The Kentucky Derby is this weekend, but your humble author is out until next week. So here is a work from David Yanofsky at Quartz that looks at the average horse times in the one and three-quarter miles at the Kentucky Derby. (I’m a baseball guy, so ask me about Pedro’s strikeout rates in the late 1990s and I’m much better equipped with answers.)
But he takes decade-long averages and shows how horse speeds have essentially plateaued since the 1960s.

Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky.