THE PEGASUS WORLD CUP
Late January · Gulfstream Park, Hallandale Beach · A Day · Since 2017
The Pegasus World Cup is a single afternoon at Gulfstream Park at the end of January, and the newest fixture on this calendar by two and a half centuries.
It was proposed in 2016, first run in 2017, and for two years it was the richest horse race in the world.
The Invention
Frank Stronach, an Austrian-born industrialist who built one of North America’s largest car parts companies and then bought racetracks with the proceeds, put the idea to a conference at his own track in January 2016.
The gap he had identified was real. Nothing of consequence ran between the Breeders’ Cup in November and the Dubai World Cup in March, which meant a champion older horse had no reason to stay in training through the winter rather than retire to stud.
His solution was a financing mechanism nobody had tried. Twelve shareholders would each pay a million dollars for a place in the starting gate, bought before anyone knew which horse would fill it. A place could be run, leased, sold or traded. Every shareholder took an equal share of the handle, the media rights and the sponsorship.
Twelve million dollars, seven of them to the winner. It replaced a race with a purse of five hundred thousand.
Arrogate won the first running, beating California Chrome. The two best horses in America met in January because a businessman had built them a reason to.
The Purse
The following year it rose to sixteen million and Gun Runner won it.
Then it fell. Nine million in 2019. Three million now, with the field invited by the racetrack rather than buying its way in. The turf race that opened at six million runs for one.
What was built to be the richest race in the world is no longer among the ten richest, and the mechanism that made it remarkable has been abandoned. What remains is a good race on a good card in the right week of the year, which is not nothing.
What to Know
The card carries several graded stakes besides the main race, and the day is better racing than the headline suggests.
Gulfstream is not a grand old track. It was rebuilt as a shopping and entertainment complex with a racecourse attached, and there is an enormous bronze pegasus standing in the middle of it that breathes fire. Arrive knowing that.
Tickets run from under a hundred dollars to a few hundred, which is a fraction of what the Derby asks.
January in south Florida is why half the crowd is there. The Palm Beach season is an hour north, and the two can be taken in one weekend.
The mistake is expecting Ascot. This is a Florida afternoon with celebrities, a fire-breathing statue and a very good horse race in the middle of it. It is a considerably better day once taken on those terms.
The Court
The Pegasus World Cup is not the Court’s own. Boxes, tables in the clubhouse and places on the apron are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the day: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Members already in Palm Beach for the season have the shortest journey of anyone on this calendar.
