How Often the Kentucky Derby Favorite Wins

The Kentucky Derby favorite has won about 37% of the time across the race's history, a figure America's Best Racing puts at 56 wins in 151 runnings, roughly 37.1%. That single number hides two very different eras sitting back to back: a 20-year stretch with no favorite winner at all, followed by six wins in six years, followed by another drought that has now run since 2018.

The shape of that table matters more than the single percentage. No favorite won between 1980 and 1999, a 20-year gap that Fusaichi Pegasus ended in 2000. Then, from 2013 through 2018, the favorite won six runnings in a row: Orb, California Chrome, American Pharoah, Nyquist, Always Dreaming and Justify. Since Justify, no favorite has won, through seven more runnings in the table above and the 2026 race besides. A single stated rate like 37% describes the whole history; it does not describe any one era of it.

Rich Strike's run is the clearest illustration of how little a Derby-week price can tell you about a 20-horse field. He was not even entered until a scratch opened a spot the day before the race, started from post 20, and beat the two horses that had set the pace, Epicenter and Zandon, in the stretch. Donerail's 1913 upset stands alone at 91-1, over a century before Rich Strike's and still the longest price the race has paid out on a win bet.

Neither case argues for betting against the favorite on principle. It argues that a 20-horse field with this much career variance will occasionally produce a result nobody priced correctly, in either direction, and that a count of wins and losses is a record of what happened, not a forecast of what will.