This Saturday, the gate crew at Churchill Downs will wrangle the enormous, custom-made, 20-horse gate that debuted in the 2020 Kentucky Derby. While there will not be a full starting for Derby 149 due to several late scratches that exhausted the list of also-eligibles, it's become an annual rite of spring for racing fans to focus their energies on the points leaderboard, wondering who's on the bubble in that group of 20 and who isn't.
But just how did we arrive at 20 as the magic number for Kentucky Derby starters?
No other race in the United States allows for so many entries, although plenty of turf and steeplechase contests overseas do. In fact, the Kentucky Oaks is limited to 14, as are most American races, including the Breeders' Cup – possibly because it was the Puett electric starting gates that debuted in the late 1930s came in sizes of either 12 or 14 stalls, the latter becoming more common as the Thoroughbred population bloomed.
In the spring of 1974, the racing world's imagination was still afire with memories of Secretariat's legendary Triple Crown run and Derby Fever was more rampant than ever. That year, 23 horses went to the post, marking the largest field in the race's history.
By some accounts, it was a mess.
Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Jim Murray summarized, “It was a race only if you consider the Battle of Jutland a race. The last time anything this wild took place on horseback the riders all had fur hats on them and went around riding down peasants.”
The comment section of the race chart printed in in the Kentucky Derby media guide doesn't even account for all 23 runners, perhaps reflecting that it was too great a task even for veteran chartcallers to sort out who did what to whom. The horses who do receive running line comments reflect a fair bit of traffic, and show that Wood Memorial winner Flip Sal pulled up lame, though it seems he was well out of the race prior to his stop at the three-quarter pole. (Impressively, though Flip Sal's injuries were traumatic, he recovered sufficiently to have a stud career at Clermont Farm in New York.)
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At a board meeting in late 1974, Churchill decision-makers voted to institute a 20-horse limit, giving preference to the horses with the top lifetime earnings.
This decision generated little fanfare at the time, and for several years it seemed no one really noticed anything had changed. There were 15 runners in 1975, only nine in 1976, and subsequent Derbies didn't get as high as 16. In 1981 however, there were 23 hopefuls pointing to the race and suddenly the limit was relevant again.
The field contained two coupled entries in Golden Derby/Proud Appeal and Noble Nashua/Wayward Lass. Both pairs had ownership in common, and in those days a state racing rule indicated that “in no case may two horses having common ties start in a race to the exclusion of another single entry.”
The decision of the owners to run both of their eligible horses plus the overall field cap squeezed out three runners, including Larry Barrera-trained Flying Nashua and Fred Wirth-trained Mythical Ruler. (The third horse left the track after the entry box closed.) The two owners went to court, arguing that the racing rule prohibited them from being shut out, and they won in county court; Churchill Downs appealed the decision to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, arguing that to let extra horses in after entries closed would be unfair to the 20 owners whose horses had qualified, and also that the state regulation did not apply to stakes races, only overnight purse races. At the 11th hour, the appeals court upheld the lower court's ruling and county court judges cleared Flying Nashua and Mythical Ruler to start.
Part of the reasoning from Judge Charles Leibson of Jefferson County Circuit Court when he allowed Flying Nashua into the race was that the horse would suffer “immediate harm” if he wasn't permitted into the Derby, regardless of where he may finish.
”That's why they run some horses that shouldn't be running at all,” Leibson was quoted as saying in the New York Times. ”Assuming this horse could run well enough to finish in the money, his loss of a chance to do so could cause irreparable harm.”
In the end, 21 horses started, as Wayward Lass ultimately scratched. Flying Nashua finished eighth, and Mythical Ruler was a distant 17th.
The rest of the story, according to reporting from the New York Times, was that the unexpected decision of Wayward Lass' ownership to enter her in the Derby and subsequently run her in the Oaks instead may have been a matter of revenge. Rider Angel Cordero Jr. had taken off Noble Nashua, the other half of the Wayward Lass entry, in favor of Flying Nashua, leading to speculation that the owner may have entered his filly just to squeeze out Cordero. Owner Carl Lizza told the Times this was not the case, and instead he had pulled his filly because he didn't like her No. 20 post position.
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The state rule on coupled entries was subsequently changed to prevent a recurrence, but the fight about the Derby field was far from over.
Initially, the 20-horse limit was predicated on the 20 horses who had the highest career earnings. That became a problem just two years later in 1983, when top contender Marfa entered the Spiral Stakes at Latonia Race Course. Latonia instituted a similar rule restricting Spiral entries to the top ten horses based on career earnings – which shut out four others. Prior to the race, track officials realized that they had the wrong earnings information for Marfa, and he actually shouldn't have made the cut-off. He was the favorite and started anyway, winning and triggering fury from the connections of Noble Home and Hail to Rome, who finished second and third.
Those connections asked the stewards to disqualify Marfa. When that objection failed, they asserted the horses, who were 17th and 21st by earnings, should be credited with the purse amounts of first- and second-place runners.
Andy Beyer, writing for the Washington Post, pointed out that there was really no good solution in the weeks leading up to the Derby. If the earnings of Noble Home and Hail to Rome had been artificially bumped to account for Marfa's ineligibility in the Spiral, they'd be pushing someone else out of the Derby field.
(Marfa's case was not helped by his eccentric personality, which led him to attack a lead pony prior to one race, bite multiple rivals on and off the track, and to run so crookedly in the Blue Grass that he was disqualified from first to fourth.)
In the end, it didn't matter. Noble Home was ultimately credited with the winner's share of the Spiral purse for the purposes of Derby eligibility, but came up with a fever the week of the race and did not start. Hail to Rome ran a disappointing eighth in the Derby Trial and his connections thought better of trying him in a bigger test.
Still, Beyer wrote, the Derby season was tarnished by the run of hotheaded threats from owners. Beyer believed the career earnings rule removed owners' and trainers' incentive to think critically about whether or not their horse belonged in the race, just so long as they qualified.
“Ten years ago,” said William Rudy, Churchill Downs' public relations director to Beyer, “a man who thought he had the 20th best 3-year-old would go somewhere else. But now they start saying, 'We're in the top 20,' and the rule almost forces them in. It has created 20-horse fields as a matter of course, and it's working to the detriment of its original purpose.”
Some would argue that Beyer had a point as, in the intervening years, it became more and more common for 20 or even more horses to enter the race.
As added revenue from slots began artificially inflating purses at smaller tracks beyond their generally-accepted prominence, the racetrack would decide to switch the system to count restricted race earnings, then stakes earnings, and eventually graded stakes earnings.
This system still had its imperfections, as it rewarded success in sprint and turf races that don't generally hold much value for predicting success at 1 ¼ miles on dirt.
Thus, the current points system released in late 2012 and first used in 2013 was aimed at resolving these inequities, awarding more points for two-turn races late in spring than for shorter races earlier in the year. It too has been tweaked over the years, most recently leaving reserved spaces in the gate for winners of the Road to the Kentucky Derby in Japan and the United Kingdom as Churchill envisions a more global event.
There were concerns at the time of its release that the relatively light allocation of points to 2-year-old races would exclude accomplished juveniles from their biggest test the following year, but of course Nyquist would go on to demonstrate it was possible to succeed in both.
If the purpose of the system was to favor horses with the greatest chance of success, it would seem to be working. Twice, the Derby winner has been the greatest points earner, and five times the winner has been among the top five points earners. (Keep in mind, we've had two disqualifications in those intervening years.) It's also good at identifying which horses don't have a strong chance. No Derby winner other than Rich Strike has come into the race farther out than 15th on the points list, and that was Country House, who advanced via disqualification of sixth-ranked Maximum Security.
But Beyer's original fear, that the 20-horse limit would create a new way of thinking about the race's qualifications, would seem to have come true. Although there are plenty of examples of connections with qualified horses choosing to bypass the race, it has seen no fewer than 18 entries in any year since 2004.
The post The Magic Number: How Did We Arrive At 20 Kentucky Derby Starters? appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
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