This year marks 15 years since the Retired Racehorse Project formed as an organization dedicated to promoting off-track Thoroughbreds, and a decade since its Thoroughbred Makeover and National Symposium debuted in its current format at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington. About 375 horses are expected to compete at this year’s event, which will take place Oct. 8-11 and is again presented by Thoroughbred Charities of America, an organization founded by several racing owners in 1990 to promote the well-being of retired racehorses. The non-profit provides grants to Thoroughbred organizations and has sponsored the Makeover since 2012.

The Makeover features 10 disciplines—barrel racing, competitive trail, dressage, eventing, fox hunting, polo, ranch work, show hunters, show jumpers and freestyle—and is open to horses that have less than 10 months of post-track training. Riders can be professionals, amateurs or juniors. 

In previous years, the top five horses in each discipline returned for an all-day finale competition in the Alltech Arena at the Horse Park. An individual champion was named in each discipline, and then judges selected an overall Makeover Champion from the discipline winners.

This year, the competition will have a different format; there will no longer be an overall Makeover Champion named. Instead the top 10 horses from the preliminary rounds will compete for discipline championships, and the final rounds of competition will take place across the Horse Park, generally in the locations where preliminary rounds took place.

We spoke with RRP’s Executive Director Kirsten Green about the changes to the Makeover format, the current state of Thoroughbreds as sport horses, and where RRP goes from here. Green, who grew up riding and competing Thoroughbred lesson horses in dressage and eventing, started with RRP as a volunteer in 2012 and became one of its first staff members in 2014. She was named executive director in 2022.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Makeover will have a different format for the 2025 competition. Can you talk about this change?

There are some logistical reasons that make this a little bit easier on us, but the driving factor is really that the Makeover is phenomenally expensive to do, and it’s not getting any cheaper. We wanted to open up a pathway for more people to finish and take home a check. We’ve been working on a lot of different ways that we can put more money back into the pockets of our participants. We ask people at the end of every year, how much did the last 10 months cost you, aside from acquisition [of the horse], and it’s well over $11,000, as of last year. I can’t imagine it’s going to look any better this year seeing how much everything is inflating—including the cost of Thoroughbreds! Which is great, but also has its own byproduct of things that you have to solve for. 

So we’ve got a pathway for more horses to the championship. Since there’s no longer an overall Makeover Champion, we took that $10,000 prize and reallocated it across the 10 disciplines, so our prize money is paid deeper than it was previously as well.

We had a private donor who made a five-year commitment to increase the prize money by another $25,000. We have the ASPCA Right Horse Scholarship, which is applicable to horses adopted from Right Horse adoption partners, and that is covering over $400 of their fees. We still have special awards [with cash prizes], and we have what’s called Make The Makeover. It’s a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, and if the trainers complete a $1,000 pledge through their peer-to-peer fundraising, we refund their registration fees.

We’ve been really looking for all kinds of different ways—particularly ways that aren’t necessarily results-based—to help offset the commitment of resources for participants. So I think, all told, in terms of what we’re projecting with scholarships, special awards, all that sort of thing, we’re probably going to put about $200,000 of prize money and other incentive-based funds back into the community this year. So that’s something that we hope to keep building upon. 

One of the other big changes in recent years was the addition of the broodmare division to allow those horses, who have been off the track for longer than the typical retiring race horse, to participate. How is that going?

This will be our third year doing broodmares, and that continues to be a fairly boutique population for us. The first year, we got a pretty significant initial pop of interest, like 22 or 25 [competitors]. That’s leveled out a little bit closer to 12 or 15 each year. In a lot of ways, the [retraining] process is similar, and in a lot of ways the process is totally different. And we know so little about how broodmares get into a retirement stage; at least with race horses, you can see when their last work was. They are a little bit easier to keep tabs on, and there are channels to retirement. I think broodmares are a segment of the aftercare industry that really remains to be fully understood in order to serve it to the fullest extent needed.

The Makeover is just going to be a small contributing piece to that. It’s not going to be the solving factor for this population, as influential as it is for the retiring race horse. It’s still a population that I think needs its own dedicated attention, so that we can really drill down on what is needed. Our average age for our broodmares I think ends up being about 12 or 13 years old, which is of course lots of life left to live, lots of potential things that they could still do. 

The Makeover also has a team competition, where several riders can be involved with the retraining of the horse and participate at the competition. That will continue?

We are still offering a team competition. We probably get maybe 25, 30 teams or so a year. They have at least two people on them now. We started out a little bit higher than that, but we’ve taken it all the way down to two people, so it could just be you and your friend. We have a handful of colleges and universities that take really good advantage of it. Colorado State University, in particular, sends two teams a year and they they each have a project horse. It’s very integrated into their curriculum at this point, so that’s a really good example of an entity that is taking good advantage. 

We see a fair amount of lesson programs, instructors with intermediate young riders and amateurs that are maybe not quite ready to totally do it on their own but can participate as part of a process. We see that working out really well too.

The first few years at the Horse Park, the Makeover seemed to have exponential growth, as far as the number of trainers accepted to compete. Then the competition was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic, and you basically held two Makeovers the following year to include those who had been accepted in 2020. What are the numbers like now?

There are things that really changed about the way that we go through our application process that have influenced our application number in a way that I think is good and appropriate. We max out at about 450, 500 total possible horses. If everybody [who applied and was accepted] registered the number of horses they said they were going to, we call that our total possible number for the year.

What we’re seeing is that we’re getting a lot closer to that number. Our retention rate is a lot stronger. In [applications for] 2018, we got the equivalent of 900 horses or something like that, and we accepted all of them knowing full well that we had a pretty significant dropout rate. We knew we’d be at something like 50% of what originally applied.

In 2022, we really overhauled the application to try to build a better picture of the rider that we were looking at, and we started using an independent application committee. It’s a volunteer committee, but it’s all people that have either stewarded or judged at the competition, or have done it themselves with a good outcome. So we staffed the committee with people who are really representative of the quality of riding and horsemanship that we want to see. We also changed our fee structure, and it got us to a point where people weren’t arbitrarily putting in applications anymore.

Since the applications were overhauled, the rate of horses registered versus our total possible number, based on initial trainer declarations [at the time of application], is averaging 92%. This rate averaged 79% in years prior. So, yeah, by count our entry numbers are down, but I think the story that is a little bit harder to represent is that the quality of horsemanship and the commitment to the process has really shifted. I would take that any day of the year over getting 900 casual participants.

RRP is undergoing a strategic planning process, and we had our facilitation with the board in Saratoga, New York, a couple of weeks ago, and I think that we can expect some kind of revision to the Makeover. We haven’t worked out totally what it looks like. We’ve done surveys and all that sort of thing, and the one big known flaw is that, by nature, the Makeover is a one-and-done process, and there’s not a lot of reason for people to stay engaged with the organization from year to year. So from a cultivation and community-building standpoint, you end up at a disadvantage, and we need to address that piece. 

There’s definitely a sustainability issue too, where you look at how much it costs—how much it costs us, how much it costs the participants—and other factors, like accessibility to riding as a sport and all of these other issues that are continually evolving, that we have to figure out an answer to. The answer is not letting the Makeover go on in the same way for another 10 years; there’s definitely going to be some kind of adjustment that speaks to the shifts that we’re seeing, and also unburdens the staff to some degree so that we can work on other things that are really needed in the Thoroughbred aftercare space. 

So that’s the big, complex question that we’re trying to answer in the strategic planning process: What do we want to focus on, and how do we balance the Makeover against everything else? Because it’s taking over our brand and our whole identity, and people don’t know that we do anything else. It’s an inflection point, for sure. We’re going to see some adjustments in the event and in our programming overall.

One of RRP’s goals has always been to get the racing industry more invested in horses’ post-track success. Last year you introduced a Makeover Champions program to further that effort, where you ask former racing connections—like breeders, owners, trainers and stallion farms—to share updates about their former horses online. Can you talk about that, and other ways RRP tries to bridge the gap between the racing and sport horse worlds?

A lot of that really goes back to how racing entities feel about their horses going on to do other things. I think sometimes, particularly in commercial breeding, which is so results-driven, when a horse is not the most outstanding world-beater [on the track], they can feel like there’s a little bit of a black mark against a breeding program because their horse didn’t pan out.

That’s something that we are really trying to actively address in terms of how we talk about Thoroughbreds; we don’t talk about Thoroughbreds as off-track Thoroughbreds very much anymore. We’re really into this language of: “This is a continuum. You’ve bred an athlete, it’s maybe not going to be athletic in the thing that you need it to do, but look at all the other things it can do.” And just embrace the statistical likelihood that they’re going to have to go on and do something else, and they’re probably not going to end up in the breeding shed. Let’s not shy away from that. Let’s come out and celebrate the things that our horses are doing. 

That’s really where Makeover Champions is grounded. It’s not a fundraising-driven thing. We don’t ask for anything. We just want the former connections to be engaged, and we really want to harness the social media visibility. I think that there’s definitely an element of seeing your your peers doing something, and you get a little bit of, “I should be doing that too.” It’s like a subliminal way of trying to push the narrative in a different direction—this is just part of the life cycle; it’s more of a continuum than two, siloed careers.

One of the big problems, for all the progress that aftercare has made, is that there’s still a charity-case narrative attached to the breed. And if we keep talking about this process that they go through as aftercare, which has this inherent “damaged goods” baked-in connotation, we’re going to have a really hard time dispelling that narrative. We have to think really carefully about how that plays into the bigger picture for the breed, so there’s been a lot of intentional shifts in how we talk about things as an organization to try to start moving the needle on that.

Looking back over the past 10 years and the overall state of the Thoroughbred sport horse, what are some areas where you feel RRP has successfully made a difference? And what aspects do you think still need improvement?

I think we’ve definitely served well as a platform. Not only for the breed; I think that we very effectively made the point that these horses are versatile and trainable and all of those good and true things. I think the Makeover has really served as a community-builder and an opportunity to bring members of this community together in a way that is not otherwise available to them. It’s also been a platform for programs. RRP would never take full credit for it, but I think there are a lot of people that have really carved a niche for themselves as Thoroughbred trainers, and we’ve given programs and organizations a platform to really highlight what they’re capable of as trainers or the types of horses that come through aftercare programs.

One other thing we’re really proud of, which is kind of tangential to the mission but has turned into a beautiful outlet to try to address the staffing shortage in the equine veterinary field, is our arrival exam for horses competing at the Makeover. Dr. Shannon Reed, DACVS-LA [a past Makeover competitor and clinical associate professor at the Texas A&M University Large Animal Hospital] started it in 2019. She opens up an application process every spring for about 35 spots for prospective veterinary students to essentially staff the arrival exams for us, and she’s getting hundreds of people applying. 

They get oversight from vets at Hagyard Equine Medical Institute (Kentucky) and from other volunteer vets that want to come in and contribute, and they get the most amazing 72-hour experience. They have dinner at Hagyard, they go watch morning workouts at Keeneland, they go visit the American Association of Equine Practitioners offices, then they come and work all day, looking at a couple hundred horses. We’ve done this enough years now that we’re starting to get notes from people that have graduated from vet school saying it was very influential in their decision to go into equine practice. It’s something that we’re really proud to have offered. 

I think Shannon and the advent of the arrival exam, in conjunction with some of the changes that we’ve made on trainer applications, have really evolved the quality of horsemanship and management that we’ve seen at the Makeover—just knowing that these standards exist, and that we’re going to check them. And we’ve been able to offer intervention as well. If people are worried about being on the bubble as far as body condition score or something like that, we’ve been able to help people and steer them toward new resources. That’s so important for the image of the Thoroughbred; they’re not supposed to look skinny and lanky. That’s not what they look like at all.

RRP has always been about marketing the breed, and has kind of turned into marketing and advocating for the aftercare industry overall. That really dovetails into what we’re seeing with our strategic planning; I think that you can expect to see RRP more intentionally positioning itself as a voice for the industry, and educating people, both on the racing and equestrian side, and finding ways to mobilize particular parts of the industry that aren’t otherwise organized. The Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance has been tremendous for the non-profit aftercare facilities, but there are so many other parts of the kind of aftercare spectrum that are operating outside of that accreditation model that really need to be tapped into, supported, recognized. So I think we’ll see some progress there. 

There’s still a lot of work to be done to improve the resale value of Thoroughbreds. We’re not solely responsible for this, but we’ve seen the prices paid for horses off the track increase almost 100%, and even if you adjusted that for inflation, it’s still something pretty significant, like 35% or more. But where you’re not seeing improvement is for the post-Makeover horse that hasn’t built up a long resume yet, but should be highly marketable. We’re just not seeing that return on investment at that point. The market hasn’t really shifted there as much as it has on the front end.

And that speaks to another aspect, which is that the Thoroughbred riding horse or sport horse still does not have a sufficient breed association. I am really interested in exploring that space more, bringing back the Thoroughbred sport tracker [a database of Thoroughbred sport horses that RRP used to maintain] with some real web development behind it, and really trying to start filling that void, where there’s a more organized entity that’s serving as the breed association. Offering stuff like competition grants for people on Thoroughbreds, ideas like trainer accreditation and Thoroughbred shows. There’s still so much that opportunity that would move the needle for the breed overall, and I really see RRP fitting into that space in some form.

Another piece of the breed registry is getting the credit back for the breed. We’ve got so many people out there that are saying they don’t want a Thoroughbred, but they’re sitting on like a Trakehner that’s like 70% Thoroughbred. Really figuring out how to kind of claw back some of that credit, so to speak, because there’s no sport horse registry that will accept artificial insemination and crosses and that sort of thing, so we’re basically ceding all of that to other stud books and registries, and that’s something that we have to fix.

You can find all the Chronicle’s coverage of previous Thoroughbred Makeovers here.