The Athletic has live coverage of the 2024 Kentucky Derby, the 150th anniversary.

Nowhere in sports is the gap bigger between casual fans and alleged betting experts than in horse racing, specifically the Kentucky Derby. On one hand, one of every eight American adults is likely to plunk down a wager on the Run for the Roses. And when a YouGov poll asked the most important factor in making those bets, a combined 45% said hunches, marketing promotions, and, that’s right, a horse’s name. On the other hand, thousands of touts are emerging from the remains of OTB parlors right about now, ready to share their slang of furlongs and geldings, their analysis of the soil at Aqueduct and their research into equine genetics that goes deeper into the ancestry of Mine That Bird than you ever will into your own family tree.

But trust me, you can learn enough to outsmart your sister-in-law at this weekend’s barbecue — and have some fun — without hugging the rail quite that hard. As Jordan Brenner and I have done for college basketball and soccer, I took a look at successful participants in past Kentucky Derbies to find characteristics that might give long shots a chance this time around. And there are quite a few that will give you an edge without forcing you down rabbit holes about Rasmussen Factors. (Don’t even Google that unless you’re already about to take at least a week off from work.)

Beyond mint juleps, two fundamental facts make the Kentucky Derby unique. For one thing, its field is huge — it’s the only American race with 20 horses. Competitors have to use every skill available to avoid heavy traffic among the thoroughbreds. For another, you can’t buy or fluke your way into the race. Since 2013, horses have qualified for the Derby by competing in a series of about three dozen races over seven months that award points to the top five finishers in each. (Invites typically go to the top 18 horses in the overall standings, plus one apiece to the leading earners in Europe and Japan.) By the time the first weekend in May rolls around, these are very well-known horses.

With those two data points in your silks, let’s look at six factors that matter:

Prep Races: Eight races, including the Santa Anita Derby and Wood Memorial, comprise the second leg of the championship series of qualifiers for the Kentucky Derby. These are extremely competitive and very high-stakes (purses range from $750,000 to $1.5 million) and offer straightforward signals about how the world’s best horses are rounding into form on big stages. Since 1980, 73 percent of Kentucky Derby winners have won at least one major prep race.

Odds: Favorites have won six of 11 Derbies (55 percent) since Churchill Downs went to its current points system for qualifiers in 2013. And the favorites in those races had average closing odds of 3.3 to 1, which implies a 23 percent chance of winning, so as a group, they were actually good value plays. The odds for most recent winners, favorites or not, have fallen into the range of 3-1 to 8-1. You may remember Rich Strike, the 80-1 long shot who won the 2022 Derby, as a counterexample. But apart from him, only one winner has overcome odds of 15-1 (or greater) since 2013 — and that was 2021’s Mandaloun, who won on a doping disqualification. These days, Derby participants are generally known quantities, and extreme underdogs have usually earned their long odds.

Post Position: Obviously, the inside of a track is shorter than the outside — but you might be surprised by how much. Racing enthusiasts call the lateral distance a horse needs to run — basically, his width — a “path.” And for every path a horse is away from the rail, he will run an extra 25 feet over the 1 ¼-mile length of the Derby. That’s why you’ll see horses cluster along the rail as the race progresses. Positioning, however, is a tricky balancing act. If you don’t cut inside fast enough, you’ll be left making wide turns and lagging. But if you’re already running along the rail when the crowd cuts inside, you can get jostled, obstructed and cut off.

So it’s best to start off in the middle. No horse coming out of the first four inside gates has won the Derby since 2010. And horses from Gates 17 to 20, on the outside, have won just four of 127, or 3.1 percent, of all races. Conversely, every gate from 5 to 10 has been in the money (meaning finishing in the top three) at least 14 percent of the time, and Gates 5, 8 and 10 are the only starting slots to win 10 percent or more of races.

Running Style: One way to avoid the hassles of a large field is to lead the pack. Again, this is a balancing act: you’d like clearance, but a horse can’t blow all his energy too early in the race. And again, history suggests there’s a sweet spot that helps pull it off. Brisnet, a subsidiary of Churchill Downs that compiles racing data, assigns style ratings to horses. It turns out that three-fourths of this century’s Derby winners were graded “E” by Brisnet for “Early” or “E/P” for “Early/Presser.” These are horses that either like to set the pace for races or run second or third — or at least within a few lengths of the leader — before challenging for first place. Again, Rich Strike, who came out of nowhere two years ago, might seem like an exception. But even he was already in third place coming down the stretch. Churchill Downs is a very, very tough place to win for any horse that runs far behind for too long.

Speed: As with most human athletes, raw speed doesn’t guarantee a horse will win anything — but if he doesn’t have enough of it, there’s just no way he will be able to compete. The industry standard for measuring equine speed is the Beyer Speed Figure, which was developed by Andrew Beyer, racing columnist for the Washington Post, about 50 years ago, and now appears in the Daily Racing Form for all American horses. It takes a horse’s performance time and adjusts it for distance and track surface. A sprinter named Groovy scored a record Beyer Speed Figure of 133 in 1987; Beyer figured Secretariat at the 1973 Belmont Stakes would have scored 139. Since 2000, 20 of 24 Kentucky Derby winners (83 percent) have had peak Beyer figures of at least 95.

Stamina: Fun fact: Of the 20 entrants in this year’s Derby, none have ever run a race at 1 ¼ miles! In fact, the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes all take place over distances longer than most horses who participate will have ever run before. That’s led some betting experts, such as Jennie Rees of the Kentucky Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, to propose the “final fractions theory,” which rates Triple Crown prospects by how quickly they finished their final prep race before the Derby. If horses are still running strong in that stretch, their argument goes, they can keep doing so for a bit longer. And there’s something to that. Since 2000, 18 of 24 Kentucky Derby winners (75 percent) ran the closing 1/8 mile of their last prep race in under 13 seconds, and 16 of 24 (67 percent) ran the final 3/8 mile of their previous race in under 38 seconds.

There’s one horse in the 2024 Derby who checks nearly every one of these boxes: Fierceness, who was last seen torching his competition in the Florida Derby. He’s the fastest horse in this year’s contest, he likes to establish a lead, and he ran the last 3/8 of a mile in that prep race in just 36.91 seconds. Also, his jockey is John Velazquez, who’s not just the only rider in this year’s field with multiple prior Kentucky Derby wins, but will be making his 26th run for the roses. Naturally enough, Fierceness is also the favorite, opening at 5-2 odds.

But when it comes to post position, Fierceness got a bad draw: He will be starting from Gate 17, which in the long history of the Kentucky Derby has never produced a first-place finish. (With an 0-44 record, it’s actually the only gate to go winless.) The chance that Fierceness will have to turn wide from the outside and play catchup cracks open the door for other possibilities. And the variables we’ve looked at suggest two that should catch your attention.

Catching Freedom (Gate 4; 8-1 odds) is known as a closer. He’s fast, with a peak Beyer Speed Figure of 97. And he’s got endurance. He won the Louisiana Derby in March by running the final 3/8 mile in only 36.58 seconds, and he was actually speeding up at the finish: The last 1/8 mile took him just 12.05 seconds. If Catching Freedom hangs close enough for long enough, he could make the final moments of the fastest two minutes in sports truly thrilling.

Forever Young (Gate 11; 10-1 odds, which is about as long as you can sensibly go betting on a Derby winner) is trying to become the first horse from Japan to win the Kentucky Derby. He’s undefeated in five races, but because he hasn’t run on American courses yet, he’s under-evaluated and probably undervalued. He has no official Beyer Speed Figures, and his biggest win came at the UAE Derby (which is the only qualifying race for the Kentucky Derby that’s not on American soil), at a length of 1,900 meters, which is about, but not exactly, 1 3/16 miles. Despite drawing the eleventh gate among 13 horses in that race, however, he quickly stalked the leaders, then surged to a two-lengths win. And according to projections by J. Keeler Johnson of America’s Best Racing, Forever Young finished his final 3/8 mile in 36.63 seconds and his last eighth in 12.70 seconds. In other words, he’s got style, speed and stamina.

Also, Forever Young’s trainer, Yoshito Yahagi, is known for building and wearing a collection of hundreds of colorful hats. At the Kentucky Derby, that’s got to carry statistical significance.

(Top photo: Lo Chun Kit / Getty Images, Jerry Cooke / Corbis via Getty Images)