Lexington, KY - Keeneland is such an integral part of the Central Kentucky experience and offers such a unique set of services to the area's equine economy that it is surprising to realize that the combination racetrack-sales company-training center-simulcast outlet-and-more is the result of almost serendipitous developments. No other racetrack in North America is under a corporate umbrella that also operates a sales company under the same name. No other racetrack conducts short "boutique" racing meets twice a year. Keeneland's library (open to the public) archives much of the North American Thoroughbred industry's oldest and most complete volumes and photographs.
Some of these circumstances came about accidentally or in response to national and international upheavals. Some were envisioned. The result is that Central Kentucky, where outstanding horses have been bred and raised almost since Revolutionary days, rapidly developed into an international racing and sales hub during a relatively recent span.
Without Keeneland, it is unlikely this would have happened.
Throughout the first third of its 20th century existence, Lexington was a sleepy farming and college town around which some of the world's best Thoroughbreds were bred and raised into yearlings - and then sent elsewhere. Other than the Kentucky Derby - hyped by the colorful Matt Winn but regarded contemptuously by Eastern stables until the 1930s (Sam Riddle disdained sending Man o' War to the 1920 Derby) - Kentucky had never been a major racing state. Nor was it a state where horses were sold on a large scale; that was New York, and specifically Saratoga Springs. For three years (1933 to 1936) during the Great Depression when Seabiscuit was scoring his first stakes victories, there was no organized racing in Lexington at all. Compared to the present era, life in the Bluegrass must have been exceedingly dull.
Keeneland opened its gates in October 1936 for a nine-day meet and followed with an 11-day meet in April of 1937. The then-defunct-and-demolished Kentucky Association racetrack at Fifth and Race Streets had a long and checkered history and had launched the careers of Hall of Fame jockeys Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield, but it no longer attracted major stables after the early 1920s. The Kentucky Association had not protected its purse structure, had given away too many free passes, and had let its facilities deteriorate. Keeneland developed a unique business model based on two short race meets of the highest quality possible while assuming a broader responsibility to horseracing and the local community. Its founding investors knew up front that they would never receive dividends, and even the wife of the track president would have to pay her own admission (a tradition that exists to this day). The race meets revolved around a few well-funded stakes events that filled certain niches (the Ashland for fillies; the Blue Grass as a Derby prep) to showcase locally bred and raised talent within otherwise modest racing cards.
Brownell Combs Sr.'s homebred future Hall of Fame filly, Myrtlewood, shipped to Keeneland from the Chicago-Detroit circuit to win three races in nine days, including the inaugural 1936 Ashland before beating the era's best sprinting mare in a six-furlong match race - for no purse money. Calumet Farm's future five-time leading North American sire, Bull Lea, captured the 1938 Blue Grass over Hal Price Headley's homebred 2-year-old champion of 1937, Menow. For the first time, elite racehorses were competing regularly in front of local Lexingtonians - albeit on a brief biannual basis prior to being shipped to bigger circuits in New York, Chicago, and California.
In the summer of 1943, the first horse auction was conducted at Keeneland (by Fasig-Tipton) because of World War II restrictions on rail shipments of yearlings to New York, launching Keeneland's July and September yearling sales followed by a November sale of breeding stock. A mixed stock sale in January and a 2-year-olds in training sale in April came later, and six years ago, the two yearling auctions were essentially merged into one giant September venue. Sales facilities were expanded and enhanced, then expanded and enhanced again. In 2007, a total of 9,124 horses - yearlings, broodmares, weanlings, stallions, 2-year-olds, older horses in training - changed hands in Keeneland's sales arena, grossing $815,401,000. The September and November auctions are the largest of their kind in the world. The sales operation helped fuel Keeneland's racetrack purse structure, which fueled the quality of its race meets.
The unlikely development of this incomparable scenario near a landlocked mid-sized college city on the edge of the South and Midwest is roughly analogous to the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin being home to a champion NFL team. Without inept management of a previous historic and century-old racetrack, without the Great Depression, and without World War II, the Keeneland phenomenon and its ancillary benefits might never have been realized. It is worth experiencing for that reason alone - but other reasons quickly become obvious.