The trigger came from a news feed: a two-year-old colt won his debut race at Horseshoe Indianapolis, then ran the next day under a different name. The first—Austrian Painter—was deemed a reference to Hitler, who was born in Austria and painted watercolors before politics. Reading it as another joke about some prankster would be easy and uninteresting. Something else caught my attention: in the horse world, a horse's name is not a brand and not a line in a passport, but a disposable identifier that the registry can pull from circulation forever. Few places treat a name as a consumable.
And more: the system has a hard limit of 18 characters, phonetic scoring against over three hundred thousand taken names, and its own name generator on OpenAI with a Pinecone vector database. This is not a dusty archive. This is production with maintenance.
All American Thoroughbreds go through one organization—The Jockey Club, which maintains the American Stud Book. There are seventeen naming rules, written for a legal task: the name must be a unique key by which the horse is identified in records, breeding applications, and pedigrees. Hence 18 characters, including spaces and punctuation—the only absolute rule, and it applies in the British BHA too.
Hence the ban on initials and numbers alone, on endings like "colt" or "2nd," on the names of racetracks and prestigious races themselves, on the names of living people without written permission. Hence the commercial filter, which the director of communications formulates simply: "You won't see Pepsi Cola running against Coca Cola."
The scale is like a small government agency. In 2013, 42,251 names were processed, 71% approved. About 90% of applications come in online. Each name is run through software written by the club's internal technology department, which calculates phonetic proximity to 313 thousand already unavailable names. The reason is prosaic: while two similar names coexist, somewhere in the world someone books a breeding over the phone and mixes up mares. The Jockey Club remembers a case where a foal made it to DNA testing and was denied parentage confirmation—and the only culprit was a slightly differently transliterated dam's name. Registrar Rick Bailey explained the essence: "You don't want to bet on the wrong horse or, worse, buy the wrong one. Our interest is the integrity of the stud book."
Then comes the economics of scarcity. You can't just "take" a name—it's taken in the literal sense, and by rules similar to trademark rights. If a horse made it into the Hall of Fame, earned an Eclipse Award, won the Triple Crown or Breeders' Cup Classic, accumulated earnings from $2 million—its name goes on the Permanent list and will never be issued again. Northern Dancer, Secretariat, Justify—these names are removed from the industry's language forever. Grade 1 winners are frozen for 25 years: Whitmore, who took the Breeders' Cup Sprint in 2020, will free his name in 2045. A separate ban covers names within the first five generations of pedigree: you can't name a foal after its maternal grandsire.
Everything else returns to circulation, but not quickly. A name is released if the horse is over ten years old and hasn't raced or been used for breeding in the last five. In December 2017, the club published a list of over 42 thousand names returned to circulation, from Aanreethegunner to Z Z Zam; in 2016 there were over 45 thousand. The list updates daily, and owners, according to the registrar, get up early on January first to pick over the best of what's freed up.
A good name can be reserved—by default for a year, renewed for money, and held for years for the right foal. A foal's official name is required by February 1 of its two-year-old season, though it could have been born anytime: Thoroughbreds in the US are assigned a birth date of January 1 of the corresponding year. The calendar here is as much a convention as everything else in the registry.
Meanwhile, name scarcity weakens on its own, because the breed is weakening. North American foal crop: 44,143 head in 1990, 37,755 in 2000, 28,420 in 2010, 19,914 in 2020, and around 17,000 estimated for 2026.
Names started running out exactly when horses started running out.
The 2026 case is worth breaking down day by day, because it shows exactly where the system's weak spot is. On Monday, September 21, a colt named Austrian Painter, bred by Scott Herbertson in Indiana, wins his debut. On Tuesday the owner posts on social media: "I'm not changing the name"—and explains he named the horse after Gustav Klimt, his wife's favorite artist, whose family is from Austria. Wednesday morning the club announces an investigation after a formal complaint, and by evening the horse is already called Merrylegs. Formally this is not, however, a name recall but an approved petition from the owner himself—he managed to request a replacement before the club could threaten confiscation.
The name was rejected for context. "Austrian Painter" is a common internet euphemism for Hitler, used to bypass moderation filters. The phrase itself is neutral, and rule 6.F.9.d speaks of perception, not meaning: names "that are likely to be offensive or threatening based on characteristics including, but not limited to, color, creed, disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, politics, or sexual orientation." Checking intent is hard, and that's where the system broke down.
The evidence was found in the database itself. Journalists and users digging through the registry pulled up reserve names that Herbertson had submitted: My Struggle—a translation of "Mein Kampf"—and Braunau Star, after the town where Hitler was born. The Klimt version fell apart after that. The runner's yearling full sister, named New Order, also lost her name: New Order is both the owner's favorite band and the Nazi plan for occupying Europe. He defended the band explanation on social media; in his defense, Joy Division really did take its name from Yehiel Dinur's novel, not party documents.
Inside the industry this was perceived as a procedural failure, not one person's. L and N Racing co-owner Michael Levinson, whose horse was second in the 2017 Kentucky Derby, put it harshly: "You'd have to know nothing about World War II not to understand what this person was doing." And added that the first line of defense is precisely the registrar, and it didn't work. A telling detail from his own practice: he was denied the name Center Cut for vulgar language, and it only passed after explaining it's a golf term. An anonymous industry source told Yahoo Sports the complaint even shorter: "Maybe just Google it? They're asleep at the wheel."
Here lies the real engineering story: the registry knows how to protect the past but doesn't know how to check the present. A Grade 1 winner's name is unavailable for a quarter century—that's a cheap and automatic rule. But semantic expertise rests on a person with Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and Urban Dictionary open on their screen, and on their sense of context. The club calls this "a combination of human and technological analysis." In February 2025, the Jockey Club launched Naming AI—a generator on OpenAI with Pinecone vector search that produces 5–10 options based on pedigree or the owner's words. But the generated name still goes to a live registrar. They automated selection, not verification.
The asymmetry is visible in the cost of error. Processing a horse's application takes seconds, and rollback takes two days of public statements, because activated protection is a reaction, not a rule: first someone notices, then files a complaint, then investigation begins. It was like this before. In 2019 a horse named Noose changed its name to Scabbard at the club's demand, in 2021 Grape Soda made headlines, in 2020 the British regulator reviewed procedures after a filly debuted with an explicitly obscene name. Each time they fixed it after it made the record.
The oldest story in this collection explains why a name is worth protecting at all. In 1773 the Earl of Abingdon told a stable boy to write the foal's name on the manger—"Potato." The boy wrote "Pot" followed by eight letter "o"s: he was writing by ear and guessed wrong. The Earl liked it so much he kept it as is. The horse entered history under the name Potoooooooo—twice as long as today's 18-character limit, which no one cared about then. They still pronounced it "Potatoes."
He raced from 1776 to 1783, mostly at four-mile distances on the Newmarket course, and won, by various counts, 28 to 34 races out of about forty—sources diverge here, and I don't know which to trust. At stud he left 172 winners with a combined purse of nearly 62 thousand pounds, and his son Waxy, winner of the 1793 Derby and leading sire of 1810, pulled Eclipse's male line into modernity.
According to BloodHorse's analysis, most current sire lines trace to that son of Eclipse, written in documents as "the oddly-named Pot-8-O's": through Bend Or and Bona Vista, then through Phalaris. About 90% of North American Thoroughbreds trace through this branch. An illiterate boy's typo on a manger became the family name for half the horse population.
Registries still store it differently: in the General Stud Book it's Potoooooooo, in the Jockey Club's online database—Pot8O's. For over two hundred years two systems can't agree how many "o"s there are. He died in November 1800 at age 27 and was buried in Hare Park. The skeleton was found two centuries later when a tree fell there; now it stands in the National Horse Racing Museum in Newmarket.
Austrian Painter himself was ultimately renamed by the owner's daughter—after the gray pony from "Black Beauty." And by rule 6(D) a horse that changed names after starting its career runs under both names for three more races, and only then does the old one disappear from records permanently.