This is the first of a three-part series examining the structural condition of American horse racing.If you follow the news of the American horse racing industry, you will find yourself staring at diametrically-opposed signals: The handle going down and purses going up. Racetracks closing down and auction sales hitting new records. Record Kentucky Derby viewership while FanDuel TV says goodbye to its audience.To make sense of these Jekyll and Hyde conditions, I decided to dive into the numbers and analyze the macro forces that shape our industry. I turned to the Jockey Club Fact Book and analyzed every horse, trainer and jockey published in the reports from 2020 to 2025.What I found is that the problems facing our sport today are not so much a product of market conditions as they are a product of structure and identity.My starting point was the horse. Humans have been selectively breeding horses for racing for over 3,000 years. A Thoroughbred is the product of 300 years of careful breeding designed for a single purpose: to run. That is its biological imperative.So the first question I went after was simple: why are horses running less?In 2000, the average North American racehorse made 7.1 starts per year. But by 2025, that number had fallen to just 5.8. Those 1.3 fewer starts per horse means 55,000 missing starts, enough to fill over 5,500 races a year.One of the common arguments made is that horses are more fragile and that modern breeding has sacrificed durability for speed. But the data does not support this argument.If you look at the Jockey Club data from 2021 to 2025 and control for age groups, you will find that within the individual age group, the decline is minimal, if any.For example, 4-year-old geldings averaged 7.22 starts in 2021 and 7.11 in 2025. But to really compare apples to apples, you need to take the number of starts a horse makes in a year and divide it by the number of race days available that year. This is what I call the Thoroughbred Utilization Rate (TUR), a measure of how often each horse is being used per available racing day.Sarah AndrewNationally, the TUR went from 0.97 in 2005 to 1.48 in 2025, an increase of more than 50%. And in some states like California, the TUR more than doubled, from 0.65 in 2005 to 1.49 in 2025.In plain terms: horses today are running more per available racing day than they were 20 years ago. There is nothing in the data to indicate that the Thoroughbred cannot run more if given the opportunity.If the horses are able and capable, then what is preventing them from running more?If a Thoroughbred's biological imperative is to run, then its habitat is not the barn or the farm, it's the race day. The race day is where the horse fulfills its purpose and its connections earn their living. Without it, every other part of the system loses its reason to exist.This habitat is collapsing.In 2005, North America offered 7,015 race days. But by 2025, that number had fallen to 4,115, a 41% decline. Before COVID, the industry was losing about 100 days a year. The pandemic wiped out 1,291 days in 2020, and 363 of them never came back.Since 2022, the industry has been losing 182 days per year, the fastest sustained rate of decline in the 20-year series.When the habitat shrinks, the species shrinks with it. From 2005 to 2025, the foal crop fell from 38,365 to 17,300. Trainers dropped from 4,442 in 2020 to 3,518 in 2025. The stallion population outside of Kentucky collapsed from 3,608 in 2005 to just 693 in 2025.So why are race days disappearing? The answer is both structural and economic.The structural part begins with how this sport is governed. Horse racing has always been regulated at the state level. There is no centralized authority managing the national racing calendar. No one looks at the total horse population and builds a schedule around it. More than 30 separate commissions across the U.S. and Canada make independent decisions trying their best to cater to their individual populations.Multiple variables need to align to fill a race card. You need enough horses that are eligible for the same condition, surface, distance and most importantly, ready in the same 2-4 week interval. Every time a horse leaves that ecosystem, this formula becomes harder to balance. When there were 70,000 starters, the math still worked, but as we go down to 42,000, the inefficiencies of a decentralized racing calendar start to show.Look at how the collapse is happening. The states collapsing fastest are the islands, the ones where a horse cannot ship to a neighboring track to find the right race on the right day. California is the clearest example of this. In 2005, California offered 738 race days with 7,877 starters. By 2025: 246 days, 3,504 starters. The calendar was cut by two-thirds. Oregon tells the same story on a miniature scale.Now look at the states that held. In the period from 2016 to 2025, Kentucky race days are up 1%. Indiana gained 3%. Arkansas gained 9%. What do these states have in common? Geography.States like Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas function as a corridor, a connected habitat where horses can move between tracks. This gives each track a larger population density that can make up for lack of alignment in race dates.California has no corridor. Oregon has no corridor. A racetrack cannot sustain itself in isolation.But a corridor by itself guarantees nothing. Pennsylvania has one and still can't fill its fields. The reason isn't only geography. It's the law.Benoit PhotoIn Pennsylvania, the slot machines that fund the purses are tied to the racing license. To keep the casino floor running, a track has to run a minimum number of live race days a year. Parx and Penn National sit about ninety miles apart, pulling on the same horse population, and both run close to year round. They are not allowed to do the obvious thing, alternate their meets and pool their horses into fuller fields, because cutting dates would mean putting their casino licenses at risk. So they run side by side, all year, splitting the same horses. Penn National carries some of the thinnest fields in the region.Now look at Kentucky. Same idea, opposite design. Kentucky's purses are funded by historical horse racing machines, and those machines run 365 days a year, but the law does not chain them to a long racing calendar. So the tracks do what Pennsylvania can't. The gaming money pours in all year and gets compressed into short, concentrated meets, which is exactly why Kentucky offers the richest daily purses in North America and fields deep enough to bet.Same machines. Same subsidy. One state spreads its horses thin to satisfy a quota. The other concentrates them and runs the best racing in the country. The difference isn't the money. It's whether the calendar is built around the horse or around the slot floor.But the structural problem is only a piece of this puzzle. The other piece is economics, and it runs deeper than most people realize. That is what we turn to next.Next: State of the Industry: The HandleThe post State Of The Industry: The Habitat appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.