Fans Love To See an Underdog Win Any of the Triple Crown Races

The 138th running of the Kentucky Derby is fast approaching on Saturday, May 5, 2012 with an exact post time of 6:24 PM EDT, and for the 138th consecutive time since its inauguration in 1875 (imagine that, a time before there was such a thing as a refrigerator, a World War I or II, a coffee machine, or before an evil dictator like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler was even CONCEIVED), the eyes of the racing world will be focused on Churchill Downs Racetrack in Louisville, Kentucky.  

Many different kinds of thoroughbreds have won the Kentucky Derby.  Some, like Triple Crown winners Secretariat, Citation, Affirmed, Seattle Slew, or Whirlaway, were either outright or lukewarm favorites.  Others, like the great Smarty Jones, were favorites disguised as underdogs (Smarty Jones, after all, WAS unbeaten coming into the Kentucky Derby).  There have been nine geldings that have won the Run for the Roses out of 138 races, and not one of them was ever favored.  Certainly the most recent gelding winner, Mine That Bird in 2009 at 53 to 1, was an underdog, a long shot even, and the way Calvin Borel skimmed that rail to guide his unlikely candidate for the bouquet of red roses to an almost 7 length victory stunned the racing world.  But more than that, it showed how when you get twenty three-year-olds together in the same race running a distance none of them have ever traversed before, the results are often atypical.  Indeed, they are more often than not, totally unpredictable.

Americans love to root for the underdog, and the Kentucky Derby is a great stage that gives sports fans of all races, color, sex, or creed the opportunity to see, with their own eyes, a David slay Goliath.  The truth of the matter is, it doesn’t happen all that often.  Going back the last 50 years, some basic research reveals that the Kentucky Derby winner is somewhere within the top three finishers of the last major Derby prep races an amazing 95% of the time.  In other words, the horse that usually ends up winning the Kentucky Derby has shown the tell tale signs of true championship quality somewhere along the line, which is not surprising.   

I’m interested in that other 5% because nobody ever pays all that much attention to horses in the group.  Sure, they finish their juvenile and early three-year-old preps with enough graded stakes earnings, but those earnings often ring a bit hollow because they are mostly Grade III earnings, a far cry from the consistent Grade I competition that most of the Kentucky Derby favorites, or at least the eventual winner, usually boasts, and that high level of competition is what makes people root so strongly for a Kentucky Derby underdog.  If it happened more than the 5% of the time, then the horses that won in that fashion would no longer be called underdogs, but rather underGROUND favorites!