Happy Friday!

The Kentucky Derby on Sunday got us diving into some horse racing rabbit holes and ending up in places we certainly didn’t expect…

📊🔢🏇 Likelihood of making the big leagues - horse edition
👷⌛️💰 Retirement jobs
🏡🐴🧽 The bougiest farms in the world

LEARNING MODULE 💡 

They don’t cover that in Racing Stripes 🦓

👷 Just Steel
📦 Domestic Product
🧙 Mystik Dan

These aren’t trivia teams at your local watering hole on a Tuesday at 8PM. 

They’re the names of some of the most elite athletes in the world: thoroughbred racehorses competing in the Kentucky Derby on Sunday. 🐎

Horses are elite athletes and as with any athletic pursuit, it’s hard to become a professional that gets paid for your services.

In a previous SportsBall, we calculated the odds of becoming a pro athlete in the 4 major sports. 

🏀 NBA: 0.04%
🏈 NFL: 0.11%
⚾️ MLB: 0.72%
🏒 NHL: 0.91%

The racing world isn’t so different. In the Kentucky Derby, only 3-year-old horses are eligible to race. This year, that shrinks the crowd to roughly 18,000 thoroughbreds born in 2021. 

To even have a chance at racing on the big stage, a horse has to be nominated to begin racing and earning points. That whittles the pool down to about 370.

In human terms, these are our “Division I” athletes who pass the first gate of professional ascension. 🪜

Finally, to get to the big kahuna, the 370 nominated horses race throughout the year, gathering “points” for winning or placing well.

The 20 horses with the most points get to participate in the Kentucky Derby. 🎉

When it’s all said and done, 20 out of 18,000 or 0.11% is directly in line with the odds of a high school football player going pro.

Sounds like Tom Brady 🐐 and Seabiscuit 🐐 have more in common than we thought.

The ultimate side hustle 💸

What’s the best retirement job?

👋 Walmart greeter
🏠 Real estate agent
🪴 Volunteer gardener
🖥️ Facebook group moderator
🐴 Thoroughbred sire 

Winning races and the Kentucky Derby is lucrative; the victor pockets $3.1M, enough to buy 2.4 million Honeycrisp apples 🍎 to munch on. 

But the real money comes later on. 

Once done racing, some male horses become “sires” and spend the rest of their days breeding 👫 in hopes of fathering a bevy of future champions. 

Each year, a sire does its part to produce more than 100 baby horses (foals), 👶 charging what’s called a “stud fee” for each foal - you can do your own research on specific horse breeding mechanisms… 🤐

For new sires, stud fees normally start low maybe around $10,000, but as their offspring begin to race and show promise, 🍀 it can shoot through the roof. In 2024, if you want the very best “stud”, it will run you $250,000 from either Gun Runner, Into Mischief, or Curlin, the most expensive sires in America.

A common metric to understand a sire's breeding success is the AEI or Average Earning Index. 🔢

Sires with higher AEI typically generate better offspring that win more money so they can demand a higher stud fee. 

Home sweet home 🏡

These horses aren’t just floating around the country, they’re stocked away in luxury farms eating steak and lobster (apples and carrots) every day. 🍽️ Where are these farms? You guessed it, Kentucky.

46% of the 18,000 thoroughbreds born per year come from the Bluegrass State.

The farms even have horse-breeding hype videos 💥 like this one from Spendthrift Farm, home of Into Mischief.

For you Silicon Valley readers, imagine these farms as venture capital firms. 

They invest in dozens of portfolio companies (horses) and a small portion of those will eventually have exponential returns as sires, 📈 making upwards of $30M per year on stud fees alone. 

When the offspring of one of the sires wins the Kentucky Derby, it’s like an equine IPO. 🔔

Take Spendthrift Farm for example. They have around 20 breeding sires, 19 of which have a $60,000 or less stud fee. The final fee for Into Mischief is $250,000 💰 and generates almost half of the farm’s roughly $70 million in yearly revenue.

The business of horse racing extends far beyond the track 🏟️ and we’re merely scratching the surface here.

Tune into the Kentucky Derby this Sunday at 3:57 PM PST to get your yearly dose of horse racing and dust off that pastel suit. 🟨

Also, check out our friend Tyler over at Bottom of the Ninth who wrote even more on the business of the Derby as well as

PLAYOFF TRACKERS - RACE TO 16 WINS 🏆

NBA 🏀

NHL 🏒

EXTRA DATA 📈

As the favorites in the NHL shift with every game, Dom Luszczyszyn produces colorful probability charts to show who the most likely champions are in each series.

He creates his own models and allegedly uses Apple Numbers to do all the analysis which is a feat in itself.

If you’re looking for a creepy NBA data visualization, you came to the right place. This NBA pass chart might haunt our dreams for weeks but a solid data exploration nonetheless.

Thanks for reading and shoutout to Kenzie for all the horse racing knowledge this week 🙏

— Claire and Riley