, and in some ways it’s how I make sense of the world,” Kornacki said.
Kornacki dedicated a significant portion of his remarks to D. Wayne Lukas, the Hall of Fame trainer who died in late June. Lukas was a hero and an inspiration, Kornacki said.
“He adamantly refused to downsize his dreams,” Kornacki said.
Among the highlights of his career, Kornacki said, was the opportunity to sit down with Lukas in April at his barn at Churchill Downs for a feature that ran on this year’s Derby broadcast.
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“They say you should never meet your heroes,” Kornacki said. “I can tell you that is absolutely not the case.”
Proper scheduling would increase handle
Artificial intelligence has dominated the tech, talk-show, and media airwaves for several years now, and the Round Table program was not bereft. A presentation by FastBreak AI, a company that uses “AI-driven solutions” to maximize revenue for sports companies, showed that racing can boost its handle by 3 percent a year simply by optimizing its scheduling of races to avoid overlaps or bunching its races together.
Officials for the company cautioned that the data set was limited to 2024, but they also stressed that the analysis was relatively straightforward and conclusive. The company hopes to develop a scheduling tool for racing that would allow racetracks to modify their schedules “in real time,” even in response to unexpected delays at other tracks.
Lower-profile racetracks typically allow dominant racetracks to set their own schedules, with the lower-profile tracks filling in the gaps, in a somewhat orderly process that has developed organically in the simulcast era. But that process can quickly break down over the length of a racing day, as post-time drags and unexpected events push the schedule off-kilter.
TJC officials said after the conference that a study conducted by the consulting company McKinsey a decade ago explaining the benefits of optimal scheduling was validated by the more recent analysis by Fastbreak. Whether tracks accept the idea of dynamic scheduling during a race day will be the real test, one official said.
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