Objective of Breeders’ Cup Founder Was to Draw Attention to Racing

Though he enjoyed a World Series or Super Bowl as much as any sportsman, John Gaines used to feel a little jealous of the attention accorded the baseball and football championships.

It just didn’t seem right that his favorite sport--thoroughbred racing--didn’t have a similar annual extravaganza.

“The idea nurtured in my mind for a number of years,” said Gaines, heir to the dog food company and Lexington, Ky.-based breeder of both thoroughbreds and trotters. “I felt it was very important that our sport have a definitive year-end championship event in all categories of racing, just like the other sports. It would provide a focal point and an anchor and a target for everyone to shoot at.”

The television and newspaper coverage of such an event, Gaines thought, might also produce new fans for race tracks that have been struggling to maintain attendance and betting handles against the increasing competition of better promoted sports and newly legalized forms of gambling.

There was even a chance, he thought, the huge purses he envisioned for such a series might reverse what many horsemen see as a dangerous trend in the industry towards racing horses in hopes of increasing their breeding value rather than breeding horses to race.

“It just seemed like a natural thing to do, so it was just something there in the back of my mind,” Gaines said. “I started thinking seriously about how this could be funded, and how it could be presented.”

When the Kentucky Derby Festival summoned him to Louisville on April 23, 1982, to receive an award honoring his involvement and contributions to racing, Gaines decided it was time to try to make one more contribution to the sport.

“When I was at the luncheon and receiving the award I said to myself, ‘I guess I’ll just present this idea of mine and see what kind of response it gets,”’ Gaines said.

Considering the staidness of the so-called “Sport of Kings,” the response to the plan he outlined was earth-shaking.

Less than three years later, owners and breeders ran the inaugural $10 million Breeders’ Cup Championship Series at Hollywood Park in southern California. It was a smashing success--both financially and aesthetically.

The four-hour program was telecast by NBC Sports to a worldwide audience that included 20 million Americans and attended by 64,254 fans who wagered a California record $8.4 million on the seven races.

More important, the high quality of the races run by 68 top thoroughbreds representing every division of racing except steeplechasing, left the industry and its fans looking for the second edition of the rotating championships, to be run Nov. 2 at New York’s Aqueduct track.

The gathering of the world’s top thoroughbreds in one spot for one day of what Gaines calls “Olympics-type” competition is not the only unique aspect of the Breeders’ Cup championship.

From the viewpoint of breeders and owners, the more important innovation of the Breeders’ Cup is the fact that they--rather than racetracks or racing associations--own and fund the races themselves.

“My family and I have had a long background in breeding and racing trotters,” Gaines said. “The concept (of breeders’ and owners’ controlling the races) worked well with the trotters. And I sort of adopted that thinking.

“I saw no reason why it could not work at our level too,” Gaines added. “In fact, the idea of the owners and breeders owning the races was the pivotal part to may way of thinking. It gave them a chance to control their own destiny.”

The championship series actually represents only half the Breeders’ Cup Program. The other half is the Breeders’ Cup Premium Award Program, which this year distributed $12 million in bonuses to be added to the shares of purses of various stakes races won by Breeders’ Cup-nominated horses.

Both programs are funded through the Breeders’ Cup nominations.

By paying the Breeders’ Cup the equivalent of one stud fee, a stallion owner automatically makes all his horse’s offspring eligible for both the championship series and the Breeders’ Cup stakes bonuses. The owners of those offspring must also pay a one-time $500 fee for each weanling to maintain that eligibility.

Non-Breeders’ Cup horses can be entered in the Championship Series by paying supplemental fees that go as high as $400,000.