LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Mick Ruis has spent his life beating the odds by betting on himself. A high-school dropout raised near San Diego in the blue-collar town of El Cajon, Ruis is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold a pair of scaffolding companies, the proceeds of which allowed him to expand his horizons and develop property in his adopted home state of Montana, and pursue a decades-long fascination with horse racing, owning and training his own expanding stable of runners. On Saturday here at Churchill Downs, the man who retains and embraces those blue-collar roots will mingle with the blue bloods when he sends out his colt Bolt d’Oro in the 144th Kentucky Derby. Once again, Ruis will be betting on himself. :: Get both the Kentucky Derby and Oaks Clocker Reports for just $19.95! Ruis, 57, picked out Bolt d’Oro as a yearling, then took him through an unconventional path to get to the races. Bolt d’Oro had his early training done at Ruis’s ranch in Montana before returning to Southern California, where Ruis’s stable is based, to begin his racing career. Bolt d’Oro – second last time out in the Santa Anita Derby to likely Derby favorite Justify – has developed into one of the best 3-year-olds in the country. And now Ruis will try to become one of the rarest of Derby winners, someone who both owns and trains his own horses. In the early days of the Derby, when the United States was a far more agrarian society, it was common for someone to own and train a Derby winner. It happened nine times in 23 years, from 1882 until 1902, then again in 1904 and 1913. Since then, though, it has happened exactly twice. The great Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham was a co-owner of Sunday Silence in 1989, but the only other Derby winner so campaigned in the last 105 years was Carry Back, who was trained by Jack Price and who raced under the name of his wife, Katherine. Like Ruis, Price was a businessman who was captivated by racing and eventually made it his primary endeavor. Price, the oldest son of Jewish immigrants who settled in Cleveland, sold first a loan company and then a manufacturing company, giving him the wherewithal to dive into racing. Six years in, Price, then 53, won the 1961 Derby as well as the Preakness with Carry Back, a homebred who was one of the most popular horses of his era. Carry Back raced 21 times at age 2, had 27 starts before even running in the Derby, and finished his career having made 62 starts. In addition to his two Triple Crown race wins, his 21 career victories included such important races as the Garden State Stakes and Remsen at age 2, the Flamingo and Florida Derby at 3, and the Met Mile and Whitney at 4. Carry Back was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1975. Periodicals from the early 1960s describe Price as an outsider whose blunt talk wasn’t welcomed in many corners of the sport. Yet he became a beloved figure in Derby lore. After winning the Derby in 1961, Price would return to the Derby every year as a visitor through 1994, often in the company of the greatest Derby historian of all, the late Jim Bolus. Price missed the 1995 Derby owing to poor health, and died in June of that year. Ruis, like Price, has forged his own path in racing. During a recent conversation at Santa Anita, Ruis said getting to the Derby on his terms is a point of pride. “It is a good feeling,” he said. “We bought Bolt as a young horse, broke him, had a plan for him to be a route horse, and here we are. It feels good to have done that.” Ruis, who first caught the racing bug at Agua Caliente, in Tijuana, Mexico, at age 18, is self-taught at horse training. Over the years he has picked the minds of the best horsemen on the West Coast, trying to glean why Jerry Hollendorfer does things differently from Bob Baffert as compared to Richard Mandella. His horse-loving daughter Shelbe, 27, is his assistant, and his son, Mick Jr., 30, once was a jockey but now works in the scaffolding business. Ruis’s wife of 23 years, Wendy, has become enamored of the sport and is alongside her husband for training every morning. “When I met Mick I didn’t know anything about racing,” said Wendy, who was born and raised in Hawaii. “I love it now. Before I was raising kids, but now they’re all grown. I love it. It’s fun.” The Ruises met in Montana, where Wendy was a widow with two children and Mick was a divorced parent raising three kids. They had two more children together, the youngest of whom is now 20. Mick said he moved to Montana because he had family there and thought it was a better place to raise his kids than Southern California. While building his scaffolding business, he would fly to Southern California for work, but be gone for only one or two nights before returning. Ruis sold 80 percent of American Scaffold for $78 million two years ago. That fall, he bought Bolt d’Oro at a yearling auction for $630,000. As his stable has expanded, so too have his property holdings. Four months ago, Ruis bought 163-acre Chestnut Farm, four miles west of Keeneland, near Lexington, Ky., from which he planned to commute to Churchill Downs during Derby Week. That 136-mile roundtrip might seem like a lot each day during a week like this. But considering how far Ruis has traveled on his life’s journey, it’s a trip around the block. As usual, Ruis is making his own path.