04/24/2025
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, none of the horses on the U.S. show jumping or eventing teams were American-bred. Not one.
Every mount representing red, white, and blue was born and brought up overseas, while our own breeding barns churn out thousands of foals a year. For a country as vast, wealthy, and horse-obsessed as the United States, that’s embarrassing.
It’s not a fluke. It’s a symptom of a broken system. We are not producing our own elite equine athletes because we’re not breeding for them.
In many U.S. breeding programs, the decision to breed a mare often isn’t based on her competition success. It’s based on injury. She bowed a tendon at four? Breed her. She fractured a sesamoid before she ever showed? Put her in foal so she “doesn’t just sit.” She was too unsound to make it through a futurity season? “She has a nice head.” This is breeding as damage control. Not selection. Not strategy.
We’re taking the horses who didn’t last, who couldn’t compete, and we’re passing those traits: genetic unsoundness, poor conformation, low resilience, on to the next generation. And we’re doing no better with the boys.
The U.S. barn landscape is simply not set up to support stallions. Most boarding facilities don’t allow them. Trainers often discourage keeping c**ts intact due to behavioral concerns and limited resale value. As a result, some of our most promising bloodlines are literally cut off before they even have a chance to contribute. Meanwhile, Europe is building stallion careers alongside competition careers, backing them with systems designed to assess, preserve, and promote excellence.
Across Europe, breeding is a science, not an afterthought. Registries require mares to pass performance tests. Stallions must prove themselves through the same performance tests as well as competition and through the quality of their offspring. Longevity, trainability, reproductive soundness, and rideability matter, just as much as flash. In the Netherlands, the KWPN registry ensures that horses with structural and genetic flaws are actively removed from the breeding pool. They are building better horses on purpose, while performance testing is virtually nonexistant in the USA. We’re gambling on foals from horses who quite literally could not even finish the race.
Why do we do this? Because our industry rewards early speed, early sales, and early burnout. We breed for yearling sales, futurities, and young horse classes. We reward breeders who produce a shiny prospect, not a durable horse.
We need a complete shift in breeding values. That means stopping the practice of breeding injured or completely unproven mares and instead selecting those who lasted, who stayed sound, performed consistently, and demonstrated resilience over time. It also means investing in infrastructure that allows promising c**ts to remain stallions, rather than gelding them for convenience or marketability. We must begin to track soundness, temperament, and fertility across generations, using that data to make informed decisions. And we need to embrace modern tools: genetic testing, performance records, and international benchmarks, instead of relying on nostalgia or sentiment. Because right now, we are selecting for the opposite of what we need. And it’s playing out in rehab barns, in short-lived careers, and yes, on the Olympic scoreboard.
This isn’t a crusade against breeders. It’s a call for accountability, ambition, and change. If we want to see American-bred horses wearing stars and stripes again, not just in name, but in origin, we need to start breeding for more than emotion and convenience. We need to breed horses that can stand the test of time, not just pass a vet check at a sale. Until we do, we’ll just keep buying our best from Europe, and wondering where our greatness went.
