The World Championship of Handicapping qualifying season is officially underway. On Derby Day, five players won their $5,000 seats to the $1 million, no takeout WCH finals on tournaments.drf.com.
The overall winner was Jerald Seagall, whose score of $134.30 was best in the field of 54. Seagall collected in eight of the 12 contest races with his two biggest hits coming from Arklow ($44.80) in the American Turf and Smooth Daddy ($45.30) in Belmont’s Fort Marcy, the contest’s anchor leg.
Unless you win the race or your horse gets hurt, it is hard to take a 20-horse Kentucky Derby seriously, especially when it is run on a track that looks like a peanut butter slurry.
However, that does not stop the chart-callers at Equibase from parsing the melee down to the smallest dips and dives. Leave it to them to turn the Charge of the Light Brigade into a dry and tidy eyewitness report straight out of “Dragnet.”
Though it was not one of the names on the laundry list of owners tied to Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming, the fingerprints of WinStar Farm could be seen all over the race’s superfecta.
Kenny Troutt’s elite racing and breeding operation stands Bodemeister, the sire of Always Dreaming, as well as Pioneerof the Nile, who sired fourth-place finisher and champion juvenile male Classic Empire. WinStar also co-owns third-place finisher Battle of Midway with Don Alberto Corp. after purchasing a stake in the colt about two weeks prior to the race.
With five straight favorites winning the Kentucky Derby, he has become the answer to a trivia question: Who is the Derby’s most recent losing favorite?
The answer is Bodemeister, a game second to I’ll Have Another in both the Derby and Preakness Stakes.
Now a young stallion at WinStar Farm in Versailles, Ky., Bodemeister has gotten revenge in a big way, with Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming in his first crop.
The myriad connections of the male line of 143rd Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming to the Kentucky Derby began 64 years ago, when his seventh-generation male-line ancestor Native Dancer finished second, beaten a head, by Dark Star in the 79th Derby. That was Native Dancer’s only loss in 22 lifetime starts, and if the excuses then made for Native Dancer’s defeat in the Derby do not stand up well to closer inspection, he needs no excuses for his profound influence on the subsequent history of America’s greatest classic.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Always Dreaming, winner of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday at Churchill Downs, emerged from the race well and will be sent as soon as possible to Pimlico to prepare for the Preakness Stakes on May 20, trainer Todd Pletcher said Sunday morning.
The race portion of the Kentucky Derby broadcast on NBC late Saturday afternoon posted a 10.5 overnight rating and a 23 share, the second-best overnight rating in the past 25 years, the network said Sunday morning.
The 10.5 rating was a 12-percent gain over the overnight figure from last year, which was a 9.1. Share, which measures the percentage of televisions in use tuned to a broadcast, for the Derby portion of the broadcast last year was a 21.
You can talk all you want about how Always Dreaming had a perfect stalking trip in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. You can snicker all you want about what a cliché it has become when people say that horses with positional speed such as Always Dreaming make their own good trips. And you can lament all you want about how the sloppy track conditions at Churchill Downs over the weekend may have compromised so many horses in the Derby who had no experience on such footing.
You can do all of that. But I will respond by saying, very nicely, that I don’t want to hear it.
Why?
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The following is a list of DRF resources and content related to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on Saturday, May 6.
Total handle on the Kentucky Derby and the supporting 14-race card at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., on Saturday were both records, according to charts of the races, with total wagering on Saturday breaking a milestone mark of $200 million.
