Florida decoupling: Turning the page to old, new battles in 2026

A court case creaking its way through the halls of justice in Tallahassee is the only publicly tangible paper trail that says the Florida decoupling drama has life. What feels like a hiatus now instead might be the calm before a winter storm.

Pro-racing advocates expect The Stronach Group to make a second try at getting the state legislature to separate its intertwined Thoroughbred and slot-machine licenses at Gulfstream Park. They fear such a split, which was rejected in May, would be the beginning of the end of South Florida horse racing.

“We killed it during 2025, but we’re gearing up on offense again to let Gulfstream Park and The Stronach Group know that we plan to fight decoupling,” said Damon Thayer, the retired Kentucky state senator who has been a guiding prod in Florida with the Thoroughbred Racing Initiative coalition.

Doing business under its 1/ST brand name, Stronach has not said much about its strategy for the new legislative session, which runs from Jan. 13 to March 13. It broke its silence with a brief written statement Sunday to Horse Racing Nation.

“1/ST remains steadfast in our belief that decoupling is the path to an industry-led model,” TSG spokesperson Tiffani Steer said. “That said, we have been and remain committed to working constructively with all parties to find a solution.”

For now the lawsuit that was filed Aug. 5 in Leon County Circuit Court is doing all the talking for Stronach. It says that since Florida harness racing, quarter-horse and jai-alai venues were allowed to stop their pari-mutuel competitions and keep their slot machines, then Gulfstream Park should have the same opportunity.

“Gulfstream alone bears the statutory burden to sustain one particular industry, Thoroughbred horse racing, in order to participate in another industry, slot machines,” the lawsuit said. “No other competitor suffers that legislatively imposed burden on its constitutional right to operate slot machines.”

The counterpoint is that Gulfstream knew full well what it was getting into when it agreed to marry horses and slots in 2004.

A motion by the Florida Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association to get the court case thrown out is scheduled to be heard Jan. 5. Until then, the arguments that became so familiar during this year’s legislative battle will be heard again.

In its Sunday statement, TSG referred to racing’s shrinking economic profile in what has been a bear market for the sport in the 21st century.

“The challenges facing Thoroughbred racing in Florida, like in the rest of the country, are very real,” Steer said. “Securing the long-term success of racing in the state will require thoughtful, collective and timely action on the part of all stakeholders.”

Meanwhile, another fight has been simmering for months between two groups who share the common goal to prevent decoupling.

The Florida Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and the TRI both take credit for stifling the 2025 bill that would have let Gulfstream split its racing and gaming licenses.

“The FTBOA defeated decoupling, nearly alone at the industry front, in 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2021 through decades of cultivated relationships,” FTBOA president Valerie Daley wrote last Monday. “Recent claims that Florida's breeding industry was ‘asleep at the wheel’ ignore this documented history. The FTBOA won four decoupling battles before outside consultants arrived, and we prevailed again in 2025, this time with collaborators.”

Daley did not mention Thayer and TRI by name, but it was clear who she meant. She was prompted by what Thayer told Mike Penna last month on Horse Racing Radio Network.

“The Florida breeding industry got caught flat-footed,” Thayer said. “Apparently nobody was paying attention while Gulfstream Park was handing out all these checks ($300,000 in campaign contributions in Florida). And so last January, when the decoupling bill got dropped on us, it was a huge surprise. Someone was asleep at the wheel, and that’s why the Thoroughbred Racing Initiative was formed.”

There is no mistaking the perceptions. The TRI intimated that the FTBOA was overmatched in this political fight. Daley’s FTBOA, which executive director Lonny Powell has led for nearly 14 years, all but called the New Jersey-registered TRI uninvited carpetbaggers.

“I never named him or the FTBOA on HRRN,” Thayer said last week on HRN’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod. Reminded that his reference was not that veiled, he said, “No, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

In a phone interview during the weekend with HRN, Powell would not speak directly about the war of words but, instead, about the common cause.

“I think the intersection of being against decoupling is always a nice thing that people can rally around,” he said.

Infighting aside, credit for the legislative roadblock of decoupling also belongs to owner-breeders Mike Repole, Mandy Pope and the Farish family. They contributed a combined $450,000 to the political-action committee run by Republican governor Ron DeSantis. Around the time the checks cleared, DeSantis said he would block any threat to Florida’s racing industry.

Calling himself the leader who horse racing does not have, Repole said on X, “Your beloved commissioner talks the talk, walks the walk and put his money where his mouth is.”

“(The donations) weren’t the biggest influence,” Thayer said, “but the fact of the matter is you have to be involved politically in state capitals, and you have to support the people who support your issue. ... That’s how you make friends and influence people.

“We got funding from all over the country, and we killed the bill. ... I believe it was that coalition led by TRI that killed the bill. Now that’s an opinion, but it’s shared by a lot of people that the current setup in Florida wasn’t enough to kill the bill. The momentum was simply on the Gulfstream Park side, and it took a new coalition to kill the bill.”

Thayer also pointed to the state legislature eliminating horsemen’s groups as middlemen in distributing $4 million in purse contributions to Gulfstream Park and $1 million to Tampa Bay Downs.

“It’s being given out by the track,” Thayer said. “That’s very rare in most states’ breeder programs.”

There is the often-whispered belief that this was a vindictive move by some lawmakers to save face and spite TSG’s most influential opponents. As one interested bystander put it, “That was revenge.”

In Kentucky, where he served 22 years in the Senate and rose to be the Republican floor leader, Thayer enjoyed a smoother path to legislative success for the horse industry. He was pivotal in bringing opposing sides together to pass a 2021 bill that paved the way for historic horse-racing machines, which have fueled bigger race purses.

“I was brought on in Florida because of my track record in Kentucky,” Thayer said.

How a potential legislative fight plays out next year in Tallahassee remains to be seen, particularly since no new bill has been filed formally yet. There might be a lesson to carry over from the end of the battle this year. That was when the decoupling proposal was added at the 11th hour to a bigger gambling bill that nonetheless failed.

DeSantis is still the governor, but he is bound by term limits to leave office next January. Even though he is a lame duck who is often at odds with fellow Republicans who run the legislature, this is the same cast of characters who saw to it that TSG did not have its way in the spring.

“It’s been our sense that the appetite is even less in the legislature to have a long, drawn-out, decoupling-bill debate as a priority for the state,” Powell said. “Our friends in the Senate remain stalwart as does the governor. We just think it’s an unfortunate conversation to have, but we’re ready to have it. We’ve done it enough.”

“I’m never confident going into any legislative session,” Thayer said. “There are always factors out of your control when you’re trying to pass or defeat legislation. But I like our position going into this session better than (2025). You know we really didn’t get rolling until February. This (time) the session starts in early January, and it’s done by early March, so we’re better prepared. We’ve got a great coalition of individuals and groups who are willing to fight this with us. I hope it is ‘Groundhog Day.’ ”

As for the percolating court case, Thayer and Powell said they could not speak as lawyers. But Thayer was not shy with his hope-cum-prediction for the lawsuit.

“As someone who made laws for 22 years,” he said, “I just think it’s more sort of chum in the water to try to maybe take our eye off the ball on decoupling. But we’re not going to do that.”

It might be frosty, but Thayer and Powell are scheduled to share the stage in Tucson, Ariz., next Tuesday on a panel at the Global Symposium on Racing.

Asked whether he coveted the chance to find common ground with Powell next week, Thayer said, “That remains to be seen.”

“My plans are, out of respect to the audience, to address the (decoupling) topic at hand,” Powell said.

Thayer and Powell agreed that this is a never-ending fight stretching beyond Florida to other racing-and-slots states and even past the U.S. border. The British Columbia provincial government just last week said it would pull the plug Jan. 31 on slot-machine revenue for Hastings Park. There already had been growing signs that racing was on borrowed time in Vancouver, where the sale of the track to tribal interests this summer awaits formal approval.

Repole went public in April with his desire to buy Gulfstream Park and save it from decoupling.

“We’ve had meetings,” he said in an X post. “I can’t force anyone to sell.”

Thayer said he was aware of two other suitors who could step forward and save the track. The problem is family matriarch Belinda Stronach has not shown any interest in accepting their offers.

“It does not appear that the track is priced anywhere close to where somebody could justify it as a racetrack,” Powell said. “I think the odds are pretty stiff, especially in the short term.”