I mean, it sounds amusing at times, but it's difficult to screen. And, you know, some people may think a name is clever, and if they were able to slip the name by, we have seen instances in the past where the horse could get all the way to the racetrack, be ready to race, and could perhaps even be owned by a different owner, and we've seen cases where the name caused the stewards at the racetrack to actually scratch the horse. It can be difficult to draw the line, and basically you have to look at what's best for the horse. Fortunately, they are few and far between. There's a history of several folks that do that. LUDDEN: Have people tried to sneak by some naughty names before? It's often a shorter version of the actual name. BAILEY: Yeah, a lot of times you'll hear nicknames for the Thoroughbreds, you know, around the barn. I mean, I can't imagine in training, you know, `Whoa, Andromeda's Hero. But do they actually use them? I mean, I'm looking at today's Kentucky Derby list. LUDDEN: So this is why people have to get so creative, and there's these very strange names that we see every year. BAILEY: At any one given time, we'll have about 450,000 what we call active names. LUDDEN: How many horse names are registered with your club? We received a letter of permission on White House letterhead. One of the best ones that I remember in my 17 years here at the Jockey Club is, several years back, we had a filly named Barbara Bush when Mrs. We have a limitation of exactly 18 characters, and there are some special permissions that you have to get, for example, so that if you wanted to name a horse after a person, you would need to seek written permission from that person. Our interest here is the integrity of the stud book. You don't want to bet on the wrong horse or, perhaps even worse, buy the wrong horse. LUDDEN: You might be cheering for the wrong one there. So I try to be careful to, you know, actually say them out loud before it gets approved, just to avoid that confusion. You know, as an example, there's a very prominent racehorse from several years back named Easy Goer, spelled E-A-S-Y, as you might imagine, and you wouldn't want to allow the name Eazy, spelled E-A-Z-Y. You don't want two Thoroughbreds out there racing at the same time with very similar-sounding names. BAILEY: What we do here at the Jockey Club is we have an approval process whereby the owners of the Thoroughbreds will submit the names to us, and we enter those names into a computer system and run them through a check of the phonetics of the name.
LUDDEN: I understand these rules are somewhat complicated. RICK BAILEY (Registrar, Jockey Club): Well, thank you, Jennifer. He's the registrar of the Jockey Club and the person who says yea or nay to some 37,000 Thoroughbred names a year. We wondered this week how they get their colorful names, so we turned to Rick Bailey. That's just one of the rules governing the naming of racehorses. The win means no other Thoroughbred will ever bear the name Giacomo again. Giacomo had lost all three of his races this year before today's triumph for jockey Mike Smith. Just behind were Closing Argument and Afleet Alex. He pulled ahead in the last seconds of the race. I'm Jennifer Ludden.Ī horse named Giacomo has beaten 50:1 odds to win this year's Kentucky Derby. From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.