The North American registered Thoroughbred foal crop is projected to be 18,500 in 2023, The Jockey Club (TJC) reported Friday morning. This is 200 fewer foals than last year's estimate of 18,700 and represents the seventh straight year of decline. The last time numbers like this were seen was in 1965, when the foal crop was 18,846.
The high-water mark of 51,296 was reached in 1986. The crop has declined every year since then with the exception of 2015.
The foal crop projection is computed by using Reports of Mares Bred (RMBs) received to date for the 2022 breeding season. RMBs are to be filed by Aug. 1 of each breeding season. TJC is encouraging stallion owners who have not returned their RMBs for the 2022 breeding season to do so as soon as possible; it can be done online at registry.jockeyclub.com.
In “Making Claims,” Paulick Report bloodstock editor Joe Nevills shares his opinions on the Thoroughbred industry from the breeding and sales arenas to the racing world and beyond.
The bloodstock market of 2021 seemed as though it would be easier to forecast compared with the unprecedented turbulence of the prior year, but no one could have foreseen the level of gusto with which certain sections of the market would bounce back.
A starving buying bench took auction returns to record highs last year, while Gun Runner's freshman class of runners put their sire in the history books. Pleasant surprises can be hard to come by in the Thoroughbred business, and last year was full of them.
After a year that went better than expected for many, will that momentum keep up the pace, or will it stall? Which stallions will see their stocks rise and fall in the coming year? I try to answer those questions with five predictions for how the year will play out in the bloodstock market.
1. Into Mischief Will Repeat As Leading General Sire…Again
You can't hit the Pick 5 without getting the first leg, so we'll start off with a safe one.
For a second consecutive year, the Spendthrift Farm resident set North America's single-season record for progeny earnings. The $24.4 million his runners earned in 2021 was more than $8.1 million higher than next-closest Ghostzapper at $16.2 million. If that $8.1-million difference were an actual stallion, it would have finished in the top 20 on the general list. That's quite the chasm for any horse to overcome.
In 2020, Into Mischief reached the top of the heap on the strength of Horse of the Year Authentic's Kentucky Derby and Breeders' Cup Classic triumphs, and the success of champion sprinter Gamine. Last year, Gamine was back to add a pair of Grade 1 wins and $851,900 to the pot, joined by a pair of electric 3-year-olds in Grade 1 Haskell Stakes winner and Kentucky Derby runner-up (at the time of publishing) Mandaloun and Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile winner Life Is Good. G1 Carter Handicap winner Mischevious Alex completed Into Mischief's quartet of Grade 1 winners in 2021 and highlighted his 13 graded or group stakes winners on the year.
The reason why Into Mischief is my pick to repeat again as leading general sire is the same one I had last year, and the same one I'll use every year for the foreseeable future: he's got the pipeline set for life.
The commercial market is firmly in Into Mischief's corner, putting him on the conveyor belt of success that includes sending him big-time mares, which produce expensive sale horses that have proven to become serious runners, and the cycle begins again. Once that conveyor belt gets going, it tends to only pick up momentum, as it has here. When one set of elite horses leaves the racetrack, another generation quickly takes its place, and perhaps goes even farther.
Into Mischief is perennially one of North America's most active stallions by mares bred, meaning he'll have a unique foundation of blue-collar earners to support the flashy graded stakes horses, the likes of which few of his rivals can muster. Looking to the future, Into Mischief has 195 newly-turned 2-year-olds of 2022; once again from the strongest book of mares he'd seen to date. They'll be given every shot to take home lucrative maiden special weight purses at the country's biggest meets, then become the next class of major stakes winners to keep their sire at the top of the list for years to come.
Get comfortable. The top of the list doesn't look to be changing anytime soon.
2. The North American Foal Crop Will Rise In 2023
This might seem out of place on a list of predictions for 2022, but stay with me, here.
Many pearls have been clutched over North America's shrinking foal crop, and it's certainly harrowing to see that number get slashed by more than half from 44,000 in 1990 to a projected 18,700 in 2022. Assuming The Jockey Club's projections for 2021 and 2022 hold true, the foal crop will have posted a decline in seven consecutive seasons, and the last time it grew by more than one percent was 2005.
However, this is a business that loves to chase a trend, and after an auction season that saw incredible depth and record-setting returns, it's not hard to imagine present and potential breeders eyeing that landscape and seeking out their own piece of it. The November breeding stock sales were strong to the last day, suggesting there is a commercial craving for broodmares that might not yet be quenched by the sale ring. If there is demand, the supply will catch up, whether that means bringing mares back into production that might have gotten time off or retiring fillies from the racetrack to enter the breeding shed. This is not a business of people who happily accept not getting what they want.
Assuming that demand is met with enough horseflesh, one would assume more mares would be bred than in previous years, with the hope that the market will remain just as electric when the ensuing foals enter the commercial space a few years down the road. Since the foals would be conceived in 2022 and born in 2023, this is a long-term prediction that hinges on the short-term.
With all of that being said, I don't expect the 2022 Report of Mares Bred to be bursting at the seams like it's the 1980s again, or even the post-recession upturn of the mid-2010s. Even if breeders are as enthusiastic as they've been in years, there are only so many mares out there to be bred. Save for a mass exodus of broodmares from other countries, any rise in the foal crop is going to have to be a gradual crawl by design. A percentage point or two of growth, though, would be a giant morale boost for an industry that desperately needs horses to fill starting gates around the country.
3. Justify Will Be The Leading Freshman Sire By Earnings
The 2018 Triple Crown winner tied with fellow Ashford Stud Mendelssohn as North America's most active stallion of the 2019 breeding season with 252 mares bred, and he attracted an absolute murderer's row of mares to fill his first book. There is little excuse for anyone but Justify to finish at the top of the freshman sire list.
If he is successful in that assignment, Justify will take a familiar path to the top employed by Ashford Stud to get the likes of Uncle Mo and American Pharoah to the head of the freshman list: Get as many foals on the ground and into the starting gates as possible, and use the deep class from that first book of mares to propel the foals into the biggest races. It's the plan that every stallion manager draws up for their rookies, but only a chosen few are able to execute it to perfection.
The commercial market seems willing to go on this ride with Justify. He finished fourth among North American-based sires by average yearling sale price ($357,387) and second by yearling gross ($26,804,000). We'll learn more about whether those looks and pages can run when we get into this year's juvenile sale season, but that kind of early endorsement is critical for a stallion with expectations as big as Justify's.
If Justify is somehow unable to get the job done, the logical next guess would be Lane's End resident City of Light. The stallion himself is a specimen, and his yearlings were received astoundingly well during last year's sales. I get the impression the City of Lights (Cities of Light?) are going to do their best work around two turns, which might preclude them from the early prizes on the juvenile stakes calendar, but I thought the same of Gun Runner, and we all saw how that turned out.
4. Arrogate Rebounds From His Rough Freshman Season
One of the biggest surprises of last year's sire races was the highly-touted champion Arrogate finishing out of the top 10 by earnings among freshman sires. After his brilliant racing career, strong debut book of mares, and fevered support at auction – hastened by his untimely demise – the dominoes appeared to be set for him to contend for the top spot, but his first crop left more questions than answers.
The late resident of Juddmonte Farms finished the year in 12th on the freshman earnings list, and without a North American stakes winner. His first winner didn't come until September at the tail end of the Saratoga meet, and his only stakes-placed runner on the year ran second in a restricted stakes at Delaware Park. Arrogate's freshman season might not have been a worst-case scenario when put up against his lofty expectations, but it certainly teetered on the edge of it.
A year earlier, we were saying a lot of the same things about Runhappy, a much-hyped stallion who limped to a 15th-place finish on the freshman sire chart in 2020 without a stakes winner to his name. A year changed a lot for Runhappy, who leapt to fourth among second-crop sires by earnings in 2021, powered by Grade 2 winners Following Sea and Smile Happy.
Runhappy rewarded patience during his own on-track career, not truly hitting his stride until the summer of his 3-year-old campaign. Arrogate had a similar trajectory, vaulting himself into graded stakes competition during the Saratoga meet of his 3-year-old season, and winning the world's most expensive races later that year and into age four. He didn't even make his first start until April of his sophomore year, so we still don't have an apples-to-apples comparison of what the Arrogates should be doing at this stage based on their sire's own racing career.
The Arrogate foals always had the two-turn look to them as young horses, suggesting they might relish the opportunities to go longer that will be afforded to them as they get older. Any runners that make noise on the Triple Crown trail would be late to the party, but the longer races later in the spring and beyond should play to their advantage if they have the talent to match their pedigrees. One or two of those could change the entire trajectory of a stud career cut short.
The tide has already started to turn for Arrogate, who picked up his first stakes winner on Jan. 1 when Alittleloveandluck took the Ginger Brew Stakes on the turf at Gulfstream Park. Arrogate left himself a lot of ground to make up on the leaders in his class, but he fits the profile of a stallion that's got it in him to pull it off.
5. The Auction Market Cools Off A Bit
I never felt like I got an acceptable answer for the question I kept asking throughout a cracking 2021 auction season: “Why is the market THIS good?”
Were people with gobs of money excited to spend it and blow off some COVID-related steam? I'm sure they were. Are purses up at some of the sport's biggest meets, making it more appealing to race horses? Definitely. Were there some other forces in play? Probably. Even so, it's hard to fathom how even a combination of these factors led major buyers to stick around until Books 5 and 6 of the Keeneland September sale when they'd have normally been home for days.
Personally, I think a lot of key players held on to their money and horses during the 2020 auction season, and once it was clear there was going to be a Thoroughbred industry to come back to in 2021, they had more capital than they normally would. With more money in reserve, that pushed everyone down a book or two in order to buy horses in their price range.
If I'm right about that, it means the end users out there might have spent a big chunk of their surplus in 2021, and they might enter this year's auctions with budgets closer to a typical year.
When a good thing appears suddenly, it can vanish just as quickly. However, the Thoroughbred industry is not known for suddenness, barring some kind of global-scale economic event. I don't expect the market to grow from the fever-dream season it saw in 2021, but I don't expect it to plummet, either.
Record paces are hard to keep up, but a slight downturn can still result in an all-time renewal of a particular sale. That's where I see us headed in 2022, probably for reasons as scattered as the ones that got us here in the first place.
This piece originally appeared in The Back Ring, the Paulick Report's bloodstock newsletter. To learn more about the Back Ring, click here.
The Jockey Club today reported that 1,447 stallions covered 29,699 mares in North America during 2020, according to statistics compiled through Oct. 4, 2021. These breedings have resulted in 19,021 live foals of 2021 being reported to The Jockey Club on Live Foal Reports.
The Jockey Club estimates that the number of live foals reported so far is 85-90 percent complete. The reporting of live foals of 2021 is down 3.3 percent from last year at this time when The Jockey Club had received reports for 19,677 live foals of 2020.
In addition to the 19,021 live foals of 2021 reported through Oct. 4, The Jockey Club also received 2,195 No Foal Reports for the 2021 foaling season. Ultimately, the 2021 registered foal crop is projected to reach 19,200.
The number of stallions declined 6.8 percent from the 1,552 reported for 2019 at this time last year, while the number of mares bred declined 4.8 percent from the 31,198 reported for 2019.
The 2020 breeding statistics are available alphabetically by stallion name through the Resources – Fact Book link on The Jockey Club homepage at jockeyclub.com.
Kentucky annually leads all states and provinces in terms of Thoroughbred breeding activity. Kentucky-based stallions accounted for 55.5 percent of the mares reported bred in North America in 2020 and 60.6 percent of the live foals reported for 2021.
The 16,485 mares reported bred to 212 Kentucky stallions in 2020 have produced 11,535 live foals, a 2.7 percent decrease on the 11,851 Kentucky-sired live foals of 2020 reported at this time last year. The number of mares reported bred to Kentucky stallions in 2020 decreased 4.4 percent compared to the 17,240 reported for 2019 at this time last year.
Among the 10 states and provinces with the most mares covered in 2020, three produced more live foals in 2021 than in 2020 as reported at this time last year: Maryland, Ontario, and New Mexico. The following table shows the top 10 states and provinces ranked by number of state/province-sired live foals of 2021 reported through October 4, 2021.
2020 Mares Bred
2020 Live Foals
2021 Live Foals
Percent Change in Live Foals
Kentucky
16,485
11,851
11,535
-2.7%
California
1,877
1,390
1,253
-9.9%
Florida
1,811
1,156
1,002
-13.3%
New York
1,032
652
649
-0.5%
Louisiana
1,101
647
631
-2.5%
Maryland
832
506
524
3.6%
Pennsylvania
793
510
449
-12.0%
Ontario
594
350
359
2.6%
New Mexico
637
313
326
4.2%
Oklahoma
576
342
271
-20.8%
The statistics include 243 progeny of stallions standing in North America but foaled abroad, as reported by foreign stud book authorities at the time of publication.
Country
Live Foals
Country
Live Foals
Saudi Arabia
66
Philippines
3
Japan
54
Panama
2
Ireland
47
Australia
1
Republic of Korea
30
Italy
1
France
16
Jamaica
1
Great Britain
16
Mexico
1
Turkey
4
Sweden
1
The report also includes 64 mares bred to 23 stallions in North America on Southern Hemisphere time; the majority of these mares have not foaled.
As customary, a report listing the number of mares bred in 2021 will be released later this month.
The Jockey Club announced late last week that the projected foal crop for 2022 is 18,700, and most of the racing press reported this without commentary. That number of foals is the lowest figure in more than 60 years. The trendlines appear to be giving us both clear indications of what is happening and generally why it's happening too. Breeders are hearing what the marketplace is telling them and are responding in accordance.
For a generation, the commercial market has been pummeling breeders whose stock ranks below the median in auction sales. Typically, the prices for those foals and yearlings do not even cover the cost of on-farm production, without even considering ancillary expenses or the cost of money tied up in non-productive assets.
As a result, the number of foals that breeders are willing to produce has hit a noteworthy low point.
The last time the North American foal crop of Thoroughbreds came this low was 66 years ago in 1965 when the foal crop was 18,846, and only five years before that, in 1960, the foal crop was 12,901. So in the span of half a decade, the foal crop increased by nearly 50 percent, but the decades of the 1960s and 1970s featured exponential growth in Thoroughbred racing, and especially in breeding, with the expansion of breeding programs outside of Kentucky, Florida, and California.
Now, those regional programs are nearly dead. Many breeders are pensioning stallions, selling off mares, and not breeding for those specialty markets.
In contrast to the present trend, the foal-production boom peaked in 1986 with a foal crop of 51,296, just in time for the tax act that changed the rules for breeders and sent the market into a panic and decline. By 1995, the selloff had bottomed out with a foal crop of 34,983, more than 16,300 foals fewer than only nine years earlier.
Since then, the foal crops remained remarkably stable around the 35,000 level until 2010, when the foal crop dropped below 30,000 for the first time since the 1970s. Crop numbers have been drawing down, slowly but steadily to the present level, and one of the great factors for this direction is the continuing negative pressure from buyers.
Despite the tone of the foregoing information, there is a good market for Thoroughbreds, but it is a good market, consistent and profitable, only for premium foals and yearlings. Nobody wants an average one. Or what is perceived to be an average yearling, because every year there are graded stakes winners from every book and every session of the September sale. Perception of average-ness is not the same as being average (or below average).
At the same time that breeders are stuck with half or thereabouts of their annual foal crop in the “below-average” section of sales, the same breeders are consistently being prodded to spend more for stud fees and other services, then to accept less at the sales, because what other choice would they have.
The situation is sufficiently trying to make one wonder “what if”: what if breeders made different decisions; what if breeders formed cooperatives (or a single cooperative) to improve their economic and political impact; what if a group or several groups collectively hired trainers to train the horses that were not “sales types?” These and other choices are out there, apparently waiting for someone or a group of someones to latch onto them and bring them into operation.
By these and other avenues, there are ways out of the financial quandary breeders find themselves in, but it may not be the path that brought them here. We have, for more than 20 years, been breeding stallions to as many mares as breeders will present and as many as the horse can (hopefully) handle.
This approach, in hindsight, might be considered an overreaction to the concept of a free market, as in too much of a good thing can drown you.
Stallion syndicates, hard number syndicates that restrict access to premium stallions and control the supply of yearlings as a result, are one option. This is considerably different from the current free-for-all that seems to be sending more breeders to the poor house each year.
Instead, a syndicate with a contractual cap on seasons and members would be a return to the style of syndicates from the 1950s and '60s and '70s, when everyone made money in horses. And somehow the horses were even better and raced more and seemed more like fun, than what we have now.