HISA fees on an owner’s bill pay for two federal programs — the Racetrack Safety Program and the Anti-Doping and Medication Control Program — at an average cost of $265 per start in 2024, up from $198 per start in 2023. Across the whole sport that comes to $160,015,567 collected in assessments since HISA began…
It costs $50,600 to enter a horse in the Kentucky Derby and get it to the gate: a $600 Triple Crown nomination in January, a $25,000 entry fee, and a $25,000 starting fee. Miss the January deadline and the same trip costs $56,000. Skip nomination altogether and buy in at entry time, and it costs…
A horse sale agreement protects a retired racehorse only as far as the person who signs it. The two clauses that carry the most weight are a no-slaughter provision and a resale-notification provision — the pair the Retired Racehorse Project requires on every Makeover Marketplace sale, where the buyer agrees not to knowingly sell the…
Entering one horse in the 2026 Thoroughbred Makeover costs an owner about $805 in Retired Racehorse Project fees, and the horse is only eligible if it has had no more than 15 retraining rides before December 1, 2025. The Makeover is the Retired Racehorse Project’s annual retraining competition, held October 7–10, 2026 at the Kentucky…
A racehorse trainer runs the entire athletic and daily-care program for your horse: conditioning it to race, managing the vets and farriers who keep it sound, entering it in the races it can actually win, hiring the jockey, and reporting all of it back to you. For that work you pay a day rate that…