Pavla Nygaard

Leadership, entrepreneurship, AI. Breeders Cup winning breeder. Former owner of Ocala Jockey Club farm. Education: Molecular biology, genetics, law.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Management is recognizing and dealing with what is. Leadership is imagining and creating what can be.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

It’s a great perspective to remember that most of our obstacles are rather small and to get up and try again.

On the other hand, those times also had much shorter life spans and fewer make it to adulthood at all.

I think what we are looking for is the mental toughness of those times but without the actual statistical consequences of those hard times.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Schools should teach and reward: curiosity, experimentation, failure when a result of trying something new, social and emotional intelligence, initiative and leadership, breadth and depth of learning, open-mindedness and ability to take and discuss opposing views to own existing beliefs.

Schools should stop teaching and rewarding that a right answer to a test means that they know the subject or that there is always a right and wrong answer in life to everything.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@PeterDiamandis I love the “let reality grade you” part. I mean that I love the concept and I love when reality agrees with me. I don’t love as much when reality hits me in the nose, but reality is a much better teacher than false enthusiasm even then.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Sometimes you have to take something a little far to know where the balance lines lie. Too little and too much are just two different sides of the same coin. Typically we learn way more by overdoing something than by underdoing, and sometimes it takes just a few tweaks to get to where it’s just right.

Either way, your path has done so much for advancing the field, whether or not all has worked. Also, you are still young and the field is still young. What looks right today may not survive the test of time, and what looks wrong today may be the most important discovery later.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@visegrad24 @kathrynpapp We had 3 that were released in a fire in California a few years ago. Our three survived along with most others. Releasing them gives a chance at making it. Keeping the stalls close doesn’t.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@TomRyanKY @Racingwithbruno I am so very sorry. For all of the best medicine available, too often it just isn’t enough for what we need.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

In my experience as a breeder, I very rarely know what strengths and challenges a particular stallion may have had. I get to guess based on known statistical information, number of races, seeing the stallion live, etc. If I didn’t want to breed to stallions with undisclosed history, I wouldn’t breed at all. I wish there was more known as I believe mare owners could make better informed decisions about matches and I think we would get overall more soundness and fewer predictable issues, but I also kind of understand that we are in a herd mentality industry where things tend to be seen as either incredible or terrible, and stud farms are incentivized to be able to keep the story to as much of the incredible part and as little of the terrible part as possible.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@lisaky72 So sorry. It’s a long meaningful chunk of life to be with a great horse.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

We tied ourselves down years ago when we didn’t train engineers and builders at the same per capita rates as China and India.

We tied ourselves down when we decided that political ideologies or suing people out of existence are more important than retaining our cultural identity as builders and innovators.

We have a lot of work to do, and the global market now provides the report card on the success of our priorities vs. others’.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@MaggieWolfndale @DRFLivingston I am so sorry for your loss. Gone much too soon. 🙏

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

This is how our bodies and nature work. An ecosystem of self-reinforcing feedback loops that take in outside input but rebalance the entire ecosystem accordingly. It works like a miracle unless the input overloads the system at some juncture and creates a bottleneck like the Lucille Ball chocolate factory episode.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Every great story in racing begins with someone willing to ignore the odds.

And that’s true in life, too.

Yesterday was the final day of racing at Aqueduct in New York after 132 years of racing, before newly redesigned Belmont Park reopens in September.

For us, Aqueduct will be where it all began.

On November 5, 2006, our first racehorse, Play It True, made her first career start. A modestly bred two-year-old filly, she broke from post 12 of 12 and went off at 55-1. She was an underdog against more expensive and better-bred horses from better-funded stables than ours.

Neither she nor us, as first-time owners, knew we were supposed to lose.

She won anyway.

Erik was at Aqueduct that afternoon. He bet on her, collected enough winnings that he walked through the parking lot carrying a brown paper bag full of cash, and between the purse and the wager, it almost paid for buying the horse.

Naturally, we concluded this racehorse ownership thing was going to be easy.

That theory lasted… well… not very long.

Over the next twenty years, racing became one of my greatest teachers.

It taught me that beginnings matter. That wins are incredible.

It also taught me that endings matter. And that they often hurt.

But what matters most is the journey in between.

Yesterday, as Aqueduct closed one chapter, one of Play It True’s daughters, Interplay, was writing another. She started at 44.6-1, almost echoing her mother’s improbable debut twenty years earlier.

She didn’t win.

She closed strongly for third.

Play It True is now happily retired at Chesapeake Farm in Kentucky. Two of her foals are racing for us in California. One racetrack closes. Another prepares to reopen. One generation leaves the stage while another quietly begins to write its own story.

That’s how life works. In cycles that tend to be invisible until enough passage of time.

Right now it can feel as though everything is changing. AI is changing how we work. Politics is reshaping how we relate to one another. Entire industries, including horse racing, are trying to figure out what comes next and how to stay relevant.

It’s easy to focus on what might be ending.

It’s harder, and yet much more hopeful, to ask what may be beginning.

Maybe that is why this little Aqueduct story has stayed with me.

What if we approached the future with the same innocent courage we had on that first afternoon?

What if we acted like we didn’t know we were supposed to lose?

Goodbye, Aqueduct, and the memories. Hello to the next chapters that are yet to be written by us all.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

I can see that there would be a good demand to own. I don’t know that there is great understanding of what is involved in having a great experience of it. There may as well be a Great Wall of China between the outside world and the inside of the industry. I’m thrilled to hear that you attracted quality people in your partnership. I agree that enough good people lead, the future can be good.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

As an owner and breeder, I believe that there is a lot that the industry and participants can do to make the ownership experience much more attractive.

About making ownership easier, that is a little trickier. We want owners who will do right by the horse and by the sport, even when and especially when setbacks happen, and that does mean appropriate hurdles to ensure that. I understand that it is very difficult to become an NFL owner and there is no shortage of people wanting to be one anyway. But we also want to make it much easier and attractive for people to enter and participate in the sport at all levels.

Thank you for caring enough to speak and to do.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@Codie_Sanchez @Chris_Petkas Congratulations. This is wonderful news!

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Negative compounding inside racing over the course of 30 years or so is difficult to stop, let alone reverse in a span of 3 years. It will take either a significant investment or maybe a few billion dollars by a single party with vision, or a very large number of committed participants who refuse the horse racing dream to die.

I think the latter is more likely than the former, and perhaps if there is a sign of the latter, the former may appear after that. But I think it will be up to all who care enough, because there isn’t a savior coming any time soon that I know of. Mike and Pat are a force to reckon with but more than them two is needed.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@coloneljen I am so sorry. You gave her all the chances that could have made a recovery work. But, for all the medical miracles that already exist, we don’t always win. You still won with trying and you still won with giving her peace. 🙏🙏🙏

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Development is not the absence of setbacks. It is about working through them and continuing to show up.

Some athletes are not late bloomers because they lack talent.

Sometimes they are late bloomers because life interrupted their education.

Midnight Strike lost by a nose yesterday at Santa Anita.

A nose.

Of course we would have loved the win. But that is only one part of the equation.

So often the scoreboard does not capture the important parts of the story.

Midnight Strike is five years old, but in racing experience, he is still catching up.

Our trainer Neil Drysdale has said to me that when horses miss the normal progression of starting at two or early three, it is not just fitness they lose.

It is education.

They miss the little lessons.

How to relax.

How to handle pressure.

How to trust.

How to compete.

You cannot recreate all of that in the morning.

You have to live it.

And isn’t that true for people too?

Sometimes we look at someone’s age and assume we know where they “should” be. But development is not a straight line. Injuries happen. Life happens. Detours happen.

The question is not whether you are exactly where someone else is.

The question is:

Are we still progressing?

Midnight Strike’s journey has required patience. Physical setbacks delayed his career. We had to give him time, listen, adjust, and let him develop into himself.

That process now includes many different kinds of intelligence.

Horse intelligence.

He tells us who he is.

Human intelligence.

The trainer, riders, grooms, and people around him learn his patterns.

And now technology and AI-assisted analysis add another layer.

Heart rate, stride data, recovery and race patterns help us see what is happening beneath the surface.

They do not replace horsemanship.

They help us ask better questions.

Yesterday taught us something new.

In his maiden win, Midnight Strike showed he could relax and close.

Yesterday, the race did not set up perfectly for that style. The pace was slow which is hard for closers that come running late. The leader controlled the race. The advantage was not ours.

But he adapted.

He stayed closer.

He listened to his rider.

He fought.

He lost by inches when he got distracted coming to the wire. He has experience but is still learning.

And maybe the most valuable lesson was that he is no longer a horse who needs everything to go his way.

He is learning how to make his own race.

That is what development looks like.

Not perfection.

Progress.

The goal is not just creating a horse who can win one race.

The goal is building a resilient athlete who understands the game, enjoys the job, and hopefully has the foundation for a long career.

Sometimes the difference between winning and losing is a nose and a large gap in earnings between 60% of the purse being first and 20% being second. Winning is always nicer.

But the difference between quitting because of early setbacks and growing past them is much bigger.

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

@coloneljen 🙏🙏🙏🙏

[Pavla Nygaard @PavlaNygaard]

Speak power and health to her and into her. Horses are incredible energy animals. They feel what we feel. Project strength. Project seeing her walking well. Project what you want to see. Accept what is and what comes but keep projecting the positive outcome you want for her. Tell her when you are with her. Love matters. 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏