Umamusume brings Forever Young back to the Breeders’ Cup, where the real horse made history

Umamusume: Pretty Derby has always lived on a strange border. Cygames took the names, rivalries and racing records of real Japanese thoroughbreds and turned them into girls with horse ears who train, race and sing for the crowd after every win. For years the traffic ran one way, from the racecourse into the game. The studio’s partnership with the Breeders’ Cup reverses the current: this autumn the game walks back onto an American track, and it brings with it a horse the racing public there already knows by name.

That horse is Forever Young. Last year he became the first Japanese-born, Japan-trained winner of the Longines Breeders’ Cup Classic, holding off Sierra Leone by half a length at Del Mar for trainer Yoshito Yahagi. His owner is Susumu Fujita, founder of CyberAgent, the parent company of Cygames, and earlier this year the champion joined the Umamusume roster as a playable character. At this year’s World Championships, a life-size figure of his Umamusume counterpart will stand on display at the racetrack, an anime double greeting the crowd that watched the real one win.

Mejiro McQueen and rival Umamusume sprint down the turf in a race from Umamusume Pretty Derby — Image: Cygames

The figure is the cultural gesture; the sponsorship is the infrastructure. For the third year running, Cygames puts its name on the Cygames Breeders’ Cup Sprint, a six-furlong (1,200-meter) dirt race for thoroughbreds three years old and up, run for a $2 million purse. The company’s logo will sit on the starting gate and on the saddle towels of every horse in the field, which means the publisher of a mobile game is, quite literally, part of the race’s frame.

It is worth remembering what the game actually asks of its players. Umamusume is a sports life simulation: you play a rookie trainer at Tracen Academy, shaping a single runner through a career of daily training, conversations and races, and celebrating victories with “winning concerts” staged like live idol shows. Its design argument is that a race is only the last page of a long story about preparation, and that a horse’s record can be read as character. A real champion carrying that story into a real paddock is the logical end point of the premise, not a marketing detour.

Rice Shower surges forward in a final stretch sprint in Umamusume Pretty Derby — Image: Cygames

The bet has travelled well beyond Japan. The game won Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards 2025, and Cygames, the studio behind Granblue Fantasy: Relink: Endless Ragnarok, now treats horse racing less as a licensed theme than as a second home for the franchise. Few game companies sponsor a sport; fewer build a fiction so close to it that the sponsorship reads like an epilogue.

The 2026 Breeders’ Cup World Championships run on Friday, October 30 and Saturday, October 31 at Keeneland in Lexington, Kentucky: two days, fourteen Grade 1 races and more than $34 million in purses and awards, under the management of Breeders’ Cup Limited. The Cygames Breeders’ Cup Sprint is on the Saturday card, October 31, and post times will be published on the official Breeders’ Cup website and social channels.

For a game built on the idea that every race is a story, the most telling image of the meeting may be a static one: a champion standing perfectly still while the real field thunders past.

Tags: Cygames, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Breeders' Cup, Keeneland, sports sponsorships, Susumu Fujita