A Horse named after Koby Brea will make its debut at Keeneland

Picking ponies can be quite a crapshoot. You can spend all morning scanning the program to analyze how the race will unfold, only to be stuck with a bunch of losing tickets. Meanwhile, the person in your party who just liked the name of the horse is holding a 12-1 winner. If you prefer betting on names and connections, we’ve got just the horse for you that is racing at Keeneland on Thursday.

Basketball and horse racing will collide in the first race when “Brea from Three” makes its debut. Named for Kentucky sharpshooter Koby Brea, the 2-year-old is among eight entries in a 4.5-furlong sprint.

Brea from Three is trained by John Ennis and will be ridden by Walter Rodriguez. He has some decent workouts on his resume but has 15-1 morning line odds. Surely, the name will lower those odds drastically by post-time, even though this race is in Wesley Ward’s wheelhouse. The trainer dominates these 2-year-old sprints and has two starters as the top two choices in this race at Keeneland.

Now this is pretty cool 😂😂

— Koby Brea (@kobybrea) April 7, 2025

Koby Brea is not the first Kentucky Wildcat to find his name in a program at Keeneland. Benny Snell often celebrated touchdowns by showing off the Snell Yeah tattoo on his stomach. A horse was named Snell Yeah back in 2019 and primarily raced at Churchill Downs. It finished second to earn a start in the Bashford Manor Stakes and ultimately ended his career on a high with a win at Indiana Grand.

Tshiebwe began his racing career in 2022. In his second race, the horse came in second at Keeneland to Extra Anejo, who won a stakes race on the Tuesday Blue Grass Stakes card. Tshiebwe is a gelding who is still active and won his last start in March in a claiming race at Gulfstream Park.

Oscar Tshiebwe did not make any money from that horse’s success, but he did team up with Winstar Farm in an NIL deal. He promoted their stallion Life is Good in an ad campaign in 2022. That was the same year that quarterback Will Levis partnered with Claiborne Farms to promote War of Will.

Koby Brea was not in Lexington for long, but it’s clear he left his mark on Big Blue Nation. He made 93 three-pointers, the seventh-most in UK single-season history. Brea ranks 14th in single-season three-point field goal percentage after the Dayton transfer knocked down 43.46% of his attempts.

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