Seven years ago, the New York State Gaming Commission undertook a daunting mission: to locate every New York-bred Thoroughbred that raced between 2010 and 2012 and didn’t race after 2012.

A year later, in 2016, the Commission released its findings. The number of horses that fit the criteria was 3,894. The Commission was able to locate 1,871, or 48% of them. The other 2,023 couldn’t be located.

One of the motivations for beginning the project was to determine how money the New York Thoroughbred industry needs to support its retired racehorses.

“But we couldn’t do that without knowing how many horses we were talking about,” said Lee Park, the Commission’s deputy executive director for public engagement and information, this week.

Characterizing the project as “to some degree successful, to a lot of degrees unsuccessful,” Park also said that the Commission learned a lot even from what they were unable to discover.

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