From today, you can ask GalopSport a question and get an answer. Her name is Sprinter, she lives in the search box at the top of the page, and she carries our entire memory with her: 141 major Scandinavian races with more than 4,000 wins – and an article archive that reaches all the way back to 1997. Together with the new English-language GalopSport, she is by far the biggest innovation in our nearly 30-year history.
Until now, the search box could find articles. Sprinter can find answers.
You type the question the way you would ask the person next to you in the stand – and Sprinter answers.
The time machine
There is a scene in the TV series Mad Men that I have never been able to let go of. The advertising man Don Draper has to sell Kodak’s new slide projector – a piece of new technology. Draper dims the lights and shows pictures of his own family. Newness is the most important idea in advertising, an old copywriter once taught him – but there is a deeper bond: nostalgia. That small twinge in the heart, stronger than memory itself, when you suddenly find yourself standing somewhere you thought was gone. The machine is not a spaceship, he says. It is a time machine.
I often thought of that scene while I was building Sprinter. Because as a child I stood in the stand at Klampenborg with my father myself, never quite understanding why he held his breath in the home straight. I understand it now. Today it is my children standing there with me, and I am the one holding my breath.
That is racing: it is handed down in a grandstand, from one hand on a shoulder to the next.
We know exactly how those days felt. We just can no longer remember all of it.
But Sprinter can.
Technically, she is a search engine. But what she can do is travel in time. She can take you back to the 1910 Danish Derby and forward to last Saturday’s racing, and she remembers every single article GalopSport has written since 1997 – word for word, as it stood the evening it was first read.
Try it yourself: the 1975 Danish Oaks
Ask who won the Danish Oaks in 1975, and Sprinter answers Farina – with her pedigree, her breeder, and the fact that she also won the Swedish Oaks.
Perhaps a bell rings at her dam’s name. She was called Fawzia, and today she gives her name to one of Klampenborg’s big races for fillies and mares on Derby Day.
Click on Fawzia, and you get every winner of the Fawzia Stakes from 1999 to 2026 – but also the fact that Fawzia herself won the Danish 1000 Guineas (Mowerinaløb) in 1961 and became the dam of two classic winners: Farina and her half-sister Fabella, a year older, who in 1974 won both the Danish 1000 Guineas and the Danish Oaks for Franz Nutz.
Click on through to Fabella, and two more classic winners appear: Fabulous, who won the Danish Derby and the Danish Oaks in 1984, and Farandole, who won the Danish Derby in 1987.
And then you may well end up thinking that there is a very good reason why Klampenborg has a Fawzia Stakes on Derby Day.
Behind the answers
Sprinter’s fact layer
15 classics · 126 major races
4,382 winner records with pedigree and, where the sources have them, breeder, owner, trainer and jockey
the 1910 Danish Derby
nearly 30 years of news coverage
Built entirely from scratch over the past 15 months. For every year, the winner is listed with sire, dam and damsire – and, as far as the sources go, sex, breeder, owner, trainer and jockey.
And just as important: unlike a Google search or an answer from an AI service, Sprinter never guesses. Every single figure has been checked against reality – distances, times, years, spellings.
Alongside the fact layer are the articles. Some 17,000 of GalopSport’s own articles in Danish and English have been searched for names, so looking up a horse, a trainer or an owner also brings up the stories we have written about them. That is nearly 30 years of news coverage that can suddenly be looked up in under two seconds.
Since August the rest of the world has been reading along: Scandinavian racing has long been bigger than its audience, and on the English-language GalopSport, readers abroad now follow everything we write – Sprinter included.
And you have probably noticed already: Sprinter comes in new packaging. GalopSport has been redrawn from scratch – calmer, more like a newspaper. Every story opens with date, headline and initial, the front page keeps the most important things at the top and the calendar close at hand, and Sprinter comes with you in the search box wherever you are. Nearly 30 years of history have found the home they deserve.
Thank you
None of this would exist without our advertisers and sponsors. They are the ones who have carried GalopSport for nearly 30 years, and they are the reason I can keep on building – in a sport that is far from Scandinavia’s biggest, but most certainly the best. Thank you to every one of you who supports us.
What it is really about is neither databases nor search boxes. It is the joy of the sport. The joy of standing in the stand and watching a three-year-old you have followed since it was a foal or a yearling stretch out up the home straight.
From day one, GalopSport has had one purpose: to share that joy with everyone who follows the sport – breeder, trainer, jockey, owner or curious spectator.
Some of you have been with us from the beginning, and others long before GalopSport existed. You have seen horses the rest of us only know as names from a distant past. From today, you can find them again.
Sprinter is my way of giving you the whole story back. Countless hours have gone into her, and I have been looking forward to this for a long time.
Try her. Ask her the question you have always wondered about. And let her take you back – around and around, and home again. To the best of all days.
