The Kentucky Derby is rightfully known as the most exciting two minutes in sports. Once the Churchill Downs starting gate springs open anything can (and often does) happen.
For the 20 3-year-old Thoroughbreds expected to compete in 2024, it is one of the most important moments of their lives, and racing luck can make or break their Derby run from the start. However, some of that luck comes into play several days beforehand: the luck of the post-position draw.
Kentucky Derby post positions will be randomly drawn the evening ofApril 27, but their influence on the race seems to be far from arbitrary.
The Kentucky Derby has used a starting gate since 1930; and for a long period, two of them. One held 14 horses, and the other, called the auxiliary gate, was attached to the outside of the main gate to allow for six more horses. That changed in 2020 when Churchill Downs secured a single gate that holds all 20 horses.
That year's race—run in September after being postponed due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—was won by Authentic , who drew the post farthest to the outside, post position 15. Authentic initially drew post 18 but moved in three spots after three horses were scratched from the race.
Common sense might suggest that the inside posts are favorable since racing near rail is the shortest way around a racetrack. This could be true in races with small or medium fields, but in the Kentucky Derby there are as many as 20 racehorses leaping from the gate and rushing to secure position before the field heads into the first turn. This means there's a lot of bumping and jostling as the field compresses to the inside of the racetrack. And that means the horses already on the inside can take the worst of it, which can discourage them or negatively affect their positioning.
Horses on the outside are usually subject to less bumping, but if they don't make it across the track before the first turn, they can be left racing very wide. In the Kentucky Derby, the turns account for about 40% of the 1 1/4-mile race. Assuming the width needed for a racehorse and rider is four feet, for every path off the rail, a horse runs more than 25 feet farther if around the horse maintains this path around both turns. A horse six paths off the rail on both turns will run 150 feet farther than a horse on the rail, making their race that much more challenging. It's important to find a balance between racing far enough inside to save ground and far enough outside that a horse can easily maneuver to be in the clear the race's stretch run.
So what post position is ideal? Conventional wisdom says that somewhere in the middle of the gate, positions 5-15, is best. In recent years, though, there seems to be a trend toward outside posts having more success, partly due to the crowded fields of the last couple of decades. Since and including 2000, 12 of the 24 Kentucky Derby winners have broken from gate 13 or higher. From the 70 races that used a gate before 2000, just 10 winners broke from gate 13 or higher. Some of the recent winners were favorites (Nyquist , American Pharoah , Big Brown , etc.) who might have won from an inside gate anyway, but some weren't—and that definitely includes 80-1 winner Rich Strike, who drew into the 2022 Derby the day before the race and became the second winner (following 2008 favorite Big Brown) to win from post position 20.
Confirmation of this trend toward outside posts comes when you look at inside post success (or lack thereof). No horse has won the Kentucky Derby from gate 1 since Ferdinand in 1986. The only horse who has won from post 1, 2, or 3 since then is Real Quiet, the 1998 Derby winner who broke from post 3 and came up just a nose shy of winning the Triple Crown. Before 1987, 19 of 58 horses that left those gates won, giving the gates a 10.9% win rate. Since 1987, the win rate for posts 1, 2, or 3 is just 0.93% (1-for-108), although Two Phil's helped improve the in-the-money percentages for those posts with a solid runner-up effort last year out of post 3.
Other interesting post-position stats include a 10.6% win rate for gate 5, which was the post position of both 2017 winner Always Dreaming and 2014 winner California Chrome and has produced the most Derby winners in the race's history with 10. Gate 10 has also produced a high rate of winners at 10.3%, with horses finishing in the money (top three) at a remarkable 28.7%. The last Derby victor to come from 10 was Giacomo, who was also the last gray horse to win the Derby.
Notably, no horse has ever won from post-position 17, and the last time gate 17 produced a horse that even finished in the top five was 2005. The big Kentucky Derby favorite in the 2020 September run for the roses, Tiz the Law , initially drew post 17. His chances, historically speaking, improved when other defections in the race moved him inside to post 14. But that spot, and its 3% success rate, didn't make much of a difference after Authentic (drawn just to the outside of Tiz the Law) got the early jump and settled on a loose and comfortable lead near the rail. Tiz the Law chased from a wider stalking position and finished second.
The 2021 Derby ended up producing another notable statistic, one that was made official roughly eight months after the race and not reflected in the official Equibase chart until January of this year. It resulted in only the second disqualification of the winner in Derby history due to a medication positive, as 2021 first-place finisher Medina Spirit was stripped of his title and purse money in early 2022, and runner-up Mandaloun was declared the winner by Kentucky Horse Racing Commission stewards. Medina Spirit and Mandaloun broke from the gate right next to one another in posts 8 and 7, respectively. After Medina Spirit's DQ, both of those posts shared the exact same winning percentage of 8.7% (eight wins in 92 starts) ... for a little over a year.
Last May, Mage won the Kentucky Derby from post-position 8, moving that spot back ahead of post position 7 and tying it with post position 10 as the second most productive in Derby history with nine total winners.
