Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem Oct. 8, 2026

Jason discusses the start of "state-bred" season around the country and talks about state-bred programs. 

A good Thursday morning to you all and welcome to the state-bred season! That’s right, even though so much of the talk over the next three weeks will be about the Breeders’ Cup, the next few weeks are also the time when the headliners on many race cards are for the state-bred runners. It makes a lot of sense honestly. With all of the top-flight, Grade 1 and 2-type horses mostly taking a break until the Breeders’ Cup weekend at the end of the month, what better time for tracks to showcase the state-bred horses and feature them in stakes events. 

I wrote a column about my newer found appreciation for the state-bred runners not too long ago, so I don’t want to cover too much of that ground again. These events are obviously very much for the breeders, owners, and horsepeople who run these state-bred runners, but as a fan I find them to be tremendously fun. 

First of all, the money often stays home. So many times when smaller tracks have their big days, the big-name, out-of-town connections come in and swoop up the cash and take it back to Kentucky or New York. Now sometimes the bigger name barns do have some state-bred runners, but often those races are filled by the local population of horsepeople. 

The other thing that is so fun about these days is often you can get real rivalries as well as stars that hang around for a long time to race. Touchuponastar is one of the current top “state-bred” runners competing, and he makes his return to the races this Saturday at Delta Downs in the Gold Cup. He’s won 21 of 29 in his career, including two Grade 2 wins in the New Orleans Classic (G2). What’s funny is half of his eight career losses have come when he went to Texas to run in the Sexton Mile (G3). He certainly loves that Louisiana home cookin! 

We’ve seen diminishment in many state breeding programs over the last 20 years, and it’s unfortunate because so many of the programs have great histories. I saw yesterday that Najja Thompson had been assigned a new role at the Jockey Club as the director of state breeder and provincial programs. The goal will be to strengthen these state-bred programs. Najja is a great guy and has worked a lot in the world of New York racing, and I hope he has great success working with and hopefully growing these state-bred programs. 

“These state-bred programs create meaningful opportunities for mares and stallions in our sport’s overall goal to increase the foal crop,” Thompson told me yesterday. “Additionally, regional markets provide additional avenues for breeders to compete and encourage greater participation and investment in Thoroughbred ownership.” 

When I saw Najja’s new role, I was hoping that a big goal of it was to work to increase foal crops and ownership because we’ve seen nothing but declines in those areas in the last twenty years that I’ve worked in racing. When I first got started there were so many little mom and pop breeding operations and now so many are gone. I really hope they can have some success in building up the state programs. 

Just in the next few weeks we have West Virginia Breeders’ Classic night at Charles Town coming up this Saturday, Oct. 10; Oklahoma Classics night at Remington on Friday, Oct. 16; and then on Oct. 24, you have two of the biggest and best state-bred days on the calendar, Empire Classic Day at Belmont Park and Maryland Million Day at Laurel Park, with Best of Ohio Day at Mahoning Valley also part of that big Saturday slate. 

It’s state-bred season, and it’s a cool and unique little part of the annual racing calendar that I hope folks check out. 

Have a great weekend everyone!