Editor’s Note: Spendthrift Farm is an advertiser on Past The Wire. They have had no involvement in this article, have not been consulted in its preparation, and Past The Wire’s editorial positions are in no way influenced by advertising relationships. We disclose this in the interest of the same transparency we are asking of others.
A response to ‘Beware Unintended Consequences’ — and the disclosures that never came with it
Ray Paulick published a column this week warning Kentucky’s Senate to “beware unintended consequences” before passing HB 904 — the legislation that, among other things, would hold The Jockey Club accountable to Kentucky’s breeders and its courts. It’s worth reading. It’s also worth knowing what he didn’t tell you before you decide how much weight to give it.
Let me be direct about something at the outset: parts of Paulick’s column are legitimate. His concerns about the prediction markets language — the section that could drive FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics out of Kentucky — deserve serious Senate consideration. That’s real policy analysis on a genuinely complicated section of the bill, and I have no quarrel with it.
Everything he wrote about The Jockey Club is another matter entirely. And before we get to the substance, we need to talk about the architecture.
Before you weigh a columnist’s opinion, you’re entitled to know who’s paying him.
What Paulick Didn’t Disclose
Paulick’s column carries no disclosure of any financial relationship with The Jockey Club or its affiliated entities. His readers are presumably meant to receive his analysis as the independent judgment of a veteran racing journalist. Here is what that framing omits.
LAYER 1 — The OwnerView Distribution Deal: The Paulick Report maintains a promotional listing on OwnerView, a platform whose copyright footer identifies The Jockey Club Information Systems and TOBA as owners — presenting itself there as the industry’s ‘leading independent’ publication on infrastructure controlled by the organization it is now defending.
LAYER 2 — Commercial Partnership With a Jockey Club Steward’s Private Business: Terry Finley is a Jockey Club steward. Terry Finley is also the founder and CEO of West Point Thoroughbreds, one of the sport’s larger racing partnerships. The Paulick Report has run West Point pop-up advertisements and — on the public record — formally co-presented a branded $2,500 Derby Dollars Contest with West Point Thoroughbreds as the named presenting sponsor. That is a revenue-generating commercial partnership between Paulick’s publication and the private business of a sitting Jockey Club steward. Not a banner ad. A co-branded promotional product.
LAYER 3 — The Lawsuit Named the Stewards’ Conflicts: When Spendthrift, Ashford, and Three Chimneys filed their 2021 federal lawsuit over the mare cap, they specifically alleged that Jockey Club stewards had personal financial conflicts of interest that made the cap advantageous to them — naming Stonestreet Stables, St. Elias Stables, Jump Sucker Stable, Lane’s End Farm, and others as entities that would benefit from restricting competitors’ stallion books. Those are the same stewards whose private enterprises advertise with and partner with the Paulick Report.
LAYER 4 — The Blood-Horse Background: Paulick built his career as editorial director of Blood-Horse, a publication 51% owned by The Jockey Club. He launched an “independent” publication whose distribution infrastructure is at least in part controlled by a Jockey Club subsidiary, whose advertising base includes private commercial enterprises of Jockey Club stewards, and whose publisher spent his formative professional years inside the Jockey Club’s media ecosystem. That career arc is not a crime. But it is context that his readers are entitled to have.
None of this proves that Paulick’s editorial conclusions are purchased. Reasonable people can hold positions that happen to align with their financial interests without those positions being corrupt. What it does prove is that the claim of independence requires disclosure — and the disclosure isn’t there. In any other field of journalism, these relationships would be stated at the top of every relevant column. Racing journalism has simply never demanded it.
It should. Especially when the column in question is defending a private organization with monopoly power against a 79-15 legislative rebuke.
The 2022 history is the complete demolition of his 2026 argument. Legislative pressure worked. He was there.
The Arguments That Don’t Hold
With that context established, let’s go through the substance. Because Paulick’s analytical case against the Jockey Club provisions of HB 904 has serious problems independent of who’s paying for the website.
The 2022 History Contradiction. Paulick’s own column recounts that The Jockey Club imposed the mare cap in 2020, got sued by three major Kentucky farms, faced legislative pressure, and rescinded the rule in 2022. He presents this as background. He never acknowledges what it actually demonstrates: that the only mechanism that produced accountability from The Jockey Club was exactly what HB 904 provides — legislative authority and the credible threat of replacement.
In federal court, B. Wayne Hughes of Spendthrift called the cap “a blatant abuse of power that is bad law, bad science and bad business” — imposed by “a handful of individuals from a private club in New York” with no vote by the general membership and with documented conflicts of interest among the stewards who voted on it. Paulick covered that lawsuit. He knows what was alleged. He now writes as though the concern is hypothetical.
It isn’t hypothetical. The Jockey Club’s current chairman, Everett Dobson, has already raised the idea of revisiting the cap. Paulick himself reports this in the same column where he warns against the bill designed to prevent it from happening again. That is not a coincidence the Senate should ignore.
The Artificial Insemination Straw Man. This is Paulick’s most dramatic warning: if Kentucky’s jurisdiction consent clause passes, The Jockey Club would have no choice but to permit artificial insemination in Kentucky if the legislature demanded it — or be replaced. Therefore, chaos.
There is one problem with this scenario. HB 904 contains no provision regarding artificial insemination, embryo transfer, breeding methods, or any practice The Jockey Club governs beyond registration caps and eligibility. Paulick has invented a threat that is not in the legislation to frighten readers about a consequence that cannot flow from the bill as written.
When a commentator must fabricate the threat to make the argument work, the argument does not work.
The ISBC Nuclear Option That Wasn’t Launched. Paulick warns that the ISBC’s guidelines — which require a single stud book authority per country — could create an international recognition crisis if Kentucky forces a registrar change. This is the oldest deterrent in The Jockey Club’s playbook.
It was also the central threat raised during the 2021 lawsuit and the 2022 legislation. The farms that sued explicitly noted that foals beyond the cap would be unregisterable internationally because The Jockey Club represents North America in the ISBC. The legislature prepared a bill anyway. The Jockey Club backed down. The ISBC did not act. The doomsday scenario didn’t materialize when it had its clearest and most direct trigger.
More importantly, HB 904 is not telling The Jockey Club to ignore the ISBC. It is telling The Jockey Club it cannot impose limits that the ISBC has not unanimously endorsed. That is a pro-international-standards provision. Paulick frames it as the opposite.
The “They Won’t Share the Data” Admission. This is the passage in Paulick’s column that deserves to be read slowly. He writes: do Kentucky authorities “really think, if they insist on defrocking The Jockey Club, that the latter will eagerly share all of the data it has compiled for well over a century? Good luck with that.”
Pause on what that sentence actually says. Paulick is arguing — as a reason to leave The Jockey Club’s authority intact — that if Kentucky dared to replace them, The Jockey Club would respond by withholding a century of breed registry data from the industry that generated it. He presents this not as institutional hostage-taking, but as a natural and practical consideration that Kentucky should factor in.
He is not warning against The Jockey Club’s behavior. He is treating institutional extortion as a legitimate negotiating posture.
If a private organization would weaponize its historical data archive against the industry it ostensibly serves, that is the argument for accountability legislation — not against it. The fact that Paulick deploys it as a warning to the Senate rather than as an indictment of The Jockey Club’s character tells you everything about the perspective from which he is writing.
The Selective Application of “Government Overreach.” Paulick has written extensively and forcefully that state regulatory oversight of racing has been a failed model — that HISA’s federal authority is superior to the patchwork of state racing commissions that couldn’t adequately police the sport. That is a coherent position on race-day regulation and drug enforcement.
Watch what happens to that logic when state authority is being asserted against The Jockey Club rather than in defense of horsemen against federal drug regulators. Suddenly Kentucky’s legislature is conducting a “power play” and engaging in a “punitive measure” against a private organization. State power is dangerous when it might make The Jockey Club accountable to Kentucky’s courts. State power was necessary when HISA needed it to override recalcitrant racing commissions.
You cannot hold both positions on principle. One of them is serving an interest.
What the Senate Should Actually Consider
The prediction markets section of HB 904 deserves careful Senate scrutiny. Paulick is right about that. The language as written could force FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics to exit Kentucky’s sports betting market — and the downstream effects on pari-mutuel wagering infrastructure are a legitimate concern that should be examined before passage.
The Jockey Club sections are a different matter. A 79-15 House vote is not an accident. It reflects years of accumulated frustration from Kentucky’s breeding community — the community that generates 66 percent of all mares bred in North America — with a New York private organization that imposed a unilateral cap without member vote, attempted it again through its chairman’s public statements, and has never offered any accountability mechanism that isn’t controlled by itself.
The bill’s enforcement mechanism is conditional, not immediate. It does not create a competing registry. It creates a consequence for non-compliance. The ISBC carve-out in the bill is carefully drafted — limits that have been unanimously endorsed internationally are explicitly permitted. The jurisdiction consent clause is not constitutionally novel; states require consent to jurisdiction from private organizations operating in their jurisdictions across dozens of industries.
Kentucky’s Senate should fix the prediction markets language. It should pass the Jockey Club provisions.
The industry built this registry. The industry should govern it. A 79-15 vote is the industry speaking.
A Question for the Paddock
Paulick ends his column with a call for the Senate to weigh unintended consequences. It’s a reasonable standard to apply to any legislation. Let’s apply it evenly.
What are the unintended consequences of leaving the current arrangement intact? A private organization with $78 million in net assets, executive compensation exceeding $2.8 million annually for its top five officers, a governance structure drawn entirely from the sport’s wealthiest ownership class, and a documented history of imposing policy changes without member vote — retains monopoly authority over Thoroughbred registration with no state oversight, no jurisdictional accountability, and no consequence for unilateral action.
That is not a hypothetical consequence. That is the existing condition. The unintended consequence Kentucky’s legislature is trying to address already arrived.
The Paulick Report declined to mention any of the financial relationships described in this piece. It declined to mention that the stewards whose private businesses advertise with his publication were named in federal court as having conflicts of interest in the policy he is defending. It declined to note that the bill’s jurisdiction consent clause is a direct response to organizational behavior that a federal lawsuit described as anti-competitive and arbitrary.
Past The Wire extends the same invitation to Ray Paulick that we extended to The Jockey Club: come on PTW TV and make the case. Bring the disclosures. Bring the analysis. Bring the argument about unintended consequences, and let’s examine it alongside the intended consequences of the status quo.
The empty chair is starting to feel like a theme.
You’re gonna need a bigger boat:
Empty Chairs:
