Honestly, I just woke up yesterday morning wondering how much those Preakness champs actually banked over the years. Seemed like a cool nugget of info, like a quick trip down money lane for horse racing history, you know? So, I grabbed my laptop, cracked open the browser, and figured it’d be straightforward. Boy, was I wrong.
The Starting Gate: Feeling the Frustration
Man, I was stuck right out of the gate. Typed stuff like “Preakness winners prize money history” or “horse earnings by year Preakness”. Google kept throwing me articles about this year’s purse, or maybe who won last year. Super recent stuff. Felt like digging for old gold coins and only finding pocket change. Needed to go way back!
Tried getting clever. Went straight to the official Preakness site. Scrolled, clicked, dug around… nothing. Maybe I missed it? Felt dumb. Searched Wikipedia for the Preakness Stakes winners list. Sure, it listed every darn horse that ever won, right from way back when. But prize money? Nada. Just the horse, jockey, trainer, time… the money part? Missing in action. Whole thing felt a bit off.
Shifting Gears & The Big(ish) Find
Okay, plan B. Figured some horse racing stats nerds must have compiled this stuff somewhere. Changed my search to “historical Preakness Stakes purse amounts”. Hit enter, fingers crossed. Finally! Saw a result from some horse racing news site’s archive section. Not the slickest page, kinda looked forgotten, but it had a table! Bingo! Or so I thought…
The table showed the prize money purse for each year the Preakness was run. From tiny early 1900s numbers climbing slowly up to today’s millions. Useful, yes! But I wanted more. I wanted to know what the winning horse specifically earned. Was it the whole purse, a percentage… what?
Back to searching. Added “winner share” and “payout structure” to my search terms. Took a few tries, but another article popped up talking about how the purse money is split – 1st gets a big chunk, 2nd some, 3rd a bit. Scrolled down… YES! There was a sentence like: “For example, when [Some Old Horse Name] won in 1978, the total purse was $XXX,XXX, with $YYY,YYY going to the winner.” That was the pattern! But only one example? I needed all of them!
More digging. Clicked link after link. Found forums with old discussions. Found PDF documents from racing commissions – dense, hard to read. Finally landed on this old database site. Looked ancient, tons of tables. Searched for “Preakness” and navigated to a “Winners” section. Jackpot! Mostly. It listed:
- Year
- Winner’s Name
- The Total Purse for that year
- And… the Amount Won (for the winner!)
Perfect! This was the raw data.
The Spreadsheet Shuffle & The Messy Result
Okay, time to get organized. Fired up Excel. Started manually typing:
- Year in column A
- Winner Name in column B
- Total Purse in C
- Winner’s Earnings in D
Started with recent years, worked backwards. Copied like mad. Some years were missing, had to go back to other sources. Formatting was all over the place – commas vs no commas, dollar signs attached to some cells but not others. Typed too fast, put ‘Secretariat’ in the Year column by accident once. Felt like a clown. Kept at it. Pasted maybe 30 or 40 years worth.
Tried to make it pretty. Made the dollars green. Tried sorting by Winner’s Earnings. Seeing names like ‘Secretariat’ up near the top wasn’t surprising. But seeing much older horses, whose earnings were tiny numbers like “$25,000”, down at the bottom… that was cool! Context, man!
The “Aha?” Moment… And The Reality Check
Stood back looking at the spreadsheet. Huh. So that’s it? Just… a list? Kinda anticlimactic after all that wrestling. The numbers told a story, sure. You see the jump from peanuts to huge paydays. You see legendary winners earning big for their time. But it wasn’t a grand revelation; it was just data, messy, raw data that needed cleaning. My final “insight” felt more like a shrug: “Older winners earned way less cash than modern ones, but adjusted for inflation maybe it was still a fortune then?” Didn’t even have the energy to add the inflation column, though!
The takeaway wasn’t just the numbers. It was the process. Finding reliable historical sports data, especially specific earnings down to the horse, is a scavenger hunt. Official sites aren’t always geared for deep history dives. You need patience, you need to shift keywords constantly, you need to embrace the messy forums and dusty corners of niche sites. And finally, when you get it… you gotta input it manually and hope you didn’t type ‘Affirmed’ as ‘Affirmative’. All that work for a spreadsheet that looked kinda like a toddler’s finger painting? Yeah, that tracks.
