A slow night at work, an informal survey, a few thoughts.

A quick look at DRF entries for last Wednesday, November 22, revealed the following: Aqueduct ran 4 maiden races on a 9 race card; Bay Meadows (3 maiden races, 8 race card); Beulah (1/9); Charles Town (2/10); Churchill (3/10); Delta Downs (3/10); Evangeline (4/11); Hawthorne (2/9); Hollywood (4/8); Hoosier (3/10); Laurel (4/9); Penn National (0/9); and Woodbine (3/8). At these 13 racing venues, a total of 120 races were run; 36 of these 120 races were limited to animals who have yet to visit the winners circle for a photo op.

The number becomes a bit more alarming if one focuses on the facilities in what have historically been called "major" racing centers. At Aqueduct, Churchill, Hollywood, Laurel and Woodbine, nearly 41% (18/44) of all races run on 11/22 were maiden heats.

In the mid 60s and early 70s, when the first multi- million dollar stallion syndications were done (Northern Dancer, Secretariat, Nijinsky) they were based on a model whereby forty or so seasons for each stallion were sold for each year. The thinking behind this was rooted in economics (the limited number of foals would increase each foal's value) and traditional notions of stallion management that dictated that breeding a stallion more than 40 - 50 times per year would have an adverse effect on the stallion's health, well being and eventually his potency.

Fast forward to the late 1970s and early 1980s, and JT Lundy, the architect of Calumet's demise, is being skewered by his fellow Kentucky hardboots for breeding Alydar nearly 100 times per year, for shuttling stallions to the Southern Hemisphere for stud duty. In retrospect, Lundy's ambitious and aggressive breeding of the Calumet studs was a measure of desperation to cover cash flow problems, but he was able to show that doubling the workload of a world class stallion such as Alydar really did not have an adverse effect on his potency.

At about the same time Lundy was finishing off the Wright family's fortune, the commercial breeding market, driven by the Sheiks and the Coolmore people and Robert Sangster and Klein/Lukas, began to take off. Prices for yearlings, stallion shares and breeding stock increased seemingly without boundaries,and everyone managing a stallion began to breed him every time he was able to make wood, sometimes covering two mares a day.

It used to be that these runners had to succeed on the track for their breeders/ owners to prosper; that is really not the case anymore. Pinhookers buy and sell these young prospects, sometimes 2 or 3 times before these prospects even breeze. (A summary of these transactions is presented succinctly on the TG sheets). As long as this market exists for unproven weanlings and yearlings, you will continue to see stallions in a mass production mode.

This is all only a problem if you think that 40% of all races run on a given day being maiden races is not good for racing. When you add the supersized foal crop to the fact that older horses are racing less frequently (which is facilitated by larger purses, fueled by slots or state breeding enhancements), what you will get is a lot of maiden races.

Solutions to this problem:

1) Limit the size of the foal crop and/or establish minimum standards (based on race track earnings) before a stallion prospect can stand stud.

2) Maiden races (not all of them) conducted on a "trial" or "qualifier" basis without pari- mutuel wagering, putting the pressure on the Racing Office to hustle more non- maiden races.

3) More accountability on the part of the Racing Office vis a vis high volume trainers. In the 1980s, I had to beg Bob Kulina (Monmouth) and Euall Wyatt
(Meadowlands) for 5 stalls for my string of non descript claimers; they would
interrogate me without humor as to how many starts I thought each horse would
make at a given race meet. The larger stables which support the overnight and
graded stake programs undergo no such scrutiny, so if Todd Pletcher is given
160 stalls by NYRA, he probably has 40 or so stake horses but also probably has
70- 80 maidens in various stages of preparation for racing.

Is the tail wagging the dog? The business of breeding horses used to support the sport of horse racing; it seems now that Racing merely exists to support breeders and pinhookers, to the detriment of racing fans and handicappers.