The official programme at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club on December 7 listed 10 races. Among those was “the race of the year”, the coveted King’s Cup over 1900 metres on turf, staged “for the glory of Thailand” or so the club’s official Youtube trailer sang.
The eight-year-old Win The Day won the prize, but Thailand’s biggest race was probably not the most important contest held on the Bangkok grass that day. Once the floodlights were on and the horses were away, elaborately dressed ‘horse girls’ loaded into the starting gates for the unofficial eleventh race, a dash to the line to determine the fastest Umamusume: Pretty Derby cosplayer in town.
Cosplaying ‘Umas’ or ‘Trainers’ – gamers train a stable of ‘horse girls’ in the game – turning up at racetracks to watch the real-life descendants of their game-side heroes, have been a thing in Japan for a few years now, but they are becoming an increasingly familiar sight further afield as the popularity of Cygames’ multi-faceted Umamusume: Pretty Derby game and anime franchise continues its gradual post-Covid era spread beyond the core of its Japanese roots.
The game launched in Japan in February 2021, but since the English version of the mobile game was released in June last year, there has been a growing phenomenon of cosplaying ‘Umas’ – Daiwa Scarlet, T M Opera O, Oguri Cap and all – at racetracks from Jakarta to Santa Anita.
And the game’s profile can only have been further boosted four days after the Bangkok dash when Cygames America CEO Motohiro Okubo picked up the Best Mobile Game award at the 2025 Game Awards at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles.
To put some context to what the global interest in those Game Awards looks like, it was livestreamed on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Steam, X, Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon Prime Video, and was also shown on media platforms in China and India, with more than 171 million streams reported. Now, those numbers might have been boosted by the appearance of the superstar diva Muppet Miss Piggy on the presenting roster, or they could have been to do with the massive and ever-growing popularity of gaming culture. Horse racing, take note.
Umamusume fans know their stuff: the game is a gateway into real horse racing; from the game, they know the stories of champion horses, they know their bloodlines; they feel an emotional connection which extends to actual racehorses. They represent a committed, educated gaming and anime sub-group within that flourishing and expanding gamer culture, which is in turn evolving as a visibly flamboyant sub-culture within the conversely declining sport of horse racing.
Bangkok’s King’s Cup event had been promoted online, including via a news article at the website animecorner.me – which has a Facebook following alone of 1.2 million – and was organised by an events company, Next Meet, which according to Anime Corner anticipated around 1,000 Umamusume fans would attend.
Umamusume fans attending organised events at racetracks is not a new phenomenon. It has been happening at Japan’s National Association of Racing (NAR) – Japan’s locally administered second-tier – racetracks for some time.
One such is Kasamatsu Racecourse, about 20 miles northwest of Nagoya, in Gifu prefecture. The track is famous among Umamusume fans as being the place that gave the world the legendary champion Oguri Cap, a leading Umamusume character and the chief protagonist in the Umamusume: Cinderella Gray manga, which last year was turned into a popular anime series.
Kasamatsu has held a Cinderella Gray themed event for each of the last four years, with great success.
“We saw a lot of young people coming to the event,” Yoshiyuki Kamitani, from the Department of Planning and Public Relations at the Gifu Prefectural Racing Association told Idol Horse. “There were obviously many more from the younger generations and female visitors compared to normal racedays.
“We had an unprecedented attendance of over 10,000. Realistically speaking, this event hasn’t resulted in an increase in our revenues as most people would think, but it may serve as a chance for those people who had never heard of Kasamatsu Racecourse to know about the course, and we think this is the most important takeaway.”
Last year the track’s collaborative Umamusume offerings included “event races” featuring the series and the characters in the race names, with the main feature race being the Cinderella Gray Sho. Life-sized character cut-outs were set up at “Photo spots” around the racecourse; Umamusume voice actors held talk shows on a stage between races; a pop-up shop sold Umamusume merchandise; fans who spent a certain amount of money with on-track vendors received a limited release Umamusume postcard and everyone received an Umamusume paper fan on entry to the track. The track also held a free exhibition of frames from the anime production to mark the airing of the Cinderella Gray anime series.
“The Umamusume: Cinderella Gray series presents the story of Oguri Cap and depicts Kasamatsu Racecourse in detail, adhering to facts, so we are really appreciative of their work,” Kamitani added. “Ideally, we hope the current Umamusume fever can be sustained for a long time without being cultish or just a flash in the pan, and we would like to keep our nice relationship with Umamusume for as long as we can.”
Most of the Umamusume growth outside of Japan until recently has been organic rather than organised. In fact, the Bangkok event was born out of an organic gathering of Umamusume fans at the Bangkok racecourse back in September, as Anime Corner reported.
Such an organic evolution was as much a common trend at Japan Racing Association (JRA) racetracks – the game’s spiritual arenas – as it has been in Thailand and other parts of South-East Asia, Indonesia, the United States and pockets of South America, countries and regions with emerging and expanding Umamusume fanbases. Social media including Reddit postings and Facebook groups have been key platforms in sharing information and arranging gatherings.
It was via social media channels that Umamusume fans last year latched onto King Argentin, the Indonesian Triple Crown winner. He was identified as having a connection through his sire line to T M Opera O. Those fans turned a horse unknown to the wider horse racing world into an Umamusume cult hero with fan art depicting his heroics.
Umamusume fans swelled the number of people that joined the live stream of King Argentin’s Derby win to 349,000.
A simple Facebook search reveals several Thai and Indonesian Facebook groups, the biggest with between 75,000 and 100,000 followers each; the English language Umamusume: Pretty Derby group has 141,000 followers, while an ‘International’ group has more than 82,000 followers and one Spanish language group has 50,000; there’s even a Vietnamese group that has 87,000 followers. And there’s growing interest in the Philippines where in December there was a noticeable Umamusume presence at Toycon Philippines.
The Umamumsume cosplay race in Bangkok seems to signal a spreading trend, too. A cosplay race was held at the racecourse in Jakarta, Indonesia, in November, and South America will have its first Umamusume: Pretty Derby cosplay dash at Hipodromo de Monterrico, in Lima, Peru on February 27. Perhaps Santa Anita or Turf Paradise will follow soon enough.
The Peru race has seemingly come about as a direct response to the Bangkok Umamusume foot race. But these races also mark a shift towards organised events. The Peru race and gathering is being organised by the Jockey Club del Peru along with a digital creator known as Bochuchow and the Vocaloid Peru community: an online community which has evolved around the Yamaha-produced Vocaloid singing voice synthesizer.
In the US, Santa Anita’s Japan Family Day festival in late October was the setting for an unofficial Umamusume cosplay gathering that awakened sections of the racing cohort in the United States to the franchise’s power and appeal. Santa Anita repeated on December 30 when Cygames sponsored the G1 American Oaks at the track and the ‘Umas’ were there again.
Turf Paradise, Arizona got in on the act on December 27 with a pop-up fan gathering organised by the fan community Pon Poko, which, in keeping with the spirit of Umamusume fandom, donates some of its proceeds to racehorse aftercare.
None of this is likely familiar to the traditional racegoer, but Umamusume: Pretty Derby and its spread, both in scope and nature, shows that horse racing’s appeal among Gen Z is beyond the realm of gambling or of being exposed to the sport through a hands-on connection to horses or family days at the races as children.
Idol Horse interviews with Japanese Gen Z racegoers in the past two years tells a common thread of playing the game leading to visits to the racecourses and horseracing fandom. The Umamusume franchise is still fringe, but it is bringing new fans to the sport and even connecting the sport globally in a way traditional attempts by racing clubs and jurisdictional administrators have failed for decades. ∎
