The man from the Japan Racing Association (JRA) shifted his feet behind the speaker’s podium, smiled and gave what seemed like a nervous half-laugh.
We were 20 minutes into the first session of the International Conference of Horseracing Authorities (ICHA) in Paris, the day after Daryz won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in front of a crowd that included many Japanese fans, just across the leafy Bois de Boulogne at Longchamp. The session, populated with racing administrators and industry decision-makers from around the world, was billed as Racing Wagering and Marketing, What Today’s Customers Want and What the Future Holds.
The conference compère, British broadcaster Rishi Persad, had asked: “Does the JRA have a plan of how to develop (Umamusume) even further than it has already gone?”
The response was probably not what Persad expected.
“I don’t know exactly what plan,” the JRA man said. “We don’t have a plan.”
With no other answer to give, the honest Dr. Atsushi Kikuta, director of international affairs at the JRA, shifted into a basic explanation of Umamusume: Pretty Derby, the video game and entertainment franchise produced by Cygames that has probably done more than any industry-devised marketing strategy this century to attract younger fans to horse racing, in this case, Gen Z.
A few weeks later, Japan’s superstar galloper Forever Young would make history by winning the G1 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Del Mar, California in the colours of Susumu Fujita, a billionaire big-spending racehorse owner who is also the man who owns Cygames’s parent company CyberAgent.
To spell it out, Forever Young is the most marketable racehorse in the world right now; Cygames is a Breeders’ Cup partner with an expanding horse racing sponsorship portfolio; Fujita is the man behind the most popular horse racing-inspired game this century, one that launched in English language in June 2025 and won Mobile Game of the Year at the Game Awards less than six months later; last month Forever Young was reborn as an Umamusume character.
Shouldn’t the sport’s marketers be all over this?
Umamusume sits outside the racing industry, yet the sport’s essence is Umamusume’s everything. With its characterisations of actual racehorses in horse girl form, Umamusume is a parallel dimension to real world horse racing and those dimensions are overlapping. But the racing industry’s marketing people, as is so often the case, have been slow to catch on.
Cygames announced its intention to launch Umamusume as a mobile game in 2016 but expanded the franchise to span anime, manga, live shows and music long before it finally launched the eagerly received Umamusume: Pretty Derby mobile game on February 24, 2021. It was an instant hit in Japan as the country came through Covid pandemic restrictions. The Japanese version of the game has had more than 30 million downloads.
Fans of Umamusume in Japan quickly connected with the characters: horse girl versions of real-life racehorses like Oguri Cap, Special Week, Tokai Teio and Mejiro McQueen. They were hooked into their story arcs – Umamusume mirrors the real-life careers – and the horse personalities. And they began to wonder if the buzz and excitement they got from the game would be felt at the race track, watching real horses, seeing the descendants of the horses whose alternate reality personas they had become so attached to.
Many did. They became committed horse racing fans.
At first, the JRA seemed to have an inkling that there might be something in Umamusume, after all, Japan had seen the video game effect before, in the 1990s, when the iconic game Derby Stallion hooked fans into the sport.
As the JRA told Idol Horse in an email correspondence in January this year: “In 2018, a couple of years before the Umamusume game was released in Japan, some promotional activities were held at JRA facilities.”
The email outlined those activities as “commercial videos were shown and posters were displayed throughout the year in JRA racecourses,” and on the day of that year’s G1 Yasuda Kinen at Tokyo Racecourse, “advertising space was set up for Umamusume PR where promotional giveaways were distributed”, and official Umamusume merchandise was on sale in JRA gift shops.
But then what? Well, not much via official channels, it seems.
As Dr. Kikuta left the Paris conference session, he told Idol Horse, “Actually, we have no direct connection with Umamusume.”
He continued, “Definitely, we continue to connect with other third parties that can promote horse racing … Umamusume is an unbelievable phenomenon,” and said that he hoped such games might help the sport in the future. But as to why there is no current connection? “It is difficult.”
The JRA email confirmed that position a few months later: “Currently, the JRA has no plans to hold any events related to Umamusume,” the email said, adding, “There have also been no past events similar to those held at NAR tracks.”
While the JRA, the elite level centrally-governed racing entity in Japan, the very heart of Umamusume, has not embraced the franchise formally, the local government National Association of Racing (NAR) tracks have held official events in collaboration with Umamusume and they have succeeded in attracting extra fans to those tracks.In a recent Idol Horse article, Yoshiyuki Kamitani, from the Gifu Prefectural Racing Association spoke of how Cygames and the NAR’s Kasamatsu Racecourse entered into a continuing Umamusume collaboration that has swelled numbers at the second-tier provincial track, drawing young fans including women. The same article also flagged the growing phenomenon of Umamusume cosplayers around the world holding events, including at Santa Anita Park in California, no less.
Even as the delegates sat stuffily in that Paris hotel conference room, the Umamusume sensation was at work in the world outside, expanding its vibrant cult following beyond Japan, China and South Korea. And it was growing and spreading into the wider horse racing sphere not by industry design or horse racing marketing strategy, but through Umamusume fan networks online: via Reddit and Facebook and TikTok. It was moving to the race tracks as horse girl cosplayers held their own gatherings at locations in South East Asia, South America, and in the United States at Turf Paradise and Santa Anita.
Those gatherings were organic at first, but it seems the marketing executives at Santa Anita and at Turf Paradise, having been met with cosplayer horse girls appearing at their tracks, have at least cottoned on that there’s a movement afoot. Yet they are in the minority in doing that outside the NAR.
Cygames itself is evidently keen to break into the U.S. marketplace, and has increased sponsorship, notably at the Breeders’ Cup the past two years.
Breeders’ Cup president and CEO Drew Fleming was also in Paris in October. He told Idol Horse in the foyer between conference sessions that the Cygames partnership is in line with a strategy to find growth in the Asian marketplace “focused initially on Japan” and that has “led to growth in the Japan market and great partnerships with the JRA on increased wagering, and what that has done is increased our exposure, which has led to partnerships like Cygames.”
Fleming said he was excited at the prospect of putting “racing in front of new eyeballs in different ways … we’re trying to grow the game, reach new fans and increase that engagement.”
Asked then if there were any plans for Breeders’ Cup to be involved in the game, he said “potentially”. And would there be any Umamusume-inspired events in conjunction with Breeders’ Cup? He said he would have to consult his marketing team about that.
In late February, Breeders’ Cup was indeed incorporated into the Umamusume game in the Beyond Dreams scenario. But what of any marketing strategy to connect the sport directly with Umamusume fans? Breeders’ Cup’s marketing arm was contacted for details, but to date there has been no response.
Closer to Umamusume’s Japan roots, Hong Kong people have a keen sense of what the latest cool thing out of Japan is. The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) has long been aware of Umamusume and its potential to draw young people.
“The Hong Kong Jockey Club has engaged with the Umamusume fan base,” the Club’s head of racing marketing Hanane Sabri responded via WhatsApp. “I oversee these initiatives … and we’ve hosted Umamusume-themed activations to connect with this vibrant community.
“These events in Sha Tin racecourse have included themed race days and promotional activities tailored to fans, leveraging the game’s popularity to engage younger audiences. We’re also in discussions for a potential strategic partnership to further tap into this fan base, as we see Umamusume fans as the next generation of racing enthusiasts, bringing fresh energy to the sport and great source of prospection.”
But further requests for information about how many fans attended those HKJC/Umamusume events, or about any upcoming events, partnerships, or in which direction the Club’s strategy will go in the future, have been met with silence.
The HKJC’s CEO Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges at least seems to understand that the long-talked about gamification young fans want is already here and needs to be tapped into as part of the important business of telling horse racing’s story.
“If you promote only wagering, especially to a younger generation, you have no chance. Because they have gaming – instant gratification, so we have to first really promote our sport,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said at the Asian Racing Conference in Riyadh last month.
“We must create heroes, create global competitions where the best meet the best, and create platforms with holistic storytelling to increase our fan base and promote our sport globally. We must use technology to create new digital onsite and online experiences. We must be more agile and embrace global initiatives like the World Pool to better compete against sports betting, iGaming and other entertainment offerings.”
But at the Asian Racing Conference, any talk of Umamusume was surprisingly low-key despite its success in the booming gaming sphere and its proven success in Japan and now beyond at bringing cross-over fans to the sport.
The recent, small spread of cosplaying Umamusume fans attending race meets in the U.S. and South America as well as Asia might not be everyone’s cup of tea, and by itself Umamusume won’t save horse racing in its long but hastening slide away from mainstream interest. But the failure of most marketing people within the sport to hook into the phenomenon has to be seen as negligent. You want young people? You want connection? You want gamification? Well, here it is. In Europe, notably Britain, Umamusume is barely known within racing circles, but then British racing is perhaps the world leader at being stuck deeply in the quagmire of its failing ways.
The thing is, Umamusume’s peak in Japan has likely already passed, fans are still being drawn into the sport there via that route but it seems not in the same numbers as before, but there are many that have already made the connection and it is puzzling that the JRA never went hard on linking up formally with Cygames to grow the connection. More so given that Fujita has spent ¥9.977 billion (approximately US$63.9 million) at the JRA’s Select Sale in just five years and owns Japan’s internationally-known Horse of the Year, Forever Young.
With that kind of profile, you’d think Fujita would have had the JRA banging down his door for an Umamusume hook up. Why have they not? Perhaps the absence of a JRA plan around the phenomenon speaks to conservatism within the government-linked organisation as much as a lack of cutting edge innovation.
Meanwhile, the game’s English language release provides the rest of the world with a window in which to capitalise. That window might be short.
So, will racing’s decision makers and marketers act? Or are they happy to continue as is, which for many is to plod on with the tired, decades-old model of putting on a live band after racing for the once or twice a year attendees who never connect with the sport’s stories and characters?
Back in Paris, South American representative Pablo Kavulakian, president of American Racing Channel, told the ICHA conference that his 23-year-old son Juan, a game designer and Umamusume player, had explained to him that to reach today’s 12 to 17 year-olds, those who could be future horse racing fans, the sport “must embrace video gaming” and it must be “addressed now.”Time is ticking, yet most of horse racing’s marketers are sleep-walking through the same old routines while Umamusume’s organic connection is happening just off their misaligned radar. ∎
