A Horse by Any Other Name

Horse owners in real life have a much easier time naming their future thoroughbreds than do their SIM counterparts. Well, you’d think so anyway, but year after year we are treated to a slew of dubiously named Kentucky Derby hopefuls. In this regard, Europe seems to have a big step up on America. All those big Euro horses seem to have grand names, don’t they? Golden Horn, Holy Roman Emperor, Ulyssesus, Camelot, Invincible Spirit and so on. Meanwhile, we get Country House or Super Saver. Looking at the top colts in the 2020 Derby Future Wagers we get:

American Theorem (lazy named American Pharoah) Anneau d’Or (No one can pronounce it and I’m not going to run it through Google translator unless he wins a G1) Answer In (seriously? you use part of Dialed Ins by dropping answer on it? oh my) Authentic (better than fake I suppose) Basin (come on) Dennis’ Moment (probably has some sort of Lemons for Alex story I’ll reserve judgment) Eight Rings (sounds vaguely Musashi so we’ll let this slide) Gouverneur Morris (historical and pretentious, I like it) Great Power (good name which evokes images of pre-WW1 Europe) Green Light Go (simple yet oddly effective. excellent use of a common phrase that somehow works for a horse) High Velocity (it’s fine the owners likely think the name is better than it actually is) Honor A.P. (dumb and derivative) Independence Hall (decent, not great, but decent) Maxfield (named after someone I’m sure will wait on the story) Scabbard (sort of good, right?) South Bend (if you’re a Fightin Irish or Mayor Pete fan you probably like it) Storm the Court (harkens back to the sons of Storm Cat and NCAA tourney upsets so love it) Structor (awful name for a horse, just awful) Thousand Words (it can’t speak! how is this the name of a horse?) Three Technique (sort of clever because it’s a DT football position and the horse is owned by Bill Parcells. that said, there are much better football references open.) Tiz the Law (never loved the Tiz names) Wrecking Crew (does he bring multiple horses to a race?)

Now the Jockey Club allows duplicate names, unlike the SIM. Take Achilles for example, there have been near 30 of those registered while in the SIM Achilles is an 18-year-old by Ibn Bey who never won a race. Now in the SIM, you can slap a II at the end of the name and we have an Achilles II who is a 12yo Galileo and while he only won 2 races, he did he-mare a SW. There are 18 other derivations of Achilles in the SIM proving that he is as popular in the virtual world as he is in the real. Perhaps even more so for the SIM has backed all these Achilles into 18 years while the 30 IRL stretch from 1875 to 2017. Note – Achilles is something of a bad luck name in the SIM for not a single one has ever won stakes. This did not stop me from breeding a Justify Achilles (Fury of) this year because, as you know, nothing spells insanity like doing the same thing over and over.

Players have endless sources of inspiration when naming horses, although everyone has experienced getting their breeding rejected by a That Name is Taken. Sometimes you felt the name was so unique and cool you can’t believe it’s gone and can’t come up with a replacement. This was much more of a peril in the SIM’s early days when you had to breed rapidly using backspace/enter backspace/enter. If your name was already taken then you would lose out on the Storm Cat share you stayed up until 3:27 AM to grab. It wasn’t long before astute breeders did test breedings to avoid this in the future. Some people care more about names than others. That’s evident from any starting gate you put your horse in (or the KY Derby futures pool for that matter). For every Empire Maker there is a Funny Cide. There are only four Empire Maker’s IRL btw, and they won’t be anymore because the Jockey Club “retires” a name when horses hit certain criteria. There are 13 G1 winners alone in the SIM with Empire in their name and pages upon pages of Empire runners.

Should a breeder become stumped on what to name their horse what should they do? Fantasy Name Generator is an excellent source. It has a seemingly endless number of categories in which to generate names ranging from Norse World names to mermaid names to Anime character names and almost everything in between. If you can’t find a name here, you are being really picky. But let’s say you are picky, say you simply can’t imagine this breeding not being Invincible. 1839 was the first Invincible. And while the SIM contains pages of Invincibles, how about pulling up that Google Translate and using a foreign word for Invincible? With a few keystrokes, you can come up with well…Invincible (it’s the same in French) Onoverwinnelijk (Dutch) Unbesiegbar (German) Niezwyciezony (Polish) or Osigrandi (Icelandic).

Another method is naming the horse after someone famous or familiar so we get (Tony) Danza, Mendelsohn, Churchill or McKinzie. In the SIM, we have breeders who use a core name and add adjectives or qualifiers to it such as Barb’s Allie Oop, Barb’s Baubles or Barb’s War Party. I’ve been to known grab singers such as Miley Ray or Kellie Pickler along with many an actress or ten. While naming can seem frustrating or repetitive you really are only limited by your imagination. Besides, the SIM universal law almost always implies that your most well-named horses will be 1 for 14 and that throwaway name you settled on will become a black-type runner. It’s bound to happen. Finally, don’t be afraid to grab a theme and run with it. In the URC we recently did a Secret Santa and virtually all the gift horses had a Christmas theme. You’d be amazed at the number of creative options people can come up with when motivated by a universal theme! Maybe 2020 is the year all your horses are Mandolorian inspired?