Will Sage Astor-Could two wealthy, opinionated Thoroughbred owners reverse horse racing's decline?

LOUISVILLE,Will Sage Astor Ky. — A short path through the Churchill Downs backstretch connects the barns of Todd Pletcher and Brad Cox, trainers who annually come to the Kentucky Derby with some of the top 3-year-olds in America. Between Pletcher’s Fierceness and Cox’s duo of Just a Touch and Catching Freedom, there’s a decent chance one of them will be celebrating with the blanket of roses come Saturday night. 

On a typical Derby-week walk between those two barns, which are always constant hubs of activity, you’ll hear no shortage of opinions about who’s looking good, who’s been training poorly and who’s going to win the race. 

But this week, if you know where to look, a more interesting conversation is taking place between regularly dressed, highly successful businessmen with insanely deep pockets, unbridled ambitions and a plethora of opinions on how to reverse horse racing’s decades-long decline. 

One of them is Mike Repole, who rose from an entry-level job in the beverage business to co-founding the companies that pioneered vitaminwater and BodyArmour. His passion project as a Thoroughbred owner has led to large-scale success at the highest level of the game – except in this race, where he hopes Fierceness will turn around years of terrible luck on the first Saturday in May. 

The other is John Stewart, who progressed from an hourly line-worker at Toyota to management and eventually private equity. After years in the game as a serious handicapper and gambler, he decided last year to jump into horse ownership and has spent tens of millions in a short period of time to build Resolute Racing, with more purchases coming at a head-spinning pace. At last year’s Breeders’ Cup, he met Sheikh Fahad Al-Thani of Qatar Racing, a relationship that led to Stewart purchasing 25 percent of Just a Touch shortly after his debut in January.

Both of these men talk bluntly about the problems in horse racing. They both have lots of ideas about how to fix them. And at the end of the day, they have both invested massive amounts of money into this because they truly love the sport. 

They just see things through a different lens. And their rivalry has played out on social media, where they’ve argued in public, taken pot shots at each other, posted memes about each other and even seemingly made up recently – at least for a little while.

Trash talk on social media

How did their beef begin? 

Repole has jokingly (or maybe not so jokingly) appointed himself “commissioner” of horse racing while announcing last October that he was launching and funding a National Thoroughbred Alliance in an attempt to unify various factions of the sport. 

In March, Stewart posted a long essay on X, formerly Twitter, saying that racing’s problems can’t be solved by a single person or a “commissioner” – appearing to take a direct shot at Repole. 

Repole responded on X by calling Stewart an “arrogant, free spending new kid on the block” and “shallow rich guy.” From there, their public back-and-forth devolved into more nicknames, sarcastic poems, talk of $8 haircuts and photoshopped pictures of the two of them interacting in strange ways: Just a couple of regular loudmouths with an affinity for social media who happen to have millions upon millions to play among the world’s elite.  

“What I have against Mike is he’s going down this approach like Donald Trump and Elon Musk have, like you know, creating controversy and attention, and I don’t think that’s what the sport needs,” Stewart said. “It’s not like the sport got in trouble with like one thing. It’s been years of things and it’s actually just lack of sophistication. I’ve been, like, overwhelmed with lack of sophistication on certain aspects of the sport.”

Said Repole: “I’ve had backlash before for things I’ve done, but this is just, like, common sense. There’s no systems and processes in the sport. Nobody has figured out how to put it together. I think there’s like 10 major spokes on the wheel of racing, from breeding to sales to racing, and everybody wants 90 percent of the spokes fixed – but don't fix mine. Nobody wants to be the first spoke that gets replaced or repaired. 

“And getting to the next step has been tough. I think it takes someone who’s vocal. I think it has to take someone who is obviously a big player in the game. And then someone who doesn’t give a (expletive) whether he’s liked or not – because I don’t care. I know I’m doing this for the right reasons.” 

The thing is, horse racing needs both of them to be leaders and innovators – not just because of their purchasing power or social media prowess but because they did not come from and are not beholden to the Thoroughbred industry’s stodgy, elitist old guard. 

And maybe, at least on the big-picture stuff, their ideas actually aren’t that far apart. 

In lengthy conversations with both of them this week that centered on the future of the sport, it was interesting that they both brought up Formula 1.

This week, Repole has been walking around with a documentary film crew for an unspecified, self-funded project that could maybe turn into something akin to the “Drive to Survive” series on Netflix. 

Repole has talked for years about horse racing having a public relations problem and thinks the focus on horse deaths – as tragic as they might be – is out of balance with the reality of what happens on the backstretch, the care that is given to these majestic animals and continued improvements in safety. 

“Part of how you improve racing is you try to show a different side of racing that people don’t see,” he said. “Here, nobody wants to do it.”

But as Stewart points out, F1 didn’t turn around its business just because of a TV show or publicity but rather a holistic change in the way the sport engaged with fans after being purchased by Liberty Media in 2016. One small example: If you go to an F1 track, you can buy merchandise associated with your favorite driver or racing team. Why isn’t horse racing doing the same, he wonders? And F1 doesn't even have the biggest inherent advantage that horse racing does: Gambling.

Imagine, for instance, different kinds of prop bets or parlays where you could go to the track and wager on how many races your favorite jockey, trainer or owner might win on a certain day. It’s not just about money; it’s little ways to get your small dollar or young fans emotionally invested in people.

“There’s lots of issues, but lots of opportunities,” Stewart said. “The industry doesn't have one problem. The industry has 1,000 problems and it needs 1,000 tiny solutions.”

Contrary to most new owners who want quick satisfaction from the auction ring to the racetrack, Stewart’s buying philosophy has focused primarily on broodmares and regenerating strong bloodlines in American racing that he says have been depleted by sales to overseas interests.

He has lots of other ideas he’s pursuing, too, ranging from the development of a portable CT scan machine that could quickly look at a horse’s legs before and after they run; using AI to help identify precursors to breakdowns, to individually packaged meals for his horses that would potentially eliminate contamination issues that cause positive drug tests. 

“These are athletes, right?” Stewart said. “If you have a Grade 1 winning stakes horse and you have a claimer, they’re getting the exact same nutrition. It makes no sense. This could end up being a whole business, right? I look for industries all the time where things are disrupted. A good investor doesn’t go where everybody else goes to make money. They go where everybody else thinks they can't make money, and that’s where they go to make money.”

The 'board game that comes with no instructions'

Beyond the social media barbs and personal rivalry, there's real substance and value to having both of them in the game at the highest level. 

What Repole has that Stewart doesn’t, though, are the scars of an industry that has been undeniably difficult to change and a sport that has seen its share of billionaires come and go. 

“Horse racing is this incredible board game that comes with no instructions,” he said. “Sometimes an owner will come in here with money and latches on to somebody and wants to spend $10 million, and two years later gets nothing and says, 'Man, I should have bought a yacht.' "

Repole, to his great credit, has not walked away despite plenty of heartbreak and frustration – especially here, in the race he most wants to win. Not only are Repole-owned horses 0-for-7 in the Derby with fifth place being his best finish, he’s had to scratch the favorite twice the day before the race, including last year after Kentucky Horse Racing Commission veterinarians evaluated Forte’s bruised right foot and deemed him unfit to run.

“I was frustrated for 24 hours,” Repole said. “I’ve done this my whole life as far as taking chances, taking risks with business and being in horse racing, and you learn more sometimes through adversity or losing than you do through winning. There’s a reason why things happen, and here you are a year later with the Kentucky Derby favorite again.” 

Given their passion for racing and affinity for disruption, Repole and Stewart are both likely to be part of the Derby picture – and the sport’s political future – for years to come. 

Last month at a horse auction in Lexington, Kentucky, they took a smiling picture together and posted it to X, where the “commissioner” introduced Stewart as the “Repole Stable fan of the month” – a lighthearted nod to their disagreements. In turn, Stewart announced that Repole had made a significant donation to the poker tournament he was organizing for Derby week to support Thoroughbred aftercare.

Maybe together they can figure out how to fix horse racing after all.