It’s the first of June and breeders around the world are entering that sweet spot between spring foaling and the fall yearling sales. For many of them, myself included, the task at hand is to name their foals.
To flip through a race program, it’s often obvious where horse’s names come from. Breed Butterscotch to Pop Tart and you have the unenviable choice of naming your foal Butter Tart or Pop Scotch. If you’re brave, you might consider Buttered Popcorn, or some other permutation.
As I’m well trained to check names before suggesting them, I’ve stumbled on the revelation that sadly, Buttered Popcorn is unavailable, taken by an Alberta-bred two-year-old daughter of Popcorn, by Vertical Horizon. She was bred by Fred Gilbert and Richard Osterbeck of Manitoba, and Jamie Gray of Alberta. Popcorn’s dam is Pop Art – which makes sense to me. Pop Art’s mother is Shy Devil, a little less obvious.
With it being Hall of Fame season, I went searching through Canada’s best horses of all time, to reveal whether a name can, even in theory, increase the likelihood of being enshrined into racing’s hallowed halls.
There are 109 Standardbred horses, including this year’s inductees, currently in the Hall. With the total number of horses on record, all-time, currently standing at 1.02 million, the likelihood of any given horse being in the Hall of Fame is approximately 1 in 9,365.
So what if we work on the premise that names do matter? If I told you that I can improve your chances of breeding a Hall of Famer from 1 in 9,365 to 1 in 3,700 simply by naming your horse something that starts with the letter “A”, would you?
Despite the fact that only 5% of all horse names start with an “A”, they account for 13% of Hall of Fame names. Names that begin with “B”, “C” and “S” come in closely behind, each respectively accounting for 9% of Hall of Famers, but each of those starting letters are far more commonplace among all horses.
What other characteristics make a Hall of Fame name?
67% of Hall of Famers have two word names, like current inductees Mach Three and Happy Lady. That is followed by one word names (18%) like Elegantimage, three word names (14%) like 2010 inductee A Worthy Lad, and finally, four word names (less than 1%), represented only by On The Road Again, inducted in 1999.
38% of Hall of Fame names consist of 12, 13 or 14 characters. Only one horse in the Hall utilizes all 18 allowable characters. His name: Somebeachsomewhere.
Delving even deeper, the consonants that appear the most often within Hall of Fame horse names are “R”, “N”, and “L”. Keeping in mind my new requirement to start with an A, and fit the name between 12 and 14 characters, I went searching for the ideal horse name, and I came up with it.
The winner: Airline Rental. It starts with an “A”, is two words, has 14 characters, including the space, and is made up of two “R”s, two “N”s and two “L”s. Airline Urinal is equally usable, but no Hall of Fame horse deserves that name, so I won’t make the suggestion.
While I included all of the Standardbred inductees in my analysis, I didn’t include Modesty.
She was the first horse, of any breed, to win a race in Canada. And while she was named 250+ years ago of unidentified breed and pedigree, her name today once again belongs to a promising two-year-old filly – a Brittany Farms bred Standardbred now owned by Erv Miller, Nick Surick and Paymaq Racing.
I think we can track the two-year-old Modesty’s name back to her mother Shyaway, and a mare on the maternal side of her family named Shy Devil. Yes, that would be the same Shy Devil we surprisingly found in Buttered Popcorn’s pedigree. Small world!
Darryl Kaplan
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