Kentucky Horse Racing Commission grants its final license

photo of brown horse during day time – Ojai Horse at Sunset – unsplash

Kentucky Horse Racing Commission has given its final license to Revolutionary Racing to build a new equestrian center in Ashland, Kentucky. The equestrian center will feature an American quarter horse “sprint racing” track and a historical horse racing section among other facilities.

Quarter horse racing has a history dating back to some of the earliest days of Daniel Boone’s “Kentucky Territory.” The first track dates itself all the way to 1780, marking establishing the starting point of a one-quarter-mile race path. In 1988, an additional race track was established for quarter horse racing. The practice has died out recently in Kentucky, no quarter horse racing has taken place in the area for almost 30 years. The new facility is aimed at bringing quarter horse racing back into the modern era.

Revolutionary Racing is expected to complete the facility in 2024 but will have a 2023 opening. Phase one of the construction plans includes a historical horse racing facility, a sprint racing track, two racing barns with 176 stalls total, a test barn, a paddock with offices and a walking ring, and parking facilities. The sprint racing track will have the longest straightaway in North America.

American Quarter Horses are named as such because they specialize in extreme bursts of speed, most famous for their namesake: the quarter mile. 2021 statistics from the Kentucky Quarter Horse Association list around 30,000 registered quarter horses in Kentucky owned by more than 10,000 people. They make up around 1/8th of the registered horse population overall.

Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2021 to support the quarter horse industry. This resolution recommended that at least one race track license would be used for quarter horse rating. This is what led to Revolutionary Racing acquiring the ninth license and the new facility.