Eighty race meetings were approved by the Jamaica Racing Commission (JRC) on November 30, 2025, for the calendar of the 2026 Racing Year in Jamaica. The JRC provides the regulatory personnel, and staffing must be scheduled well in advance to accommodate staff vacations and other eventualities. Obviously, a calendar is subject to change and periodic adjustments to allow for vagaries of the weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

An interesting adjustment to the 2026 calendar has reduced the number of race meetings from 79 to 77, as originally published last December. In this particular instance, it is neither the unpredictability of tropical weather nor any other unforeseen circumstance that has informed this change. The principals of promoting company Supreme Ventures Racing & Entertainment Ltd (SVREL), and I would imagine that the board of directors would have had an input.

There are two amendments, which are interesting proposals, and this is what they have to be at this stage. Saturdays July, 25 and November 28, 2026, have been removed as race days. This reduction means that there is concern that the horse population can deliver, as the focus is on the December 05 Mouttet Mile, and in fact, the month of December has now been rightly designated the marquee showcase of local horse racing.

In the aforementioned July and November, the number of race days has been reduced from six to five, but December will have the usual seven, with Friday the fourth and Wednesday the 23rd, part of the effort to maximise promotion. This I endorse, wholeheartedly, but to have two “dark” Saturdays, as the Americans term it, requires a data-based justification at the very least.

This is a departure from tradition, which was apparently endorsed by the regulatory JRC, as required under the 1977 Racing Rules. In any event, there are two Sundays, the fifth and the 19th, scheduled in July, with races set for Saturday the 18th, as well. With reference to November, the Sunday racecards will be on the 8th and 15th and will complete consecutive two-day meets.

If the concern is the availability of horses to fill races, even three months prior, it is not difficult to determine why the 18th of July may be surplus to requirements, and either November 8 or 15, as well. Fewer horses means fewer races and having viable field sizes of an average of at least 10 starters per race. In fairness, though, to SVREL, the 71 nominations for April 18, 2026, do not inspire confidence.

By the way, there were 114 declarations for April 11, last Saturday’s race card, and believe it or not, for 1992, the final year of the handicap system under which racing grew at an average of 10 per cent annually, it was 115 runners in between 11 and 12 races each race day. From 29 race days in 1960 to 84 by 1992, functioning as a sport with mass appeal, the complicated claiming system, in a 33-year financial disaster, has reduced horse racing to niche market status.

The decline of the racing industry in the Pan American region, from Canada in the North to the tips of Chile and Argentina, sharing the southern-most region of the South American Continent, has been a lesson gone unheeded until October 25, 2025, when the US Jockey Club’s classification of the horse population could bring corrective action to the failed 95-year claiming system.

As I have been advising since the uninformed anti-bookmaking conspirators convinced the then JRC board, that the owning of thoroughbreds could be a financially viable undertaking, and that the handicap system, which had grown exponentially in three decades, lacks integrity in the gaming market. This was idiocy, which to this day is being hailed as the best thing that happened to the industry since poor people could now own horses. The division of the horse population in 25 confusing categories for the owners, trainers, and punters also posed a huge existential threat.

What is not understood and maybe has no chance of ever doing so that it is not claiming tags that is the main source of the malaise; it is, in fact, the non-classification of the horse population, which ensures that inferior horses concede weight to superior ones in over 80 per cent of races, leading to nearly 50 per cent of races presenting odds-on favourities.

Using the indicators above and the 33-year lack of growth in the gaming market, as well as a dearth of new customers annually, even with population increase, I can demonstrate effectively that the racing product delivered in the American claiming system format has delivered at least $100 billon less in turnover, when charting the previous pre1992 trajectory of the handicap system.