West Point CEO Finley: End of mare cap is no ‘magic wand’

If word of mouth and social media were used as prisms, The Jockey Club’s dumping of its controversial mare cap this month was widely hailed across the racing industry.

Limiting any particular stallion to 140 mares in a breeding season was seen as stifling to a marketplace that has been desperate to recover from a 42 percent foal-crop plunge since 2008.

Not everyone, though, was caught up in that opinion.

“I think that the cap would have been a good thing,” said Terry Finley, CEO of West Point Thoroughbreds and himself a member of The Jockey Club. “Whether it’s 140 or 180, if anybody can tell me that they think that our breeding industry and the racing business as a whole is on firm ground, on terra firma, I’d like to know the details.”

In a telephone interview last week for Horse Racing Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod, Finley said the elimination of the foal cap cannot be seen as a magic wand to cure what ails breeding.

“You can analyze it, you can complain about it, you can support it, you can be against it,” he said. “But unless you take some sort of action, it’s going to stay that way and/or get worse. I think that’s the case here.”

RELATED: Jockey Club rescinds mare cap.

Reverting, then, to the status quo that was in place before the cap was written to limit the mares available to any one stallion born since 2020.

A year before The Jockey Club did away with the cap on Feb. 17, three of Kentucky’s most prominent breeding operations – Spendthrift Farm, Coolmore’s Ashford Stud and Three Chimneys Farm – filed a federal lawsuit to get rid of it. The late B. Wayne Hughes of Spendthrift called it “a blatant abuse of power that is bad law, bad science and bad business.”

After two Republicans in the Kentucky legislature filed a bill to make the mare cap illegal and to move some breeding authority to the state’s racing commission, The Jockey Club blinked and got rid of it.

“Reaction to the rule may divide the industry at a time when there are many important issues that need to be addressed with unity,” Jockey Club chairman Stuart Janney said in a statement. “We are taking this action for the greater good of the entire industry.”

That The Jockey Club’s move came on the heels of legal and regulatory pressure could not be seen as a mere coincidence.

“We understand there are pockets of power,” said Finley, who estimated West Point breeds to 25 mares a year. “The three stallion farms that led the (legal) effort, they’ve done a lot of good for the industry in a lot of different ways. I can’t have a big issue with them individually. I don’t agree with the way they went about it.”

Supporters of the mare cap hoped it would keep bigger breeders from monopolizing the best stallions and that it would expand the diversity of future foal crops.

Finley said it was not that simple.

“When you dive into it, it’s very complex,” he said. “You have the international part of this. You have economics of a stallion farm, of buying stallions. You have the economics of a broodmare band. A lot of different things are coming into play here. It’s not a simple situation.”

If there is one thing Finley wants to come out of the controversy, it is transparency in regulating and, more important, reviving the breeding industry.

“I understand what the rationale was behind The Jockey Club move to implement the cap,” Finley said. “I agree with them. But I also see the side of the farms that stood behind the movement to address it and to sidestep it. I hope we can work together and we can come up with a better solution than there is now. I don’t think with the current system we’re seeing the results.”

A first step, he said, could come this week at Hot Springs, Ark., where the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association holds its annual conference Tuesday-Saturday. Perhaps a sideline conversation could open the door for further discussion of how to fix what ails the breeding industry – and an alternative to the mare cap.

“I hope so,” Finley said before accepting some of the realities at hand. “There’s no magic bullet, right? There’s no one entity that’s going to take care of all of our challenges, because when it comes right down to it, we compete against each other every day. We all come from different backgrounds and upbringings, and our environments are different. So to expect us all on every issue to be in sync is not reasonable.”

Part 2: Finley discusses the NHBPA’s opposition to federal regulation of racing.