Here is a table of the Kentucky Derby winning times (in seconds) for the last
104 years. If you graph this data you can see there has been no noticeable
improvement for the last 50 years.
The average winning time for all 104 years is 124.3 seconds. In the last 50
years that average decreased to 122.1 seconds. In the 1990?s, the ten winning
times varied from 121 seconds to 125 seconds, averaging 122.4 seconds, which is
0.3 seconds slower than the average winning time for the last 50 years. Or, to
put it in terms more familiar to American motorists, the average winning speed
from 1950 through 1989 was 36.893 mph, and in the last 10 years it has decreased
to 36.768 mph.
