The Jockey Club Projects 2022 Foal Crop Of 18,700

The Jockey Club is projecting a North American registered Thoroughbred foal crop of 18,700 in 2022. This represents 500 fewer foals than the 2021 foal crop estimate of 19,200.

The foal crop projection is computed by using Reports of Mares Bred (RMBs) received to date for the 2021 breeding season. RMBs are to be filed by August 1 of each breeding season.

Additional foal crop information is available in The Jockey Club's online fact book at jockeyclub.com/factbook.asp and in the online state fact books.

Stallion owners who have not returned their RMBs for the 2021 breeding season are encouraged to do so as soon as possible. Interactive Registration, which enables registered users to perform virtually all registration-related activities over the Internet, is the most efficient means of submitting RMBs and is available at registry.jockeyclub.com.

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Making Claims: Joe Nevills’ Five Fearless Predictions For The Bloodstock Market In 2021

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.

Making predictions at the beginning of 2020 meant starting with certainty and taking a wild detour after COVID-19 changed the world. Assuming the distribution of the vaccine goes to plan and normalcy returns by the end of 2021, we could see the inverse.

Regardless of the start and end points on a global scale, the bloodstock market rolls on as ever. With a new year ahead of us, I have five predictions for how the marketplace will play out in 2021.

1) Into Mischief Will Repeat As Leading General Sire

Into Mischief had a season for the ages in 2020, setting the single-season record for progeny earnings, spearheaded by probable Horse of the Year Authentic, and Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Sprint winner Gamine.

The Spendthrift Farm resident has been set up for a long reign at the top, thanks to the two things that put any stallion in a position to succeed: quantity and quality in his books of mares. Arguably no other stallion in North America has a stronger pipeline of future runners to keep him at the top of the sire list for the foreseeable future.

Into Mischief is annually at or near the top of the list when The Jockey Club's Report of Mares Bred reveals the most active stallions of a given breeding season, and that was true in 2018, when the 2-year-olds of 2021 were conceived. He has 199 registered live foals among his 2-year-old crop of 2021, which is 41 more than next-closest Klimt. Adding that group to the list of later developers who will certainly mature into stars during their 3-year-old and 4-year-old seasons, that's a strong platoon of runners that figures to get stronger.

Furthermore, Into Mischief covered the strongest book of mares of his career in 2018. That fact was true for several years before that season, and it's certainly true for every season that's followed. Now that he's reached the top of the mountain, that doesn't figure on changing anytime soon.

2) The Report Of Mares Bred Will Continue To Decline, But Not By Much

I could go into all sorts of tiny details as to why the number of mares bred, and the ensuing foal crop, will continue to reach depths not seen in decades, but the simple reasoning here is, “Why wouldn't it?”

The commercial market is trending slightly downward; COVID-19 and its biological, social, and economic ramifications will still be a hindrance for most folks during the bulk of the breeding season; and purses are going to be a mixed bag in 2021 until live handle starts hitting the accounts in full force and supporting casinos are back at full capacity. In short, there just isn't a compelling reason to assume the number of mares added to production will surpass those taken out.

That doesn't mean the bottom's about to fall out, though. Last year's November sales displayed a “hold” market, both in terms of the horses that weren't cataloged and the ones that were bought back. This suggests that breeders are willing to ride out the current uncertainty with the hand they've got, instead of getting out altogether.

There's not a compelling reason to think the number of mares bred will go up, but there's also not a compelling reason to think they'll tank, either. We haven't found the bottom yet, but I think we're close.

3) Practical Joke Will Be The Leading Freshman Sire Of 2021

There are typically two roads to the top when it comes to the freshman sire race. One can flood the market with foals and succeed by attrition by getting a lot of runners into the winner's circle, particularly in minor stakes races (Overanalyze). Others are spearheaded by a star runner or two who vault them to the top with big performances in big spots like the Breeders' Cup (Cross Traffic, Dialed In, Nyquist). Sometimes, a true star will hit both targets (Uncle Mo, American Pharoah).

Practical Joke hits that sweet spot in between, where he has a ton of foals ready to go in his debut crop, and he was well-supported by home farm Ashford Stud and outside breeders. He has 147 juveniles of 2021, which is the fifth-most of any North American sire. He'll have plenty of bullets to fire.

Practical Joke also has the pedigree to back it up. His sire, Into Mischief, is one of the most proven sources of juvenile success going today. Practical Joke was himself an example of that success, taking home a pair of Grade 1 wins as a 2-year-old, and a third in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile.

Physically, Practical Joke is a ball of muscle, which should translate to an early developer who can get the job done around one turn. There's no reason to expect the Practical Jokes won't come out firing. If a few can get it done on the graded stakes level, he could run away with it.

4) The COVID-19 Vaccine Won't Change Much

There are a lot of industries where the COVID-19 vaccine figures to be a magic bullet to return things back to normal. Regardless of when that normalcy returns, and the general public can freely return to the races and sales, I don't expect the bloodstock market to experience quite the same sudden resurgence.

This is a market that was already starting to show fissures from the record-setting highs of a few years ago, and like many industries, the complications of COVID-19 sped up the downturn. Even if returns are up in 2021, there is a fair bit of ground to make up to bring things back to where they were, and that was going to be a challenge whether the world came to a grinding halt in 2020 or not.

Working in the market's favor is the fact that the sale calendar should largely be back to normal in 2021, after the initial uncertainty of last spring decimated the 2-year-old sale calendar and the first half of the yearling season. Assuming the schedule holds, the security of knowing when horses are going to be bought and sold should help both sides prepare appropriately.

We'll learn a lot from the early 2-year-old sales, which will not only will show us how buyers are feeling about spending money on racehorses, it will set the bankroll for a large chunk of the buyers during the ensuing yearling season. The yearling market felt the effects of the scrambled 2-year-old calendar and shaky economy in the spring of 2020, and this spring will either speed up that inertia or reverse it.

Perhaps most importantly, the reason the vaccine won't change much about the bloodstock market is that the bloodstock market went on without one in 2020, especially in the latter half of the year. There are some complications that figure on being eased once more people are able to travel freely, especially in terms of international buyers, but the climb back will not be as high as a business that's had to operate without one of its major sources of income, like a restaurant without a dining room.

More or less, life went on for horse trade in 2020. Because of that, there's not as much ground to make up when life starts to go on again for everyone else.

5) Get Stormy Makes The Leap

After covering 111 or more mares in his first two seasons at stud, things got quiet in the breeding shed for Crestwood Farm's Get Stormy.

At first, it was the usual lull that befalls many stallions in their third and fourth books. Then, his first couple seasons with runners on the track were solid, but lacked the superstars the market demands to line up the trailers on Spurr Road.

In 2018, Get Stormy's runners found their mojo. Got Stormy launched her superstar career with three stakes victories, including a Grade 3 score. The stallion also rung up Grade 3 wins that year with Storm the Hill and Go Noni Go, and he had a handful of others bring in graded stakes placings. He finished the 2018 season in the top five among third-crop sires by stakes winners and tied for second in that group by graded stakes winners.

Breeders took notice, and nearly doubled Get Stormy's book from 47 mares in 2018 to 86 mares in 2019. Between then and now, Got Stormy has become a true star of the turf, Fifty Five has become a millionaire, and Clyde's Image has multiple Grade 1 placings. Get Stormy was a top-10 sire by graded stakes winners on turf, and by total turf stakes winners in 2020, both with fewer starters than any active stallion ahead of him.

Get Stormy is still looking for his first serious juvenile runner, but he has the opportunity to send more 2-year-olds to post in 2021 than he's seen since his second crop hit the track in 2017. The stallion's foals conceived in 2019 had a roadmap to what makes a graded stakes-winning horse with Get Stormy, suggesting the quality and intent of the mares sent his way were clearer than before. This should, in turn, give him the best chance of his life of getting over the hump with a good 2-year-old.

Looking at the breeding season, Get Stormy's stock as a sire of runners has been on the rise, and his average yearling sale price has been climbing steadily year-over-year. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect Get Stormy to eclipse 100 mares in 2021, especially at a completely reasonable stud fee of $7,500.

Get Stormy is on his way to becoming a made man in Kentucky. This year could be the one that fully establishes it.

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Q & A with Everett Dobson, Chairman American Graded Stakes Committee

For the American Graded Stakes Committee, 2020 presented challenges unlike anything it has faced before as the pandemic played havoc with racing schedules and caused the cancellation of numerous stakes. The TDN sat down with the committee’s chairman Everett Dobson to discuss the challenges, why it made the changes that it did for 2021 and what might in store for future years.

TDN: Take us through what the process entails when it comes to evaluating stakes races. What are the numbers that you crunch?

ED: We look at a tremendous amount of information. The Jockey Club puts together an enormous amount of what I call objective analytical data that we go through. There are a variety of data points. The objective information that we look at is on the TOBA website, if anyone wants to take a look at it. From that, you get a pretty good indicator of the relative strengths of a race. We look at it over a five-year period and look at the relative performances of the horses over what is now 15 divisions. We actually look at every single race. With some, we don’t feel compelled to look too long. An example would be the Breeders’ Cup Classic. It doesn’t warrant much discussion when it comes to whether or not it should be a Grade I race. It’s the same for the Kentucky Derby and a few other races.

TDN: In what was a very unusual year, there were several major stakes, for instance, the Arlington Million and the Pennsylvania Derby, that were not run. Did that throw a wrinkle into things and how did the committee deal with this set of circumstances?

ED: We had 69 graded stakes that weren’t run in 2020. There were another 63 listed races that were on the calendar that weren’t run. So, 132 total stakes races were not run. Yes, that threw a wrinkle into things. Despite that, we still went through the process and looked at those races. While 2020 was an exceptional year, we still had a fair amount of data for each of those individual races. We felt like we owed it to the tracks, those races, the owners, trainers, breeders and everyone involved to take a look at those races.

TDN: Because of the COVID-19 shutdowns, there was a period when some tracks were the “only game in town” and their stakes races were actually much stronger than normal. How did the committee deal with that issue?

ED: We had a separate call among the committee members a couple of weeks before the session actually started to discuss that very issue. How were we going to approach the process this year? We decided to be somewhat cautious about giving a race too much credit when it came to evaluating it off just the one year. We didn’t want to significantly reward a race because of COVID or the impact of the COVID effect. In the United States, we have a committee that discusses and analyzes and debates the relative merits and strengths of a race. While we do have objective analytical data points, we ultimately use our collective wisdom to assign the grade of the race for the following year. We made a conscious decision to not overly penalize a race or reward a race if it was clear there was a COVID impact on that race.

TDN: There were few changes for 2021. Is there any particular reason why?

ED: There were undoubtedly fewer changes than normal, whether a race was promoted up or down. The answer is, that was the result of our decision to be cautious because of COVID. That resulted in fewer changes.

TDN: There were a handful of stakes this year, including Grade I events, where the quality of the fields was disappointing. Are there any races that are on the committee’s radar that might be nearing the point where they are in jeopardy of being downgraded?

ED: The answer is yes. We actually meet no less than four or five times a year in between the session where we assign the grades. In those meetings, we discuss a lot of what we are seeing in terms of trends within the races we will be asked to analyze. Those trends include things like a situation where certain geographic areas are seeing smaller fields in their stakes races. We will discuss and analyze whether something like that is having an impact on quality. Are races being impacted because of where they are positioned on the calendar opposite other races? We look at field size across the board. We’ve noted that field size in turf races has gone up. That has had some influence on the quality and strength of those fields. We look at the size of the foal crop. We’ve had a significant reduction in the size of the foal crop over the last 20 years. But interestingly enough, the size of the foal crop in Kentucky is actually pretty flat. We do an enormous amount of analytical research and have a tremendous amount of discussion about what we are seeing. We like to see the big picture.

TDN: In recent years, the committee has let it be known that it recognizes that the foal crop has gone down, that top horses race less frequently than they used to and, because of this, there is an overall need to downgrade races or take graded status away from some races. Have those adjustments now been made or is that still a work in progress?

ED: We see a little bit more stability in the foal crop, despite it being down. But there are still legitimate concerns about the foal crop as it relates to the strengths of the stakes over time. Yet, the rate of decline, if you will, has subsided quite a bit, particularly when you consider that the foal crop out of Kentucky is relatively flat over the last five or six years. In our minds, that bodes well for the relative quality. That’s not to say that markets like Florida and California, where there has been significant reductions in the foal crops, aren’t a concern. It is. But Kentucky is relatively stable, and that helps.

TDN: This year, there were some complaints from Kentucky Downs, which felt it had been treated unfairly by the committee. They must be happy since they had more races upgraded than any track. Could you address their situation and why these upgrades didn’t happen sooner?

ED: In some cases, it was a matter of it taking a two-year renewal of a race for us to consider it for a grade. Why it hadn’t happened sooner? I can’t really answer that question without breaking down individual races, looking at the divisions and how a race stacks up against other races. Kentucky Downs, obviously, is a tremendous bright spot in our sport right now and we are thrilled at what they are doing. We certainly see the relative strength of turf racing in the U.S. improving. We are benefitting across the board when it comes to turf racing with all the European horses coming to the U.S. to run, and some of those horses wound up running at Kentucky Downs. Overall, turf racing in the U.S. is doing very well and Kentucky Downs is a significant bright spot when it comes to that.

TDN: In the past, the committee had made it known that it might take a stand when it comes to Lasix. One possibility has been that stakes races run with Lasix will lose their grading. With so many tracks disallowing Lasix in their stakes for 2021, is the committee once again thinking of penalizing stakes where the medication is still allowed?

ED: I hate to say this, but this is a topic I cannot comment on…maybe for obvious reasons.

TDN: The committee members have a pretty thankless job and, at the end of the day, a lot of people are not happy with some of the decisions that it makes. What can you tell people so that they are more sympathetic when it comes to the challenges the committee faces?

ED: I’ll go back to my opening comments. We have 11 dedicated people on the committee that are enormously knowledgeable about the sport, their heart is in the right place and they work really hard. It takes me a good week to prepare for the grading session. It takes a tremendous effort to be prepared to go into those sessions and be able to have a knowledgeable discussion about individual races. I think we do it the right way and analyze things the right way. In other countries around the world, they take a number and do their analysis based on something like speed ratings. They take the human element out of it. When you do that, how do you evaluate things like what happened in 2020? That’s exactly where you need people with knowledge of the sport to come in, weigh in and make the right decisions. We have five racing secretaries on the committee that are spread around the country and represent different tracks. They leave their badge back at home. They work really hard when it comes to being fair and assigning the grades as they should be. Everybody works exceptionally hard to get to the right answer.

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Jockey Club Live Foal Report Shows Declines in Foals Born, Active Stallions

The Jockey Club today reported that 1,552 stallions covered 31,198 mares in North America during 2019, according to statistics compiled through Sept. 29, 2020. These breedings have resulted in 19,677 live foals of 2020 being reported to The Jockey Club on Live Foal Reports.

The Jockey Club estimates that the number of live foals reported so far is approximately 85-90 percent complete. The reporting of live foals of 2020 is down 3.4 percent from last year at this time when The Jockey Club had received reports for 20,363 live foals of 2019.

In addition to the 19,677 live foals of 2020 reported through Sept. 29, The Jockey Club also received 2,476 No Foal Reports for the 2020 foaling season. Ultimately, the 2020 registered foal crop is projected to reach 20,500.

The number of stallions declined 4.8 percent from the 1,630 reported for 2018 at this time last year, while the number of mares bred declined 4.0 percent from the 32,508 reported for 2018.

The 2019 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 55.3 percent of the mares reported bred in North America in 2019 and 60.2 percent of the live foals reported for 2020.

The 17,240 mares reported bred to 228 Kentucky stallions in 2019 have produced 11,851 live foals, a 2.9 percent decrease on the 12,200 Kentucky-sired live foals of 2019 reported at this time last year. The number of mares reported bred to Kentucky stallions in 2019 decreased 1.2 percent compared to the 17,446 reported for 2018 at this time last year.

Among the 10 states and provinces with the most mares covered in 2019, three produced more live foals in 2020 than in 2019 as reported at this time last year: Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The following table shows the top 10 states and provinces ranked by number of state/province-sired live foals of 2020 reported through Sept. 29, 2020.

  2019 Mares Bred 2019 Live Foals 2020 Live Foals Percent Change in Live Foals
Kentucky 17,240 12,200 11,851 -2.9%
California 2,129 1,612 1,390 -13.8%
Florida 2,024 1,164 1,156 -0.7%
New York 1,080 703 652 -7.3%
Louisiana 1,082 728 647 -11.1%
Pennsylvania 853 339 510 50.4%
Maryland 804 537 506 -5.8%
Ontario 615 377 350 -7.2%
Oklahoma 631 289 342 18.3%
New Mexico 624 307 313 2.0%

The statistics include 429 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 150 Chile 8
Turkey 83 Jamaica 8
Republic of Korea 81 Australia 4
Ireland 38 Germany 2
Japan 23 Peru 2
Great Britain 16 Barbados 1
France 13    

The report also includes 79 mares bred to 14 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 2020 will be released later this month.

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