Repole demands urgent Saratoga meeting on foal crop crisis and industry reforms

Mike Repole turned the sport’s deepest structural problem into a public showdown, pressing for an urgent in-person meeting in Saratoga Springs with The Jockey Club stewards as the North American Thoroughbred foal crop keeps shrinking. The latest Jockey Club estimate projected just 17,000 registered foals in 2026, down from 17,300 in 2025, a number that shows how far the game has drifted from the 51,296 foals it produced at its 1986 peak.

That decline is not an abstraction. Everett Dobson, in his November 2025 essay after becoming chairman, said the 2025 estimate was already 13% below 2020 and linked the erosion to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the 2008-09 recession, casino gaming and legalized sports betting. He also wrote that the smaller crop has filtered straight onto the racetrack, producing fewer tracks, fewer race dates and smaller fields. For fans, that means less of the full-card depth that made major Saturdays feel layered. For bettors, it means thinner fields, fewer usable opinions and less chaos in exotic pools. For marquee races, it means more races that are competitive in name but not always in depth.

The Jockey Club’s mares-bred numbers reinforce the pressure point. It said 740 stallions covered 24,681 mares in North America during 2025 through Sept. 30, an output that still points to a shrinking pipeline relative to where the sport once stood. Repole has framed that slide as an industry failure, not a weather report, and in January he proposed a four-hour live forum with the board of stewards tied to a $1 million aftercare commitment. The Jockey Club shot back on Jan. 27, saying Repole had been attacking the organization since 2023 and that his accusations were baseless, while noting $112 million in contributions over 15 years and another $7 million planned for 2026.

That fight sits in the middle of several other pressure points Repole wants on the table. Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance, based in Lexington, accredits, inspects and funds approved retirement, retraining and rehoming programs, and Repole had already matched donations up to $100,000 for TAA in January 2024. HISA is the other unavoidable flashpoint: Congress authorized the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority in 2020, its Racetrack Safety Program took effect July 1, 2022, and its Anti-Doping and Medication Control Program followed on May 22, 2023. With HISA regulating safety, medication and wagering integrity under FTC oversight, a Saratoga meeting would not just be about breeding. It would be about whether racing can fix the economics, the rules and the trust before the fields get any smaller.