Horse racing is full of statistics, arguably as much as any other sport. Also, if you look at past performances or results charts from a century ago, you'll see much of the same information then as you do now.
The Jockey Club has been the curator of much of the information for horse racing in North America since its founding in 1894. It maintains and publishes the American Stud Book, the genealogical archive for Thoroughbreds in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The Jockey Club also partners with the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America to run Equibase, the archive that meticulously charts the action in horse races across North America.
Heading into its 130th anniversary, The Jockey Club is now exploring new information to track, and that information will be extremely valuable for the continued well-being of the equine athletes and the sport. It will go a long way to addressing horse racing's social license to operate. On Aug. 3, in her remarks at The Jockey Club's 2023 Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing, Kristin Werner, senior counsel for The Jockey Club, will present about the topic of traceability of Thoroughbreds.
To be clear, horse racing's historical statistics have always facilitated traceability, although it's been confined to a horse's racing career. However, there's now more focus than ever on tracking these horses after their racing careers are finished. Some of that is for positive reasons that celebrate the Thoroughbred. For example, the Retired Racehorse Project Thoroughbred Makeover has revolutionized the market for OTTBs by spotlighting the viability and versatility of the Thoroughbred racehorse as a sporthorse. Since 2020, with thanks to the support from Excel Equine, this column has shared stories about Thoroughbreds like:
- Sorocaima and Palm Crescent, who went from racing to competing at the Land Rover Kentucky Three-Day Event;
- Cozmic One, who has become an ambassador for the partnership between the racehorse and sporthorse worlds;
- Canton Comet, who inspired hunter/jumper and dressage trainer Samantha Fawcett to breed her first racehorse after they competed in the Thoroughbred Makeover; and
- many more examples because there are plenty of stories like these.
Unfortunately, there are also negative reasons for motivating traceability after horses finish their racing careers. The kill pen economy is stronger than ever. When a former racehorse ends up in these situations, regardless of how long it's been since that horse has been on the track or how many hands through which that horse has passed since they retired from racing, the spotlight gets put on that horse's connection to the racing industry.
When Werner discusses traceability of Thoroughbreds at the Round Table Conference, the focus will be on how it will help horses that end up in bad situations. It will be an important step toward helping track the first steps racing connections make when their horse leaves the racing world for the world outside of the stable gates.
“My talk is really just going to be touching on the topic, and after that, we have some software development that we're going to be working on that's an effort of furthering traceability,” Werner said. “With digital certificates now, we have a great opportunity to be able to have information about horses that we didn't have when there were just paper certificates because the paper certificates were just out there floating around. So, we're hoping to leverage the digital certificates with traceability.”
The end result will be a framework that answers the question, “Where are these horses coming from before they go to the kill pen and can we capture that information ahead of time?” Werner said. “If we can capture the information from the owners or trainers that are sending them to bad situations, can we redirect their efforts to all these options that we have out there—whether it's an aftercare organization, a private organization, the racetracks with aftercare liaisons to get those horses to a better place—and remind people that these Thoroughbreds have value if they are sound and coming off the track in a healthy way.”
From there, the future possibilities are endless, and that is what I'd like to explore in this space, as well as an area that the Retired Racehorse Project is looking to lead the movement for the evolution of the influential organization and for the future of the industry.
“The vast majority of racing connections want to know where their horses end up,” RRP executive director Kirsten Green said. “So then the big question becomes who has the bandwidth, the capacity to take the responsibility to support what it's going to take to build something like that? That's the question we're in the middle of trying to answer right now. I certainly think RRP has a position to play a part in that where we don't have the capacity to gather the full picture, but we certainly have the groundwork for something like that because we are a very data-minded organization and have a proprietary system where we've been collecting data on Makeover horses over all these years.”
Here is one example of traceability based on what I do in my broadcasting of horse races and horse shows involving Emily's Pegasus, a 2016 chestnut mare bred in Louisiana that raced 23 times from 2018 to 2020. A quick look at her past performances shows how straightforward it is to trace her steps during her racing career in terms of who owned her, trained her, where she was stabled, and her record in races and workouts.
What she did after her last race on May 13, 2020, is not currently connected with her racing biography, although I happen to know it because she arrived at our Super G Sporthorses farm in Colorado five days after her last race. Brit Vegas, who transitions many OTTBs from the racetrack to new careers through her Royal Fox Stables in Nebraska, acquired Emily's Pegasus from her last racing connections at Fonner Park. My wife, Ashley, bought the mare she calls “Sussy” from Brit.
That Brit bought Emily's Pegasus from the racetrack, a private sale at the time, would become known through The Jockey Club's traceability initiatives. What Emily's Pegasus has done since with Ashley is actually traceable if you know where to look, and this potentially represents a future vision for traceability of Thoroughbreds. Emily's Pegasus has gone on to a successful career in the equestrian sport of eventing, and her record in horse shows through the United States Eventing Association (USEA) resembles her race record on Equibase.
She currently has two wins and nine top-three finishes in events that have taken place in seven different states, including winning the USEA's Area IX Championships and finishing third in the American Eventing Championships at the Modified level of 3-feet-5 in 2022. The eventing success of the daughter of Fusaichi Pegasus has greatly increased her value. Ashley sold Sussy at the end of last year to her teenage student, who was able to move up to a new level because of her partnership with the mare. Emily's Pegasus is a feather in the cap for the Thoroughbred industry.
However, a challenge to tracking all this is that Emily's Pegasus shows under a different name than her race name: Tiny Dancer.
“We know what happens is they go into sporthorse life and they get registered to USEF or whatever, and they may or may not have their race name or pedigree attributed to them,” Green said. “So, it makes it very difficult to maintain that records continuity.”
The onus on registering horses with a sporthorse organization like USEF or USEA is on the owners to provide information about their horses. The Jockey Club connects the race and show identities of Thoroughbreds through its database for The Jockey Club's Thoroughbred Incentive Program (T.I.P.). If I'm announcing Thoroughbreds at horse shows, and their show names are different than their race names, I can still trace back to their racing career if they've been registered with their sire and dam by searching the dam's name and year of foaling on Equibase.
These challenges to traceability could be rectified if Thoroughbreds' show registration was accompanied by their Jockey Club number, either provided by the owners or through a framework that links the databases of racing and sporthorse entities, as it's successfully done through T.I.P. If there was an Equibase link to a horses' race record on their show page and vice versa, this would provide valuable information about where a horse came from prior to showing and where it has been after it finished racing.
“It's probably not even as much gathering data because a lot of it already exists, but whether we could ever conglomerate all those into one area, I would probably say initially lean on RRP, but never say never when it comes to Jockey Club, particularly if partnering with those major, larger organizations, as opposed to creating something new ourselves,” Werner said.
There have been a number of times where a rider at a horse show will come out of the competition ring and tell me, “You know more about my horse than I do,” because I've talked about their Thoroughbred's racing record. I take this as a huge compliment, but it's also a sign that the racehorse and sporthorse worlds are capable of coming together to share information about their horses that will benefit each other and better promote the lifelong journey that a Thoroughbred makes.
Announcing horse races inspired Jonathan Horowitz to become an advocate for off-track Thoroughbreds and Arabians, as well as to learn to event on horses he used to announce at the track. He also serves as Acting Director for the Arabian Jockey Club and runs the Super G Sporthorses eventing barn with his wife, Ashley. He can be reached on Facebook and Twitter at @jjhorowitz.
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