Two Shores, One Question: Where Does Racing Stand on Welfare and Trust in Mid-2026?
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Summer racing in North America and across the northern hemisphere carries its own rhythm of stakes days and sales results, but underneath the meets at Saratoga and Del Mar, and across the water at the tracks of the United Kingdom, this summer has offered a more useful read on where the sport actually stands: on welfare technology, on the stability of its regulatory bodies, and on a public whose trust shows no sign of returning easily, on either side of the Atlantic.
By Aleksandra Spasic
Published July 17, 2026
The clearest signal from the U.S. side came out of Keeneland on June 30th, at the final session of the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation's Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit. What emerged was not a single breakthrough but a crowded field. Arioneo previewed a specially designed race-day girth set to debut in September that embeds ECG electrodes and locomotion sensors, already in testing in the U.K. and France. Ben Bernhard, vice president of Pin Oak Stud and a former SpaceX engineer, described building Equigraph, a sensor producing an individualized Gait Risk Index, after his Grade I winner Geaux Rocket Ride broke down training toward the 2023 Breeders' Cup. StrideSAFE and Sleip, already in use across various North American and European jurisdictions, rounded out a session built around a single premise: the data to identify at-risk horses largely exists, the industry simply has not yet organized itself to act on it consistently. Four companies submitted sufficient data for analysis in the AAEP's Wearable Biometric Sensor Research Project this spring, and Sleip is already embedded in the regulatory workflow at NYRA and the Kentucky Horseracing & Gaming Corporation.
Across the pond, British jump racing has been pursuing its own version of the same two-pronged approach. On the detection side, heart-rate monitoring technology is now in use during training in the UK, though it has not yet been approved for use in live competition, a step behind where sensors like Sleip already sit in US regulatory workflows. On the in-race side, research from the Royal Veterinary College found that padded-style hurdles reduce the risk of a horse falling by roughly 11 percent compared with traditional birch. More than 90 percent of British racecourses have already made the switch, with the British Horseracing Authority mandating full compliance by October 1st.
Read together, the two countries are working the same problem from both ends. American racing has moved further on pre-race detection, with sensor data already built into regulatory workflow at tracks like NYRA. British racing has moved further on changing the conditions horses actually race under. Neither side has finished the job on both fronts, and neither approach substitutes for the other.
On the U.S. side of governance, a smaller item from a few weeks earlier is a reminder of how much welfare progress still depends on institutional continuity. On June 17th, the Horseracing Integrity & Welfare Unit (HIWU) announced that Michelle Pujals had retired as general counsel after four years in the role, with Janelle Winston named as her successor. Pujals had spent two decades in the NBA's legal department before joining HIWU at its founding in 2022, helping build out the Anti-Doping and Medication Control Program from its earliest rules. Winston arrives from nearly a decade at the NFL, where she administered substance policy. The appointment is reasonable on paper, but it's worth naming what this kind of transition costs a young regulator. HIWU is still inside its fourth year of existence, still refining how the ADMC Program is interpreted and enforced, and institutional memory in a program this new sits disproportionately with the small number of people who built it from the first test barn onward.
Across the pond, British racing's governance troubles run considerably deeper. Lord Allen resigned as chair of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) in March, just six months into the role, after failing to secure unanimous agreement among the BHA's member organizations on establishing a fully independent board. David Jones stepped back in as interim chair, a position he has now held twice. The resignation triggered a broader revolt: the Jockey Club and several of Britain's largest racecourses, including Ascot, Goodwood, Newbury, and York, issued a joint call for a formal governance review of the Racecourse Association, arguing that the current structure prevents timely and decisive action on matters affecting the wider industry. No permanent chair has been named as of this writing. Where the HIWU transition is a matter of institutional memory walking out the door, the BHA's is a more fundamental disagreement about who gets to hold power in British racing at all, and it remains unresolved.
Taken together, both regulators enter the second half of 2026 carrying real questions about their own stability, at precisely the moment both are asking the industry to trust their judgment on welfare standards.
The widest-angle data point of the summer is, fittingly, the one that doesn't sit on either side of the Atlantic exclusively. World Horse Welfare's 2026 public perception survey, published June 11 and now in its fifth year of annual tracking, found that a majority of the British public sees horses primarily as pets or leisure animals rather than sport or working animals, and that over 70 percent believe welfare should take priority regardless of the effect on performance. CEO Roly Owers was direct in saying the year-on-year trend is not a positive one: the share of people who support horse sport only conditional on welfare improvements has stayed roughly flat since 2022, while the share who oppose horses in sport under any circumstances has risen from 19.5 to 24.4 percent.
The panel convened to discuss the results landed on a shared diagnosis without quite agreeing on the prescription. British Equine Veterinary Association CEO David Mountford pointed to a structural problem underneath the numbers: most of the public has never had any direct contact with a horse at all, which limits what any communications strategy can accomplish on its own. Racing broadcaster Lydia Hislop extended the point to the sport's own coverage gaps, citing how little mainstream attention followed Ros Canter's Badminton win weeks after the birth of her second child. Baroness Minette Batters, chair of British racing's Horse Welfare Board, returned to Canter's win as a model for the kind of story the sport should be telling, and confirmed plans for welfare champions on every yard as one concrete step. Where the panel converged was on Mountford's closing point: racing and horse sport more broadly do not yet have much institutional humility about how much remains uncertain, and treating any single year's data as confirmation that the current approach is working would be a mistake.
Though the survey itself is British, its implications travel. Nothing about the underlying dynamic, public trust eroding faster than institutions can visibly earn it back, is specific to one country's regulatory structure. If anything, an American reader should find the UK's numbers more useful as an early warning than as a foreign curiosity, given how much faster public sentiment can move than either HISA or the BHA are currently able to.
Taken together, the summer's picture on both sides of the Atlantic is not one of crisis, nor one of resolution. Detection technology and equipment redesign are both advancing faster than the institutions meant to standardize their use, American and British regulators alike are navigating real questions about their own stability, and the public conversation about whether any of it is working, or whether it can ever be enough, shows no sign of settling either way, on either shore.