Wednesday, September 02, 2020 By Robb Levinsky
Kenwood Racing’s record has been nothing short of phenomenal this summer, with ten wins, eight seconds and two thirds from twenty-six starts in July and August, including four wins and five seconds from nine starts at our home base of Monmouth Park. Obviously when you are hitting at 40% win and 80% in-the-money for an extended period of time you are doing something right. Even for a successful stable these are exceptional numbers. Rather than just highlight our success, we’d like to use this as a ‘teachable moment’ in terms of how the racing game works…
Elite stables look to maintain roughly 20% wins and 50% in-the-money percentages over time. Those are exceptional numbers and difficult to maintain. In every race, typically with a field of 7-10 horses, you are going to have 1 winner, one 2nd, one 3rd, and the rest will be out of the money. In other words, the overall industry average is going to be about 11-13% wins and 30-40% in-the-money. Think of baseball, where an ‘average’ hitter might bat .240; if someone bats 50% better or .360 they are a world-class superstar, one of the best in the game. Similarly, the average racing stable wins at 11-13% and the best win at 18-22%, roughly 50% better.
What this means is, racing is by nature a game of hot and cold streaks. Another way of stating 20% wins is 80% losses. Statistics show that with a 20% winning average, streaks of 15-20 races without a win are common. When owners experience 15- 20 losing races in a row it ‘feels’ awful, like something is terribly wrong, yet it’s actually a normal part of the process. Less experienced owners routinely look to replace trainers and/or riders after going through several months with 20 losses in a row, or a couple of wins out of 30 or 40 starts, only to discover over time that this is par for the course. When things heat up and the stable has 4 or 5 wins in a cluster, it seems like an easy game and all is well with the world. When they lose the next 15 in a row, they can’t believe how things suddenly went wrong again, not realizing that overall that would equal a heathy 18 – 20 percent winning percentage.
Hot and cold streaks are about more than weeks or months, even the best stables experience hot and cold years. Calumet Farm is one of the leading owners in the world, an iconic stable for almost a century. In 2019 they had 67 wins from 655 starts, about 10%. Reddam Racing has been one of the most successful stables in the 21st century, having among other things won the Kentucky Derby twice in the last 10 years, yet in 2013 they had 23 wins from 238 starts, about 9%. To be fair, these stables still won a number of major stakes in those ‘down’ years, but they invested tens of millions of dollars more than they made in purses and struggled to win at a 10% clip over the course of a year. Kelly Breen is the leading trainer at Monmouth Park in 2020 and maintains a lifetime record of very high winning percentages, but he was 1 for 31 to begin 2020. Kenwood Racing went from 5% wins to start the year to 40% wins this summer.
Beyond overall winning percentages, consider the percentage of horses that win stakes. The industry average each year is just under 3%. In other words, of the approximately 22,000 horses born each year, about 600 will win a stake at some point in their lifetime. Only a fraction of those will win a graded stake, and perhaps 15-30 will win one of the grade 1 stakes people dream about. About 85% of the 22,000 will either end up as modest claiming horses or never win any race. What 3% stakes horses means is that on average, you have to buy 30-35 horses to come up with one stakes winner!
That’s the racing game, plain and simple. The people who endure in this business are the ones who are emotionally able to handle the roller coaster ride that is an integral part of high-performance sports. That’s precisely why Kenwood Racing’s ‘Taste of Thoroughbred Ownership®’ program is structured to offer a small (5%) share in a horse at a modest cost (generally $4,000 - $9,000). We know it’s a numbers game; a lot of waiting for the occasional special horse that makes it all worthwhile, and our goal is to make it affordable for as many people as possible to own shares in enough horses over time to experience the highs as well as the lows. Sadly, many people try to ‘cherry pick’, i.e. they buy into one or two horses-groups based on a fast workout time or a pedigree they like and are disappointed when their horse ends up running in claiming races, not realizing that any horse that makes it to the winner’s a couple of times is beating the odds. If they are emotionally and financially able to stick with the program, over time owners generally do come up with some really good horses and some exceptional winning streaks( like we’ve had this summer) that make the game so worthwhile. It’s absolutely not a game for everyone, but if you play it right and have plenty of patience, it can be very rewarding.
Let’s end with a few notes about what it takes to maintain high winning percentages over the long run:
1. Placing your horses in the right spots (without worrying about them being claimed!). A large part of success is running where your horses fit. If you run horses over their heads they rarely win and the chances of them getting hurt – going out of form increases because they are living, feeling creatures, not racecars where you step on the gas and they go faster. Horses are claimed a lot less frequently than owners imagine and when they are, for successful stables with good trainers, they rarely do as well for their new owners. Successful owners know when a horse is likely to be claimed and most of the time are not averse to that happening for various reasons.
2. Good luck. Part of winning at an exceptionally high percentage is plain good fortune you don’t control. Races go and your horse gets in. They draw favorable posts and get good trips where everything sets up right in the race. Races are rained off the turf when you have a horse entered that runs as well or better on dirt. You win head bob photo finishes. When things aren’t going well, it seems like everything that can go wrong, does (thus the saying there’s 1 way to win a race and 100 ways to lose one). When things are going well, the breaks go your way.
3. Avoiding injuries. Racehorses, much like high-performance human athletes, are fragile and injury prone. In basketball and football you frequently hear about how much of winning comes down to which team is healthy at playoff time. It’s impossible to totally avoid injuries but having a good trainer who knows when to push and when to back off and running horses where they aren’t over their heads and more likely to get hurt (see #1 above) makes a real difference. At some point virtually every horse needs time off, but when you are winning you’ll usually find most of your horses are sound and fit and happy.
4. Maintaining a long-term perspective. A lot of the time people over-react to both winning and losing streaks and engage in short-term thinking. It’s important not to get greedy or over-confident and not try to change what’s working. Just because you are winning races don't suddenly start buying a ton of new horses you didn’t plan to (or stop buying horses that were in your plan), or start entering in races that don’t make sense because you’re ‘hot’, or being afraid to take sensible chances because you don’t want to risk ‘breaking the winning streak’. Remember, “It’s never as good as it seems when you are winning and it’s never as bad as it seems when you are losing”.
Tracy Ann's Legacy, with Jose Ferrer up, goes gate to wire to win by seven lengths in race 13 at Monmouth Park on August 29, 2020
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