Hardened horseplayers know that to survive long term in this game, you need to get value on your plays. That's all of your plays, including the Kentucky Derby. On the other hand, the casual sports fan simply wants to know who will win the race and isn't really interested in which horses are the best value plays. Hence the plight of the public handicapper, who tries to balance the two approaches.
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DRF Past Performances
Anybody can train the winner of a Kentucky Derby. Anybody.
You can be born in a Georgia log cabin like Tom Smith, a Yorkshire mining village like John Longden, or a Havana barrio like Lazaro Barrera.
You can win it in your first try, like Ben Jones, Frank Childs, or Jim Fitzsimmons, or in your only try, like Don Cameron, George Conway, or Neil Drysdale.
A winning trainer can be as young as Hollie Hughes, who was 27, or James Rowe Sr., who was 24, or wait until deep into the twilight of a satisfying career, like Charlie Whittingham, Mack Miller, or Art Sherman.
Churchill Downs
Weather: Cloudy
Track: Fast
Temp.: 52
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A couple of key players here this weekend, IRISH WAR CRY and PARADISE WOODS, put on a pretty good show for railbirds Thursday at Churchill Downs during the final regular morning of training for the 3-year-olds competing in Friday’s Kentucky Oaks and Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – After a tumultuous prep season in which no horse asserted himself as the clear front-runner of the division, a full field will line up for the 143rd Kentucky Derby on Saturday at Churchill Downs with more questions emanating from this group than a bunch of children in a preschool class.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – About 1,900 horses reside on the backstretch at Churchill Downs. Every morning, they are groomed, tacked up, and led to the racetrack, where they jog, gallop, or breeze, and then return to their stable.
For a racetracker, the process hardly could look more commonplace. Yet every time the father-and-son training team of Mark and Norman Casse sees a relatively plain-looking bay horse with a white blaze accomplish this mundane task, it eases their minds.
ELMONT, N.Y. – Trainer Graham Motion and jockey Rajiv Maragh have become very close friends over the last few years. It did not have to turn out that way.
In 2011, Motion won the Kentucky Derby with Animal Kingdom, and Maragh finished third on Mucho Macho Man. It was an incident in that year’s Belmont Stakes that could have ended this friendship before it began.
The road to the Kentucky Derby is rarely, if ever, a straight one. The only thing that varies from year to year in this aspect of the journey is how many unexpected detours arise, and how deep into the weeds those detours take us.
This year’s road to the Derby seemed active on both counts. It feels like there were more twists involving important horses than usual. And when things went wacky, it seemed like we wound up in some uncomfortably tall grass, like where someone who wronged Tony Soprano would end up.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – It was an early-spring morning at Keeneland in 1989 when one of Carl Nafzger’s horses came galloping by, with his newly hired exercise rider impressing the trainer.
“Sharon,” he said, turning to his assistant, Sharon Peters, “don’t let that Australian boy out of my sight.”
The Kentucky Derby field is the most heavily scrutinized of the year in North America, yet much remains unknown about the group until after the race is over.
Most important among the race’s variables is which horses are best able to handle the Derby’s 1 1/4-mile distance, a route of ground no horse in the field will have raced before and most never will again. Since there is no prior form with which to evaluate horses at the classic distance, a useful tool to determine each entrant’s potential is the average progeny winning distance of his sire and dam.