If there’s one aspect of the thoroughbred business that’s the most confusing and frustrating for many owners, particularly new owners, it’s probably the claiming game. Quite simply, it’s totally counter-intuitive for most people to conceive of a business where someone can ‘force’ you to sell your horse. While factually it may be a way to make races competitive and give horses at different levels of ability an opportunity to compete, the emotional response from the vast majority of owners is “I don’t want ‘my’ horse to get claimed!”. While it is an understandable reaction, the facts of the business are that the vast majority of horses are claiming horses, less than 15% of all horses are talented enough to compete in the higher level non-claiming (allowance and stakes) races.

Savvy owners place their horses in spots where they can win races, which as above for most horses means claiming races. Not only does this make the most financial and emotional sense (it’s a lot better to win a nice purse in a claiming race than it is to run up the track in an allowance), it’s the right thing to do by the horse, as asking a horse to compete over its head increases the risk of injury. If your team (trainer and racing manager) know what they are doing, they will have a very good idea going into any claiming race a. how likely the horse is to in fact get claimed (surprisingly few are) and b. if it is claimed is it likely to ultimately prove to be wisely sold vs. given away at a bargain price. In fact, one of the best ways to judge the job your trainer and/or the people managing your horses are doing is to look at the results after the horse leaves your barn (via claim, private sale, etc.). In other words, if the same horses as a group perform better for other owners – trainers once they leave your hands, your team is under-performing. On the other hand, even if many of your horses haven’t been all that successful for you (remember statistically about 40% of all horses never win a single race and about 90% lose money) if they do worse once they leave your barn, your team is more than doing their job, especially if many of the horses claimed from you turn out in the long run to have been well sold.

Kenwood is (quite justifiably) proud of our management team and our record, but we thought as 2019 comes to a close it was a good time to let the numbers speak for themselves, so we prepared a list of ALL horses claimed from us over the last two years (2018 & 2019). The following table lists the name of each horse, the date it was claimed from us, the amount it was claimed for, and the results since. The horses who did WORSE for their new owners (i.e. we did better selling them than keeping them) are listed in red under the results column. The horses who did about the same for their new owners are listed in yellow, while the horses who did BETTER for their new owners (i.e. we would have been better off NOT having them claimed) are listed in green. Take a look….

Overall in the last two years we had a total of 13 horses claimed from us. Of those 10 were “well sold” (most of them were an outright disaster for their new owners), 1 was about a “wash” and 2 were successful claims for the new owners. Looking at the two successful claims, one Diamond Play was interestingly a horse we claimed for just $12,500, won a $50,000 allowance race with, and was then re-claimed by the original owner for $32,000 from us. She has gone on to win multiple races since the claim and no doubt we’d have been better off keeping her, but we actually claimed her from them first, made money, and then they paid us a huge premium to claim her back. Basically she’s one of those rare gems that has been a money maker for everyone. The second successful claim, High Five Cotton, is a lower level claiming horse who was claimed from us for $10,000 and has won multiple lower level claiming races since. He hasn’t made a lot of profit for the new owners running at this level with the modest purses, but anytime someone wins six races with a horse over two-year period, it has to count as a successful claim.

Looking at all horses claimed from us over a substantial period (2 years), it’s obvious the vast majority of time they declined in value (most of the time significantly so) and produced lesser results for their new owners than they did under Kenwood silks. If you want to look at the entire results for each horse since being claimed from us go to www.equibase.com and type in the name of the horses in the search box in the upper right corner. Their entire race by race record will appear; you can look at the results and decide for yourself if they were indeed “well sold” the day they were claimed from us. Bottom line, while it might be an emotional moment the day ‘your’ horse is claimed, the numbers clearly show it’s rare indeed that we gave away any bargains and most of these horses performed better for us than they did for their new owners.