As usual, the way the Churchill toteboard looks when the Derby runners enter the starting gate Saturday will provide a fascinating contrast to how betting unfolded through the winter and spring in the three pools of the Kentucky Derby Future Wager.
Hansen’s name had yet to be called and there were only two slots left in the starting gate when post positions were assigned late Wednesday afternoon for Saturday’s 138th Kentucky Derby.
Bob Baffert knows all about the luck of the draw. Had he still been in the air, instead of on the ground, when he suffered a heart attack in late March in Dubai, he doesn’t think he would be have been here at Churchill Downs for the post position draw on Wednesday, where Bodemeister drew post 6 and was installed as the morning-line favorite for Saturday's Kentucky Derby.
Projected favorites Bodemeister and Union Rags avoided landing post positions to the extreme inside or outside when in Wednesday afternoon’s post draw for Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. The former, the Churchill Downs morning-line favorite at 4-1, drew post 6, while Union Rags, the 9-2 second choice, has post 4.
Before dawn Sunday morning at Churchill, the wearing of a parka wouldn’t have been entirely absurd. Three days later, the Downs has turned subtropical. The temperature Tuesday night didn’t drop much below 70 degrees, and the mercury was expected to hit 90 late Wednesday afternoon.The heat wave is forecast to continue all the way through Derby Day.
With all the talk that the best horses in this 3-year-old crop made it unscathed through the winter months and will be in the starting gate for the 138th Kentucky Derby, it must be noted that there was one glaring exception: Algorithms, who in mid-February was widely considered as perhaps the preeminent Derby contender along with Union Rags.
Gemologist, El Padrino, and Take Charge Indy were on the track for the first time Wednesday, one day after arriving from south Florida.
Four of the major contenders for Saturday’s Kentucky Derby schooled in the starting gate Wednesday morning following the renovation break. Bodemeister and Union Rags, who figure to vie for favoritism in the Derby, were well behaved as was Alpha, the Wood Memorial runner-up. Went the Day Well, who was wearing blinkers, was a bit antsy in the gate and had to be backed out and reloaded.
The cell phone rang while walking the Churchill Downs backstretch and the quiet voice on the other end of the line, before politely asking if it were a good time to converse, identified itself: “This is Aidan O’Brien,” it said.
With My Adonis’s status for the Derby still up on the air, he’ll be the first also-eligible in the history of the race, trainer Kelly Breen took out a little insurance by also putting his star 3-year-old in Saturday’s $75,000 Canonero II Stakes at Pimlico.
