The Blog
Short, specific answers to the questions new and experienced racehorse owners search for. Organized by category, searchable, and updated regularly. The four chapters are a guided introduction. The blog is the working reference.
Every Thoroughbred foaled in the Northern Hemisphere has an official birthday of January 1. Every Thoroughbred foaled in the Southern Hemisphere has one of August 1. Neither is the horse’s real birth date. Both are bookkeeping conventions that let a…
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…
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…
A sale-attached bonus scheme should change where you buy only when the bonus you could actually collect, discounted by your honest odds of winning the qualifying race, beats the premium you pay to buy at that venue. At the two…
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…
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…
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…
The OBS March Sale of Two-Year-Olds in Training is Ocala Breeders’ Sales’ select juvenile auction, held each spring in Ocala, Florida, and it sells horses that are already broken, already galloping, and close enough to a first start to run…
The Keeneland September Yearling Sale produced the highest gross ever recorded at a Thoroughbred auction anywhere in 2025: 3,070 yearlings sold for $531.5 million, at a $175,807 average and an $80,000 median. Those are the figures every recap quoted, and…
When a horse trainer is suspended, the horses in that barn cannot breeze or race until each one is transferred to another licensed trainer and that transfer is registered with HISA — and if the suspension runs longer than 30…