Charlotte Clement:

Good morning. I want to start by saying I’ve consistently been told that I speak too quickly, so wish me luck and this should be fun for all of us. Now, I want to start with a number: 24.4 million. That’s how many Americans watched the Kentucky Derby this year. The most watched Derby since 1989. More people than watch the final rounds of the Masters. More than the average World Series game and right in line with the NCAA March Madness final. Twenty-five million, give or take, choose to watch a horse race over everything else on a Saturday in America. We know that millions turn out for our biggest days, but too few come back for the rest of the calendar. I want to put an exact number on that gap. I’ll come back to it. For those I haven’t met, I’m the chief strategy and transformation officer for The Jockey Club.

What that means in practice is The Jockey Club’s future mission is a service organization to all participants in the industry focusing on sustainable growth. My job is the route to that and my job is to be able to tell you honestly whether we’re on it. Change is hard and change takes time, but that doesn’t mean we shy away from it. We are committed to hearing your feedback and acting on it. So, let’s start with where we actually are today. Everett was direct about this a year ago. Grow the sport, reverse the decline in the foal crop, in the field size, in the fan base and in wagering. Hold onto the racetracks we can’t afford to lose. I’m not going to stand up here and tell you those numbers turned around. They haven’t yet. We see field sizes down to 7.26 starters a race in the first half of the year from 7.54 a year ago.

U.S. pari-mutuel handle fell over 3% in 2024 to 11.7 billion, down 57% in real dollars since 2003. That’s the honest starting point. I’m not here to spin it, but I’m here to tell you why I’m not discouraged by it. And it starts with getting the diagnosis right. This is less of a demand problem than a supply problem. Here’s the data behind that and credit to the Equibase team for tracking all of this data. Since 2015, total starts in North American racing are down 28%. Over the same period, nominal handle per starter is up 32%. This is not a demand collapse. This is a contraction in how much racing we are able to produce. Look at where the contraction actually comes from. Roughly 85% of the decline in starts through the age four is explained by the foal crop alone. The 2015 crop generated 7.54 starts per foal through age four.

The 2021 crop generated 7.27, a decline of just 3.6% in a period when the foal crop itself fell 17%. We didn’t get worse at getting horses to the races, we just started with fewer horses. So here’s the diagnosis plainly - supply contracted faster than demand did and supply is the one variable that no single farm, no track, and no company controls alone. Each of us can set an example. None of us can be the whole answer. That’s not a discouraging conclusion. It’s quite the opposite. It means that the fix is structural, not existential. Let’s start with safety because it’s the clearest proof we already have that this kind of collective structural fix can work. Yes, there’s a commitment to continue to work to improve, but I want to point at actually what made these huge rides possible. It was tracks, horsemen and women, veterinarians, regulators, and all others had to accept one common yard stick and change behavior over years.

No single organization gets to claim ownership of that result. Uniform standards work. That is exactly the model that we now need to bring to supply and participation next. This country did not lose its appetite to bet or its love of the horse. Both are actually growing. What’s not growing at the same rate is our share of either of those markets. That’s a packaging problem, not a demand problem, and packaging problems are the ones we can actually solve, which brings me back to this number. 24.4 million people watched the Derby this year, but over 80% of the Derby audience never watched another horse race all year long. I want to be really clear about what that means because it’s easy to hear it as bad news, but it actually isn’t. Nearly 25 million people already showed up once. That is a product that can win. What we don’t have is a program built to keep them.

What is our strategy? That’s a retention problem. And retention problems are the kind you can build a system to solve. Here’s the contrast to make it concrete. Legal U.S. sports betting handle grew 24% in 2024 to nearly 150 billion in the same year our own handle fell. The money didn’t just disappear from gambling. It went somewhere that gave people a reason to come back next week, not just once a year. So here’s what we’re going to do about it. For the parts of this we haven’t cracked yet, we’re going to treat every serious idea as a measurable experiment, run it centrally, and tell you the truth about the results, including the ones that don’t work. We did this once already on safety after hearing feedback from the public that our standard was not acceptable. The next opportunity is for us to bring the same shared measurement to participation.

How many horses we breed, how many reach the races, how long they stay active, and whether we’re creating enough real opportunities for them to become fans. That’s not a slogan. That’s a specific buildable dashboard and I want us building it together - starting now. We heard your feedback about access to data. So now there’s the Innovation Incubator piloting new ideas and holding them to a real standard of impact, partnering with startups to launch more products in the industry and stimulate innovation, allowing access to data quickly to any new idea with the goal of moving towards an entirely self-service model. Since launch, we already have new proposals for betting solutions, new sales products, and even new products focused on equine safety. This is exactly what we were hoping for. Our mandate at The Jockey Club has been clear from your feedback to us. We are a service organization, not just a registry.

And that starts with something as simple as a Net Promoter Survey, a survey that is centered around asking customers for honest and direct feedback. I want to sit with that for a second because it’s a bigger idea than it sounds. An NPS survey means that people in this room are deciding the direction of our product development. You telling us directly and us building around what you tell us. We are committed to modernizing the products you interact with daily to improve how you do what you do every day. So here’s our commitment. No decision gets made without proof and data that it’s worth making. No experiment gets run without measurement built in it before it starts. And no one on our team celebrates anything until we see actual improvements in the numbers that matter. Beyond that specific commitment, every key industry metric and every initiative we run, we are going to share it publicly and transparently. What’s working and what is not.

Some of what we’re running is worth expanding. Some of it is worth sunsetting. We will tell you which is which in public on a regular basis. And this can’t just stop at our own initiatives. There are tracks running real experiments right now.

That knowledge currently lives in one building and it should live across the entire industry. One experiment we are running is refining the Equibase rating system that is being built with racing offices, owners, and trainers since the first rating races debuted late last year. The goal is simple to state, but very hard to build. Simpler conditions, more opportunities for horses to actually run, and a way for owners to run without losing their horse in a claim. As of August 1st, 76 rating races have been run at 11 different tracks involving more than 400 horses, 300 owners, and 200 trainers. That’s a small footprint today, but the early signal is exactly the participation data we should all care about. More starts and fewer published workouts for horses running in these races. What comes next isn’t a bigger algorithm. It’s town halls, it’s one-on-one conversations, and it’s real case studies to get feedback to improve our rating number.

Now here’s a case study where the early results aren’t modest at all. In 2025, America’s Best Racing drove more than 300 million video views and a billion impressions. This year, video views are up 166% year over year. Some of that content has gone properly viral. The mic’d up behind the scene footage of Cherie DeVaux’s win got picked up by creators and outlets around the world, not because we bought placements, but because the story was good enough to travel on its own. Here’s how I’d put a number on it. That reach is worth somewhere between 12 and 15 million in earned media generated on a budget of roughly two million a year. The NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball spend hundreds of millions annually on marketing backed by national broadcast deals we do not have.

Measured against that gap, this is one of the best performing dollars in our entire budget. We’re now applying that same storytelling approach directly to ownership through an expanded OwnerView racing platform we relaunched just before this year’s Triple Crown. Traffic to that site has nearly tripled since launch and lead capture is accelerating. It’s early and I don’t have a full conversion on it yet, but if ABR taught us how to get people to notice this sport, OwnerView is where we find out whether we can turn that attention into new owners who actually stay in this sport. The foal crop problem and the ownership problem are the same. More owners in this game means more mares in production, means more foals, means more horses to fill the fields. We’ve spent this whole speech talking about. OwnerView isn’t a marketing side project. It’s a foal crop policy approach from the other end.

Our competitors are not each other. Our competitors are every other form of entertainment fighting for two seconds of somebody’s attention in a world that has never had more to give of it. The more we remember that, the more we remember that collaboration isn’t a nice sentiment. It’s the strategy. If we say an experiment worked or didn’t, you should expect us to show our work, not just tell you. If your track has learned something running its own experiment, good or bad, tell us. I’d rather this whole room learn from one failed experiment than have five of us quietly repeat it over and over again. So back to that number. We already have a story worth telling. 24.4 million people prove that already this year. The safety numbers prove that structural change works when we measure it honestly and do it together. Now we need to apply that same discipline to grow our sport sustainably.

We need to roll up our sleeves and get to work together. I thank you for the time today and I look forward to the journey ahead.