New racing league stumbles but moves toward September launch

With less than a month until its launch, the National Thoroughbred League is striding confidently toward an inaugural event during Labor Day weekend. Trying to attract a young, well-to-do audience, it has been selling tickets for a high-end, VIP experience featuring a race at Kentucky Downs and a concert in Nashville.

On either side of its premiere, though, the NTL has found the startup path to be a rocky one. The original plan was to have run events already this summer at two East Coast tracks. A six-month tour that was intended to have seven stops has been winnowed to four.

“I’m not going to lie. It’s disappointing,” league president Tom Ludt said late last week.

In spite of the cancellations and early stumbles, the NTL plans to have its branding on an undercard handicap race at Kentucky Downs on Sept. 3. That is the Sunday when the Grade 3, $750,000 Dueling Grounds Derby will be the feature.

“We’re running a $500,000, one-mile turf race for 3 and up,” Ludt said. “It’s being helped purse-wise by Kentucky Downs. The horses are going to run in our silks on a one-day basis.”

The details were finalized Monday morning with track owners Ron Winchell and Marc Falcone.

“We want to encourage new ideas and innovation, especially concepts created with the goal of bringing more people into horse racing,” Winchell said in a written statement.

Although the Kentucky Downs event looks like it is full steam ahead, what the NTL definitely will not have next month is a Seattle date. It had been scheduled for Sept. 15 and 16 at Emerald Downs.

“We’re just going to do it next year,” track president Phil Ziegler said. “They kind of ran out of time this year.”

“It’s just been part of the challenges of this league,” Ludt said. “Trying to get everything organized and structured, that’s kind of the reason we squeezed Emerald Downs out just from a logistics and a cost standpoint. We’re trying to tighten things up so we can have a great 2024.”

A late start this year

In a telephone interview from California on Friday with Horse Racing Nation, Ludt said the NTL had hoped to hold events at seven tracks this year. But even before the league was introduced in May, two penciled-in hosts were dropped.

“We had Parx and Monmouth,” Ludt said. “We were supposed to run at Parx on July 4 weekend, and we were supposed to run at Monmouth this (past) weekend. Just logistics and everything of a startup, we had to postpone those events. It frustrates me. I spent a long time negotiating these contracts.”

Ludt confessed that track management at Monmouth was none too happy about the plans for Friday and Saturday falling through.

“We spent months trying to get this all worked out with the horsemen, and then we canceled,” Ludt said with a resigned chuckle. “We did cancel, so it was us. It wasn’t like I wanted to, but business is business. You’ve got to get it all worked out. We didn’t have everything finalized.”

Even for next month’s launch at Kentucky Downs, the NTL team concept had to be scaled down. Instead of a roster of horses owned by league investors, the NTL as a title sponsor will be represented merely with its colors for the $500,000 race.

“We’re much more going to be a hybrid in 2023,” said Ludt, who has been a leader in all facets of racing and has chaired the Breeders’ Cup board. “I’m not going to throw anybody under the bus, but it’s been tough getting it started.”

According to nomination blank for what is billed as the National Thoroughbred League Handicap, $200,000 of the purse will come from the Kentucky Thoroughbred Development Fund. Other than 3-year-olds and up, no conditions are attached, and no fees will be required for nominations that close Aug. 21. Since it is a handicap, there also are no entry or starter fees. The field will be limited to 12 horses with up to four also-eligibles, and each finisher will get at least $5,000. Since this was an addition to the condition book, there will be 12 races run Sept. 3.

The long-term plan is still to have allowance-level horses racing across the country on behalf of teams owned by NTL investors. Ultimately each event would feature three league races with fields of six representing Los Angeles, Nashville, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia and Seattle, even if it is in name only. Ludt admitted that making this wish come true has been an uphill challenge.

“I’ve never been involved in a startup,” said Ludt, an executive who has had breeding, stable, racetrack and regulatory experience. “I’ve been in this horse business forever. What could go wrong has gone wrong. Everybody’s like, ‘Tom, that’s just a startup.’ But that doesn’t mean I have to accept it.”

Through all the growing pains, Ludt said the NTL show will go on in less than four weeks.

Bubblin’ with a concert

The promotional display on the home page of the NTL’s ticket vendor Tixr gives the race second billing behind a Saturday, Sept. 2, concert in Nashville. It features eight-time Grammy Award-winning rap artist Anderson .Paak, whose breakout track was “Bubblin” in 2018 and whose biggest hit “Leave the Door Open” in 2021 was recorded with Bruno Mars as Silk Sonic. He is doing club gigs like this one under the name DJ Pee Wee.

“The idea is to attract people who would not normally go to racing,” Ludt said. “That’s been the hard part for me. I don’t know anything about running events, but it’s all about trying to make it a weekend experience.”

Not counting processing fees, tickets cost $199.99 and $399.99 to go to the race day and $499.99 package for both the concert and the races. Even though they still were said to be available Sunday at the NTL’s Tixr link, Kentucky Downs’ vendor TicketSpice said the Sept. 3 racing date was sold out.

Ludt was generous with his praise of the track’s management even as he openly thought about the precedent the NTL was setting with such an expensive inaugural race.

“Ron Winchell and Marc Falcone, our friends, have been so helpful and so supportive,” Ludt said. “We’re running this $500,000 race, and the organization loved it, but the horse guy Tom Ludt would be like, oh, God. Now we’re going to go back and run at Meadowlands for probably $50,000. It’s going to look weird, but it’s complicated.”

Going ahead without Seattle

Although specifics were not revealed, devilish details no doubt conspired to bring down the Seattle event. Ziegler said one of the complications that he faced in his role running Emerald Downs was organizing horses to represent the NTL during the track’s closing weekend.

“They’ve got to get their horses and this and that and travel,” he said. “We were trying to cram it in before the end of our season (Sept. 17). I think they kind of ran out of time on it.”

Ludt said the NTL still planned to sponsor the $150,000 Longacres Mile, which is scheduled for Sunday at Emerald Downs.

As it stands, events at and around the Meadowlands on Oct. 13 and 14, Los Alamitos on Nov. 10 and 11 and a $1 million championship at Tampa Bay Downs on Dec. 30 and 31 are still on the calendar.

“We’re running at Los Al that Saturday night,” Ludt said about Nov. 11, when the track runs mostly quarter horses but also some longer sprints. “They usually open up with three or four Thoroughbred races, so we’ll be the first three races there. ... We’re still negotiating, but the L.A. theme is still not finalized, and then Tampa Bay is New Year’s Eve, and we’re still working on that.”

At one point tickets were available for an Oct. 14 Meadowlands event with price points of $150 and $300, but that link was replaced on the NTL website with the same mailing-list option shown for the California and Florida dates. Ludt said that Saturday event will be aligned with the New York Wine and Food Festival, which had not yet included it on its website.

“We’ve got 15 celebrity chefs coming and cooking on the grounds at the Meadowlands,” Ludt said. “That’s going to be an all-afternoon and evening deal. We’re only going to have owner parties on Friday night (Oct. 13). There’ll be no concerts, because the celebrity chef is the event.”

Want a team? Put down $100,000

The competition at the core of the league concept remains the building of teams that own six horses each, three of whom would compete on each three-race NTL program. Jockeys and trainers may come and go at each team’s discretion, but the horses would be the constants.

“As those six active horses become inactive, (teams) can trade or draw in more horses through a supplemental draft,” Ludt said. “The league will control horses coming in and out to keep it competitive. If you owned a team, and you had a horse get hurt or need to be retired, you can’t just go buy a horse and bring it in. It has to be a horse that we approve with a committee of three independent horse people, or we bring horse options to you, and you pick one.”

Ludt said the committee would be tasked with keeping an owner on the verge of clinching the championship bonus from bringing in a ringer for the final race.

“In your starting six, if one blossoms, you might be a standout. That’s just part of the game,” he said. “What we’re trying to prevent is, if you and I are head to head in teams, and we’re coming to the championship at the end of 2024, one of us goes out and buys a horse that’s far superior on paper just to win the $1 million bonus.”

At Kentucky Downs, Winchell said he and Falcone “like the idea of having a handicap race, allowing horses of slightly different levels of ability to compete against each other for a lot of money.”

Ludt identified NTL co-founders Bob Daughtery and Randall Lane, both of whom are synonymous with Forbes, as being two of the team owners. He said investors are required to make $100,000 down payments to secure their teams, but he stopped short of naming other owners who still are committed to the startup.

“We have people that are holding teams,” he said, “but we haven’t closed on our raise (of money) to finalize the structure. We had one guy that came in, and he didn’t have a certain net worth. I’m not a financial guy, but if you try to go raising money, there’s certain requirements you have to have. So he’s no longer a part.”

Critics are fast and loud

When the NTL was introduced in the middle of the Triple Crown campaign, it was met with immediate criticism that ran from questions about the team concept and whether there is a need for more race cards to comparisons with other failed leagues and events.

“Call me a skeptic,” Parx announcer and FanDuel TV publicist Jessica Paquette wrote in May on what was Twitter, “but I feel like the NTL has the potential to be horse racing’s equivalent of Fyre Festival.”

The reference to the spectacular failure of a music event in 2017 notwithstanding, the cynicism has been ringing in Ludt’s ears and those of the NTL’s supporters.

“I read a lot of comments from industry people,” Ziegler said. “Ninety percent of them were negative. I look at this as we’re always looking for ways to get people to come see live horse racing. ... If an idea comes along that has the possibility of something new that involves entertainment or involves people coming out and having a different kind of experience or an upgraded experience at the track, that maybe brings a different audience of new people to the track. Just generically, we would always be interested in something like that. Why wouldn’t we be?”

Ludt said he could not fathom why the NTL received so much backlash before it got going.

“We’ve got plenty of critics out there telling us how bad we’re doing, which I just think is so amazing,” he said. “The whole league is focused on creating new fans and promoting racing, and everybody wants to pick it apart. But the truth is it’s all about that we’re trying to get new fans to come.”

Ludt said that was the reason for emphasizing the concert next month and the culinary festival in New York and New Jersey.

“Once you get them there, then you can start working on converting them into loyal horse fans,” Ludt said.

“We do that whether it’s our corgi races or our grandparents race that went viral, we do all this stuff,” Ziegler said. “Our motivation at Emerald Downs is always to get people to the racetrack.”

In his statement Monday, Winchell applauded the creative ambition of the NTL.

“The way you get better is to try something different or see if there is there is a way to tinker with an old idea to bring it back,” Winchell said.

Negotiation complications

The terms of engagement have not been a one-size-fits-all negotiation for the NTL but, rather, a piecemeal reality in trying to mold half a season let alone a full one.

“It’s a juggle,” Ludt said, “because every track is different. Every setup is different. It has not been easy. It never is. It’s not been very easy to deal with and get some of this stuff worked out, but we’re working through it.”

While he takes things one date and one challenge and one obstacle at a time, Ludt said the NTL should be closer to full steam next year.

“We’re going to have eight events in 2024,” Ludt said. “We want to run once a month from April to December.”

He said the league season would include stops at the tracks originally intended for this year plus Lone Star Park.

In spite of the fits and starts ahead of the NTL’s launch, Ziegler was nothing but upbeat about the idea of the league having its date at Emerald Downs in 2024.

“If it takes them a while to get it up and going,” he said before stopping himself to damn the NTL’s critics. “I never understood, I still don’t understand, the negativity that they got from some industry people about doing this, because their whole idea is to try to get people to come to the racetrack, and it’s something new. If you’ve got empty grandstands, you’ve got to try different things.”

In the end, Ludt had the NTL’s long-term vision as his muse.

“I will tell you, it’s been a real strain on me,” he said. “Hopefully, I’m laughing about all this a year from now.”