Born to Run 🐎

Happy Thursday!

The Kentucky Derby was this weekend, which meant I spent an unreasonable amount of time learning about horse genetics, qualifying points systems, and why certain horses cost more than houses.

Like a lot of SportsBall projects, this one started simple enough. “How do horses qualify for the Derby?”

Then twenty minutes later I was staring at family trees that all somehow looped back to Secretariat.

Derby Qualification - IG, TT, YT
Secretariat Bloodlines - IG, TT

As always, we have prints of almost every page I draw at our print shop here

The Kentucky Derby is one of the most recognizable two minutes in sports.

Twenty horses. One and a quarter miles. Every year since 1875.

But getting to the starting gate is its own story, not just of qualifying as a racehorse, but of having the right bloodline long before the racing even begins.

The first is the Road to the Derby: a points-based qualifying system built across 36 races and roughly six months of the calendar. Points trickle in during the early season, then spike hard as the major spring prep races roll around. The Louisiana Derby, Florida Derby, Arkansas Derby, and Santa Anita Derby can each award up to 100 points.

One horse in this year’s field ran a single qualifying race, won it, banked 100 points, and was done. Another ran five races over six months and scraped in with 34 points as the final qualifier. Same destination, very different journeys.

The second story starts long before any of that. Before the races, before the training, before the horses are even born.

Four horses in this year’s field trace back directly to a single stallion: Into Mischief, the leading sire in North America for seven straight years, with a stud fee of $250,000 and more than 2,000 foals.

Go back another few generations and the bloodlines start converging again, almost inevitably, on Secretariat.

The qualifying system is real and it matters. But the field was never random.

And then, of course, the Derby actually happened.

This year’s winner, Golden Tempo, closed from near the back of the field at 23-1 odds to win one of the more chaotic finishes in recent memory. Even more fittingly for this story, he comes from another powerhouse bloodline entirely. His sire is Curlin, the two-time American Horse of the Year whose own stud fee reportedly reached $225,000 before retiring from breeding earlier this year.

So even in a race built around unpredictability, longshots, and chaos, the bloodline conversation still finds its way back into the picture.

The more you dig into the Kentucky Derby, the more you realize the field isn’t built from thousands of completely independent horses scattered across the country. It’s built from a relatively small number of bloodlines standing at a smaller number of farms, most of them within about thirty miles of each other in central Kentucky.

If you want to dig into some of this data yourself, there are a few really interesting databases with fees, genetics, and bloodlines below.

Equineline
Bloodhorse
Pedigreequery

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Hope everyone has had a great week, and as always, feel free to respond with any feedback. We’re all ears.

More drawings soon.

— Riley & Claire