The Unfair Criticism of Tom Ryan, SF Bloodstock, and the Model That Keeps Winning
Down at the walking ring rail, they’ve always had opinions. At Aqueduct on a cold Thursday afternoon in the old days, after Angel Cordero dropped a heavy favorite, you could hear the post-mortems before the horses even cooled out. The touts ate criticism for breakfast, washed it down with bad coffee, and were back at it by the next race. This is horse racing. Everyone is an expert. Everyone has a theory. Everyone, it seems, has a spreadsheet.
Bloodstock agents are easy targets. They work in a world where the majority of the horses they buy will never return their purchase price, where the best-laid plans end with a vet’s report, and where even a Grade 1 winner can be a financial disappointment if the breeding shed doesn’t pay off. The nature of the business invites second-guessing. Sure, there are operators out there who deserve more criticism than they receive — the industry has its share of unscrupulous actors, and that’s a column for another day.
This column is not about them. This is about the other kind of criticism. The lazy kind. The kind that runs a spreadsheet on a corner of someone else’s game without understanding the rules, the stakes, or the strategy. The kind that sees a gelding win a Grade 2 after thirty-one career starts and declares that the people who first bought him as a yearling had “no clue.”
With respect — and only barely — that criticism removes all doubt about who doesn’t have a clue.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak, tweet, or write and remove all doubt.
There is a particular kind of racing observer who believes that because they can look up a sales history and track record on a publicly available database, they understand the bloodstock business. They don’t. They understand the data. That is not the same thing. It is the difference between reading a box score and understanding why a manager pulled his starter in the fifth inning. It is the difference between knowing the price of a painting and understanding why a collector paid it. It is, if you will, a Fiat driver critiquing the pit strategy of a Ferrari team — with great confidence, and absolutely no standing.
WHO IS TOM RYAN, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER
Tom Ryan is a native of Wexford, Ireland who came to thoroughbred racing the hard way — working in Australia, working in Japan, eventually settling in Lexington, Kentucky at the center of the American breeding industry. He serves as Managing Partner of SF Bloodstock and Racing Manager for SF Racing. There is a biographical detail worth knowing: a stallion, Woodman, bit off his right thumb early in his career. The thumb was reattached. The career trajectory changed permanently — away from hands-on horsemanship and toward bloodstock investment, partnership architecture, and deal-making at the highest levels of the sport.
“So in some strange way, I’m very thankful to Woodman for what happened that day.” Tom Ryan
In other words, the man has literal skin in this game. More than most critics could ever say.
Ryan’s operational philosophy, stated publicly and repeatedly, is worth understanding before one opens their mouth to critique it:
“You can’t live off one horse seven years ago. Everyone lives in the now. It’s always about what you have in the pipeline. We run this as a business. We have fun with it, but it is a business and it needs to make money.”
That is not the statement of someone who doesn’t have a clue. That is the statement of a disciplined operator who understands that results compound over time and that the process, not the individual outcome, is what matters. Keep that in mind.
THE AVENGERS AND THE MODEL THAT BUILT THEM
Following SF’s involvement with Justify — which we will address momentarily in full financial detail — Ryan assembled what became known in the industry as “The Avengers.” The core partnership: SF Racing, Jack Wolf’s Starlight Racing, and Sol Kumin’s Madaket Stables. The buying team was anchored by one of the most decorated bloodstock agents operating in North America today: Donato Lanni.
A word on Lanni, because he deserves it. A native of Montreal who cut his teeth in the Standardbred game before making the move to thoroughbreds in Kentucky, Lanni has built a record that speaks at a volume most agents never reach. Arrogate. Authentic. Gamine. Multiple champions, multiple Eclipse Award finalists, multiple nine-figure stud deals. He accepted an Eclipse Award on behalf of champion Moira in 2025. He is not merely good at his job. He is, on the evidence of his career, among the finest selectors of elite thoroughbred talent in the history of the modern American marketplace. Lanni himself, when asked about the Avengers, was characteristically direct: “Tom put the Avengers together. It’s Tom’s masterpiece, and it’s a great team.”
The architecture Ryan built around that partnership is methodical, not impulsive. The team targets proven stallion-producing sires — Into Mischief, Quality Road, Empire Maker — and physiques that can handle the demands of dirt classic distances. They retain Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert to develop the horses, because Ryan’s faith in Baffert’s eye for talent and his management of elite horses is absolute and documented. Ryan has described it plainly: “Bob knows exactly the style of colt that fits into his program. A shared consensus view is a decisive factor. Bob’s ability to identify talent is incredible.”
And about that loyalty to Baffert — it is worth noting here, and noting plainly. When Baffert served his suspension, it would have been easy, even fashionable, to quietly distance. Many did. Ryan did not. Loyalty is rare in business. It is rarer still in a sport where relationships are often as transactional as the horses themselves. Ryan stood by his trainer. That is a character data point that no spreadsheet will ever capture.
THE FINANCIAL RECORD: ONE JUSTIFY CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING
Let’s talk about what this model actually produces, because the numbers are not ambiguous.
Justify. Purchased as a yearling for $500,000 by WinStar Farm, China Horse Club, and SF Racing. Six races. Undefeated. Triple Crown. Then the deal: Coolmore acquired the breeding rights for $60 million before the Belmont Stakes, with a $15 million bonus triggered by the Triple Crown sweep. Total: $75 million. The most valuable thoroughbred breeding transaction in history at the time. SF held a 15% stake in breeding rights. Do the arithmetic. That is not a good investment. That is a life-altering, generation-defining return on a $500,000 yearling purchase.
One horse. One result. Decades of financial security for everyone involved.
One Pick 6 ticket. If that is all you play all year and you cash it, everything changes. That is the prize. That is what winners play for. JS
The 2018 Avengers crop illustrates the model even more vividly. The group spent $11,430,000 to purchase 24 colts — all sent to Baffert, all targeting Triple Crown preps and stallion-making races. The attrition rate was, as Ryan himself acknowledged publicly, severe. Of any crop of that size, perhaps five or six are still in serious consideration by Derby season. The rest wash out — to lower claiming ranks, to other connections, to other purposes. That is not failure. That is variance. That is the cost of playing at the level where the prizes are worth winning.
From that single crop, three stallion exits:
Authentic — purchased for $350,000, sold to Spendthrift Farm at a valuation of $36 million. 2020 Horse of the Year. Kentucky Derby winner. Breeders’ Cup Classic winner. Initial stud fee of $75,000. First-crop yearlings averaging over $300,000 at Keeneland.
Eight Rings — purchased for $520,000, sold to Coolmore for $10 million. Grade 1 American Pharoah Stakes winner.
Charlatan — purchased for $700,000, sold to Hill ‘n’ Dale for $10 million. Multiple Grade 1 winner. Initial stud fee of $50,000 with one of the strongest first books in his freshman class.
Three stallion exits from one crop: approximately $56 million in breeding rights proceeds. The entire crop cost $11.43 million. Add two years of training and carrying costs across 24 horses — call it another $3 million conservatively. Total cost basis: roughly $14-15 million. Three horses returned $56 million. The other 21 horses — the washouts, the claimers, the horses that needed different paths — are arithmetically irrelevant to the outcome. Authentic alone, at $36 million, erased the entire crop investment more than twice over.
That is not luck. That is a repeatable model operating as designed. The subsequent crops have continued to produce: National Treasure, Preakness winner and three-time Grade 1 victor, retired to Spendthrift at a $40,000 stud fee. Prince of Monaco, Grade 1 winner, retired to Claiborne at $30,000. The pipeline Ryan described — always building, always deploying, never coasting — is not a talking point. It is a documented production record.
THE POINT DUME ARGUMENT: A MASTERCLASS IN MISSING THE POINT
Which brings us to the specific criticism that prompted this column — the case of Point Dume, offered as evidence that Tom Ryan and SF Bloodstock don’t know what they’re doing.
Point Dume: a bay gelding by Into Mischief, foaled February 16, 2021. Purchased by SF Bloodstock, Starlight Racing, and Madaket Stables for $450,000. Sent to Bob Baffert. Given three starts. Moved on. Subsequently claimed, campaigned by other connections, eventually landing with trainer Timothy Kreiser and Bush Racing Stable. In 2026, three wins from three starts, $345,000 in earnings, including a Grade 2 victory in the Carter Handicap. Career record: 11 wins from 31 starts.
The critique: SF never gave him a chance to develop. They discarded a Grade 2 winner.
Here is what that critique reveals about its author’s understanding of the business.
Point Dume is a gelding. He was gelded. That single fact could be the entire answer to the entire argument, but let’s go further anyway.
SF Bloodstock’s model has one destination for the colts it buys: the breeding shed. Ryan has stated it openly and without apology — they are looking for horses that can have stud careers in Kentucky or elsewhere. Every yearling they buy at $350,000, $520,000, $700,000, or $1.1 million is evaluated against one ultimate question: can this horse become a stallion worth millions? When the answer is no — when a horse’s talent or physical makeup suggests he needs to be gelded to develop, or when his early performance doesn’t indicate Classic-level potential — the correct business decision is to move on. That is not a mistake. That is the model working.
Moreover, there is something the critic conveniently overlooks about gelding: it frequently transforms horses. The behavioral and physical changes from gelding can be dramatic. A horse that showed limited promise as an intact colt under Classic-level pressure with a Hall of Fame trainer can become a consistent, durable, competitive gelding over thirty-one starts under different conditions and different management. That is Point Dume’s story. It is a genuinely good story. It has absolutely nothing to do with Ryan making an error.
The critic is essentially arguing that SF Bloodstock should have held a horse that needed gelding to reach his ceiling, campaigned him thirty-one times over multiple years, and celebrated a Grade 2 win that generates zero breeding value. That is a participation trophy argument dressed up as analysis. SF Racing plays for stallion deals worth tens of millions of dollars. They are not in the business of accumulating participation trophies, and they should not be criticized for it.
Winners or participation trophies. You can’t play for both.
The broader argument — that Ryan’s ownership group is a “major reason” for the downfall of California racing — deserves approximately the respect it has earned, which is none. An ownership group that spends $15 million in yearlings, sends them to California’s preeminent trainer, and campaigns them in California’s major stakes races is not a cause of California racing’s decline. They are participants in whatever market exists. The structural decay of California racing traces to track mismanagement, handle erosion, regulatory uncertainty, and consolidation of racing dates — not to the presence of a well-capitalized ownership group running good horses at Santa Anita.
THE STANDARD OF EVIDENCE
There is a version of this business that the critics understand, and it is not the version Tom Ryan plays. The version they understand is the stalwart breeding farm model — breed to race, race to breed, keep the best, sell occasionally, measure success in generations. Those operations have produced greatness, and this publication respects them. But the modern game has evolved. The economics have evolved. The integration of venture capital thinking, partnership architecture, and stallion deal-making into elite racing operations is not a corruption of the sport. It is an adaptation to it.
Ryan, Lanni, and Baffert represent arguably the most successful such operation in American racing over the past decade. The receipts are not ambiguous: a $75 million Triple Crown syndication, a $36 million Horse of the Year stallion deal, multiple nine-figure breeding rights transactions across consecutive crop cycles, and a pipeline that continues to produce Grade 1 winners and stud prospects year after year.
To look at that record and declare that the man running it “doesn’t have a clue” — based on a gelding who developed over thirty-one starts with different connections — is not criticism. It is noise. It is the rail at Aqueduct in 1987, confident and loud and completely divorced from the reality of how the game is played at the level that matters.
The critics who traffic in this kind of content understand one thing very well: clicks. They understand that takes aimed at successful people, dressed up as consumer protection, generate engagement. They are not wrong about that. What they are wrong about is the substance. And in a sport where one Justify, one Authentic, one National Treasure can return more money than a hundred unsuccessful yearling purchases combined, the substance is all that matters.
The eye on the prize. Always.
“Man in the Arena” — “It is not the critic who counts… the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Theodore Roosevelt
