LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — As they scrambled their way through the grandstand, stepping through and around the thick, roaring crowd, trainer Kenny McPeek and his wife, Sherri, focused on the three jumbo screens in the Churchill Downs infield, searching for information.
“Did we win?” Sherri McPeek asked.
She was asking the same question that had all 156,710 fans at Kentucky Derby 150 holding their breath for nearly 10 minutes after the race:
Had Mystik Dan, the colt trained by her husband, nudged his nose over the finish line a millimeter ahead of Sierra Leone and Forever Young.
“I think so,” Kenny McPeek said.
She held her Derby hat in her left hand. Somebody had pulled it loose during the confusing celebration raging around her. But it was too soon to scream. Hold all tickets — and all emotion.
The word OFFICIAL had yet to flash on the video board.
So Sherri McPeek asked the question one time more: “Did we win?”
“I think so,” Kenny answered. “But I don’t know.”
Seconds seem like months when you’re waiting for confirmation that you’re a Kentucky-based trainer trying to win the Kentucky Derby, a race you first entered in 1995. Nine Kentucky Derbies. Nine quiet walks back to the barn, wondering how you finished 13th or 16th or something else you could not explain.
You solved the Preakness. You solved the Belmont. But not the Derby. You were still chasing that dream, the biggest dream for a trainer who grew up in the Bluegrass.
So Sherri and Kenny McPeek waited inside the rail as the stewards studied the photo of the finish before they were ready to cross the track to see the horse and jockey Brian Hernandez.
Kenny Rice of NBC Sports stopped McPeek and asked for an interview. He asked the only question that a worldwide television audience wanted him to ask:
“Did he win?”
“They haven’t posted it yet,” McPeek said. “You don’t assume anything in this business.”
And then everything went crazy in Kenny McPeek’s world, even crazier than it had on Friday when McPeek and Hernandez teamed to win the Kentucky Oaks on Thorpedo Anna, breaking an 0-for-33 record the trainer and jockey carried into the weekend in those two races. Only four times had somebody pulled off the improbable Oaks/Derby double.
Somebody in a bright red sport jacket, black bow tie and straw hat started dancing and pounding on McPeek’s broad shoulders. Another guy in a bright red and white striped suit began screaming and jumping and looking for somebody to hug.
“Yesss, yesss, yessss, it’s up,” the gentleman roared.
Somebody standing behind them told Kenny and Sherri McPeek they had just became the first trainer to win the Oaks and Derby on the same weekend since the legendary Ben Jones in 1952. Did it at odds of 18-to-1, did it in the closest Derby finish in 28 years.
And Rice understood it was time to end the interview so Kenny and Sherri could slip under the rail and into the track’s other winner’s circle, the special one that is only open one time a year for the folks who win the Kentucky Derby.
OFFICIAL.
Mystik Dan, the No. 3 horse, won Kentucky Derby 150. He covered the mile-and-a-quarter in 2:03.34, paying $39.22, $16.32 and $10.
“In case you didn’t realize, Kenny McPeek just won the Kentucky Derby,” Rice told his audience.
All three video boards confirmed it. So did the picture the stewards studied.
“That’s tight,” McPeek said. “But we’ll take it.”
“The longest few minutes of my life,” Hernandez said.
Tucked against the rail on a ground-saving trip similar to the one Hernandez gave Thorpedo Anna Friday, Mystik Dan had indeed reached the finish line first.
It was a nose back to the hard-charging Sierra Leone, who was closer to the middle of the track. And then another nose back to Forever Young, the colt from Japan who was positioned between the top two finishers.
“The post position helped us a lot, the inside draw (post 3),” McPeek said.
“But Brian just did an amazing job. Just a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant jockey and ride.”
There was a reason that McPeek stuck on the word brilliant and used it three times. Hernandez is 38, but this was only his fifth Derby mount. He’d never hit the board. Never been close really, finishing 12th, 8th, 9th and 11th.
On Saturday, Hernandez rode a race that would have dazzled Angel Cordero and Laffit Pincay. He urged Mystik Dan out of the gate sharply, ahead of Dornoch and Sierra Leone, who broke slower from the 1 and 2 post positions.
He positioned Mystik Dan near the rail in the first furlong and never moved away from it, saving every critical inch of ground.
“It still hasn’t sunk in, it’s so unbelievable,” Hernandez said. “We decided we were going to roll the dice (and hug the rail).”
Track Phantom, Stronghold, Just Steel, Epic Ride and the favored Fierceness all held their positions ahead of Hernandez for nearly a mile. The fractions were legitimate 22.97 for the opening quarter, 46.63 for the half mile, 1:11.31 for three quarters and the mile in 1:37.46
But when the horses crackled into the final turn, Hernandez and Mystik Dan had the lead, the rail and the shortest path to victory.
Sierra Leone closed the way that his past performances suggested that he was bred to close. Forever Young ran like the horse who had won all five of his career starts.
They made up several lengths in the final eighth of a mile.
They just failed to make up the final nose.
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