653. Does Horse Racing Have a Future?

Freakonomics Radio

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4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Thoroughbred auction prices keep setting records. But tracks are closing, gambling revenues are falling, and the sport is increasingly reliant on subsidies. Is that the kind of long shot anybody wants? (Part three of a series, “The Horse Is Us.”)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Once we started making this series about horses, this is the third and final episode in the series,
0:09.5	people kept telling us that if we really wanted to understand the market for thoroughbred
0:14.0	racehorses, which is the glitziest of all the horse markets, that we needed to get to
0:19.1	Keenland.
0:20.1	Keenland is an auction complex in Lexington,
0:22.8	Kentucky. They hold six major sales a year. The big one is the two-week September yearling sale.
0:29.1	Unproven horses bursting with promise. A horse that someone comes to Keenland to buy with the dream
0:35.0	that their yearling will be the next justify or the next
0:39.1	American Pharaoh or, God willing, the next secretariat.
0:43.9	Course hope springs eternal.
0:46.8	The yearling sale is the biggest sale like it in the world and the highest quality.
0:50.7	A huge share of champions over the past few decades, maybe 40% of the winners of the
0:56.1	biggest U.S. races were bought at Keenland as yearlings. So this September, we decided to go
1:03.3	see for ourselves. Keenland is a massive complex with one racetrack and one training track,
1:12.6	a sales pavilion, and 46 barns that each have 30 to 40 horse stalls. You travel around by golf cart. The grounds
1:18.7	are extremely well manicured. From the first day of the sale to the last, you can smell fresh
1:24.1	cut grass. For this year's September sale, there are about 4,700 yearlings in the catalog.
1:31.5	It also takes a lot of people to make the thing work.
1:35.1	Wade, Cunningham, auctioneer, Keenland.
1:37.2	Rota Ferraro, and I'm director of Keenland Library.
1:39.4	We are the only library of our kind in the world,
1:43.2	and we're by far the largest repository of information related to the third bread breeding and racing industry.
	...

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