Jockey- Investor - Pioneer
Tom Foley
Tom Foley spent 25 years competing at the highest level of professional horse racing, accumulating over 180 career wins including stakes victories across four countries and a Grade One triumph at just 20 years old. Today he is a devoted father, a pioneer in regenerative medicine for animals, a partner at Black Type Capital, and a proud member of Pro Athlete Community.
FROM TIPPERARY TO
the world.
Tom Foley answered a newspaper ad at 17 just to see if his phone could ring America. It did. A few days later he was at Dublin Airport, about to board his first ever flight, headed for a farm in South Carolina with no idea what was coming.
What came was one of the most distinguished careers in American steeplechase racing. Foley accumulated more than 180 wins across the United States, Ireland, England, and Italy – 25 percent of his jump wins came in stakes races. His breakthrough arrived at 20, aboard a horse called Al Skywalker, considered unpredictable by most. Foley saw something different. They won the Carolina Cup, one of the sport’s most prestigious events, together. It was his third career winner. It was a Grade One.
“I got very lucky. But luck has a lot to do with the people who choose to believe in you before you have given them a reason to.”
He built relationships the way he built his career – through listening, patience, and learning to earn trust from something that had no reason to give it. Working with horses for 25 years taught him to read people the same way he read animals: not by what they said, but by how they moved.
By 2021, the physical toll of 25 years at the highest level had caught up with Foley. That was when he found regenerative medicine and everything changed.
The treatments gave him something back he thought was gone for good. And with it came an itch he could not ignore. Eleven years after his last race, he returned to the Carolina Cup – the same course, the same event, the place where it all began. They put him on a horse his friends described as an old warrior. He got on, felt what was there, and knew.
“When this horse splits the field and I can feel that movement — that feeling you have not felt in so long — it was just an unbelievable rush. I never thought I would feel it again.”
They won easily. Full circle.
Today, Foley operates at the intersection of horse racing, investment, and regenerative medicine.
As a partner at Black Type Capital, a disciplined investment fund built around acquiring and developing elite racehorses, he identifies opportunities most investors cannot see. The edge is simple: most bloodstock agents evaluate a horse from the outside. Foley gets on and rides it.
“It is not about speed. It is about mentality. I want to know what is between the ears as much as what kind of engine they have.”
Alongside Black Type Capital, Foley is pioneering regenerative medicine for animals – bringing the same drug-free treatments that restored his own health to the horses and dogs that have given everything to sport. The results have been remarkable. Veterinarians working with these protocols have reported healing outcomes so significant they questioned their own equipment.
“Everything I have ever had in life, I got from animals. And now I am at a stage where I can actually give something back to them.”
That sense of community is the most needed, most missing piece for athletes in transition. PAC is filling something nobody else is filling and I don’t think they fully understand what they have created. I think it is going to be a global phenomenon.
Tom Foley
25 years in Professional Horse Racing
Tom is the first to tell you that everything he knows came from listening and from the people who chose to invest their time in him. At PAC Accelerate in Phoenix, he sat in rooms with and learned from Super Bowl champions, Olympians, founders, and executives.
“People’s eyes were up. They were engaged. They were not on their phones. And in how many rooms does that actually happen?”
Foley has thought deeply about what happens to athletes when competition ends. The structure disappears. The camaraderie disappears. The identity built over a lifetime of training suddenly has nowhere to go. He has lived it.
“Men don’t talk near enough about what goes on with them. We’ve all banged our bodies up, we’ve all had hard days — but that sense of belonging, that feeling of being around people who get it, is gone when sport leaves you. And it is hard to get back.”
He found it at PAC. And he is not keeping that to himself.