About KDTop4

I can remember my first horse race that I attended as an adult 25 years ago at Mountaineer Race Track in Northern West Virginia. A bunch of maiden claiming and allowance races with third-tier horses. I was amazed at how the horses came out of the gate – how loud it was and how aggressively the jockeys worked to position the horses, and the contact and rubbing was surprising. NASCAR on hooves. 

I walked into the concession area between the track and the paddock, and I saw a group of old-timers discussing the upcoming race, I was drawn into their conversation. I watched and I listened. “He’s not fast enough”, “too far back and no speed in here”, “He’s got the horse in this race for a reason”. I was watching live action handicapping at a table of six old guys, and I was hooked. I wanted to learn more. That is where my journey started. Over time, I became enamored with route races, those races longer than a mile, or in horse racing terms, those races 8 furlongs or greater. There are so many ways to win route races.  The importance of how pace and race set up impacts each horse’s chances, the positioning a horse is able to establish at the start of the race— what is not to love. Now, if you are thinking, he likes route races, then he must love the Triple Crown races for three(3) year old horses—and you would be right, especially the crown jewel of the series, the Kentucky Derby.
 

I have spent the better part of 20 years analyzing the Kentucky Derby. Not from an expert-handicapper standpoint. I am an absolute novice. I know enough about the pillars of traditional handicapping (speed, pace, class, form, pedigree, connections) to be dangerous. What I am obsessed with is the processing of information and data as it relates to outcomes. I was a computer science major in college and the processing and analyzing of data—has always been in my blood. In grad school, I realized that this STATS class that was killing my rem sleep would someday come in handy for my Kentucky Derby obsession. 

Every day in my Stats class I would think about how I could apply what I was learning to the Kentucky Derby.  It appeared to me that I could use the correlation of variables to find trends in Kentucky Derby history that might be predictive of future race outcomes. I would use variance to show how Derby outcomes deviate from what we would normally expect, and where traditional handicapping assumptions break down in the Derby (think speed stuck in an outside gate). I could use probability to understand why some outcomes tend to occur more often than others in a 20-horse field. By observing historical Kentucky Derby outcomes compared to a horse’s prep races leading up to the Derby, I could use confidence intervals to develop reasonable ranges for key race variables among top Kentucky Derby finishers. This premise would become the backbone of KDTop4. 

Over time, I began thinking about the Kentucky Derby through a slightly different lens—Energy Utilization—and how those energy signals related to Kentucky Derby outcomes.  What previously was not obvious to me (recent derby outcomes - Rich Strike, Mystik Dan, Mage, Final Gambit, and many others) was suddenly more explainable. I had found something in my work on energy utilization, key performance signals, and race archetype.  

That’s how KDTop4 was born. My love of data analytics, my thoughts on horse energy utilization, key energy variables, race archetype, and my obsession with identifying the top finishers in The Kentucky Derby crashing into each other. 

I look forward to sharing my findings on horse energy utilization, other key variables, and the KDTop4 horse rankings for the 2026 Kentucky Derby. My hope is that KDTop4 provides you with quality information that enhances your 2026 Kentucky Derby experience.

Please check back frequently for additional content focused on the 2026 Kentucky Derby. Feel free to drop me a line at info@kdtop4.com if you have any questions, or if there’s something specific you’d like me to address in my content.