But there are plenty of good story lines this year.
Not long ago I was invited to compile a volume for the Library of America dedicated to the history of horse racing in this country, a sport and a pastime that was well underway before the Declaration of Independence. When I began, I thought it might be helpful to commit to memory the winners of the Kentucky Derby, beginning with Aristides — the speedball chestnut trained by a former slave named Ansel Williamson who bested the legendary racehorse Ten Broeck and 13 other colts in 1875 — and going all the way up to last year’s champion, Nyquist, named for a Swedish hockey star.
I wasn’ t the first to try this parlor trick. The great turf writer William Nack got his gig covering racing after he climbed a desk at a Newsday holiday party in 1971 and regaled his colleagues with the list. It has gotten tougher since then, though, as the list has stretched to include 139 colts and 3 beguiling fillies.
Clicking off the names of the legends, the little remembered and the truly forgotten won’ t get me many laurels in my day job, but it has been a great reminder of just how far the Kentucky Derby, which the writer Laura Hillenbrand once called “the supreme hour of a supreme creature, ” has come as an American institution. From its scrappy beginnings, when it featured tough and unglamorous local horses with names like Joe Cotton and Pink Star, the Derby matured into a sporting dynamo, one of the first mass events of the radio and then TV era, when Secretariat was as famous as any athlete, anywhere.
Today, even as the sports section real estate set aside for horse racing shrinks each year, the Derby still captures the attention of casual sports fans. To the rare few of us who consider the sport of kings to be the king of sports, it’s a hallowed date even if we have only an inkling of which horse is the best bet to win.
I, for one, have no idea. That is both a statement of fact and a comment on my typically desultory talent at handicapping the Derby, which even for the savviest horse-pickers is a feat astronomically more complicated than the already difficult skill of picking a winner in, say, a middle-of-the-week feature at your local racetrack. The Derby is the only race in America with 20 entries (most races have only seven or eight competitors) , and the X-factor of such a large number of colts competing at the unusual distance of a mile and a quarter for the first (and often only) time in their young lives can tax the confidence of even the most cocksure handicapper.
This year is especially tricky. Unlike in most previous years, none of the starters established himself this spring as the horse to beat. There are an inordinately high number of genuine contenders in the field, mostly because none of the horses towers over his cohort in natural ability. Add in the prospect of heavy rain all week in Louisville, where the race is held, and so the likelihood of a muddy racing surface, and today’s Derby is a tricky race for the bettor and racing fan to get a bead on, much less to beat.
What the field lacks in stature it makes up for in story lines. Take the aptly named Patch, the runner-up last month in the Louisiana Derby, second to Gervin, the horse that some wiseguys seem to fancy this year. If Patch were to win, he’ d be the first one-eyed colt in history to be draped in roses in Louisville. His stable mates Tapwrit and Always Dreaming are scheduled to run for the trainer Todd Pletcher, who has dominated the winter and spring Derby prep races over the past decade, but who has only a single Derby winner to show for the herd of immaculately bred speedballs he has dispatched to Louisville.
There are plenty of others to root for. Do you love beat-the-odds, underdog trainers, the anti-Pletchers who do a lot with less glamorous stock? Then you’ ve got your man in Antonio Sano, one of the greatest trainers in Venezuela, whose life was turned upside down when he was kidnapped there, held chained in a cell for nearly a month and bankrupted by ransom payments. He relocated to South Florida, and eight years later has his first Derby entry in Gunnevera.
Looking for a super-underdog colt? Sonneteer hasn’ t yet even won a race, but he’s had enough near misses to earn his way into the field.
My favorite improbable contender, though, involves a jockey rather than a trainer or a horse: Rajiv Maragh, the affable Jamaican rider who shattered his ribs and eight vertebrae at Belmont in 2015 when his mount, Yourcreditisgood, tripped and landed on top of him. Rehabilitating for more than a year and overcoming the physical and mental demons of getting back on a devilishly unpredictable animal, Maragh has the mount on one of the Derby favorites, the winner of New York’s Wood Memorial, Irish War Cry.
For those who won’ t watch a race on any other date, the Derby may be their only contact, virtual or otherwise, with the sublimity of horseflesh in motion, not to mention the carnival of the track on its biggest day. For those long hooked on the sport, no Derby seems to come out exactly as they expected in advance, which is the one, somewhat counterintuitive lesson provided by repeat exposure, year after year.
Yet what I find most deeply satisfying about the Derby is the way each one creates an echo of the sport’s robust history. That’s perhaps true of other sports’ premier events and elite achievements, too, but there’s somehow more plus ça change continuity between the Pink Stars and Joe Cottons and the 20 horses scheduled to start today than between, say, the 1908 Cubs and their 2017 avatars.
At the track, there’s little new under the sun. Antonio Sano’s saga reminds the turf lover of Canonero II, the zippy Venezuelan-bred colt with the crooked front leg who stunned the Kentucky blue bloods four-plus decades ago by winning the Derby. The one-eyed Patch conjures back to life the courageous Casselaria, who lost an eye as a yearling before running in the 1982 Derby, and the partially blind Pollard’s Vision (2004) , named after the similarly challenged rider of Seabiscuit. The colt Sonneteer harkens even farther back, to Buchanan (1884) and Brokers Tip (1933) , who won their first lifetime races in the Derby, but also to Sir Barton, who followed up his maiden win in Louisville with victories in the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes at a time — 1919 — before the three-race sweep had even been christened the Triple Crown.
This time of year, racing fans like me get more than the usual number of who-do-you-like questions, of course, but also more pointed queries about why we like the sport at all — or even how it could be called a sport. Surely, you must ride, I get asked a lot.
