CRAWFORD | Setting the scene as Kentucky Derby week dawns in Louisville | Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Kentucky Derby week dawned in Louisville cool and cloudy, with a brisk wind on the Churchill Downs backside.

The picture for this year's Derby isn't much clearer. Uncertainty fills the air.

There is a favorite, but not an overwhelming favorite. Omaha Beach has won three straight races and will be the morning line favorite, according to oddsmaker Mike Battaglia, but there is no Justify in this field, no one who stepped off the van to 50 cameras clicking with every step.

There are five Grade I winners in this Kentucky Derby, and three of them are trained by Bob Baffert. But two of his best were beaten by Omaha Beach, trained by Hall of Famer Richard Mandella.

The two are neighbors in the Santa Anita stable area.

“He was giving me a lot of Derby advice,” Mandella said. “Then I won the Rebel (Stakes), and he started throwing me curveballs. So I started going to Wayne Lukas.”

Baffert, who won his fifth Kentucky Derby last year, will try to match “Plain” Ben Jones with No. 6 this year. He’s bringing a trio of contenders: 2-year-old champion Game Winner, who ran second to Omaha Beach in the Rebel Stakes, Santa Anita Derby winner Roadster and Improbable, who ran second to Omaha Beach in the Arkansas Derby.

“I’m just glad to be here with good horses,” he said. “But Omaha Beach is the favorite, and should be the favorite. He’s earned it. I’ve tried with two of them and couldn’t beat him. So I’m hoping Roadster can.”

Mandella is one of three Hall of Famers looking for his first Kentucky Derby victory. Asked about his advice for his Santa Anita neighbor, Baffert said: “Yeah, I’ve got some: Wait for the Preakness.”

Steve Asmussen’s Long Range Toddy won the second division of the Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Park before finishing a disappointing sixth in the slop in the Arkansas Derby. Long Range Toddy will be the 20th Derby starter for Asmussen, the most of any trainer without a win in the race.

Mott has Tacitus, winner of the Wood Memorial, and Country House, third in the Arkansas Derby. He trained the great Cigar and has won just about everything, but the Derby has been elusive.

Shug McGaughey is a Hall of Fame trainer in his own right. He doesn’t come to the Derby often. He experienced heartbreak in 1989 when he ran second and third with Easy Goer and Saarland. He finally won the roses in 2013 with Orb, and is back for the first time since with Code of Honor, winner of the Fountain of Youth Stakes.

He knows how those trainers looking for their first Derby win feel. But he’s not about to sympathize.

“I’ll sympathize with them next year if I don’t have a horse in,” he said. “This year, they’re on their own.”

There are others. Maximum Security was a $16,000 claiming horse who, for college basketball fans, may be the Gonzaga of this Derby field. All he does is win by large margins. He beat Code of Honor by better than seven lengths in the Grade 1 Florida Derby. Conventional wisdom is that he won’t get away with slow fractions in the Kentucky Derby, but he hasn’t been passed in four races and is one of only two horses in this field who has posted back-to-back triple-digit speed figures.

The other, Tax, was claimed from Claiborne Farm last October and has put up three straight triple-digit efforts, including a win in the Grade 3 Withers Stakes.

If you’re from these parts, when the calendar hits Sunday of Derby week, your soul quickens. Hoofbeats and heartbeats start to share a rhythm.

Churchill Downs training — From the rail, Country House, Tacitus and Win Win Win train in close quarters at Churchill Downs.
Eric Crawford photo.

I was standing around the far turn at Churchill on Sunday morning when three horses on the track for their final pre-Derby work actually, for a moment, looked as if they started to race. These are tightly controlled runs, but these three, Tacitus, Country House and Win Win Win rounded the corner three-wide and stretching their legs, pounding the track and zipping past as if they were ready to run an early division of the race right then.

All of horse racing is under a cloud at the moment. A difficult winter at Santa Anita saw 23 horse fatalities during a meet that actually was suspended to deal with the issue. Safety concerns are front and center. The future of the sport in California has been up for debate.

In Kentucky, those concerns are reverberating. They will no doubt be a topic this week at Churchill Downs, as they have been for the past month.

But on Saturday night, as the track opened its spring meet, Churchill showed that it can still throw a party with the best of them.

As that trio of horses rounded the turn in training, it was a good reminder that they were bred to run. The breed came into existence for speed. Leave them in a field long enough untended and young thoroughbreds will race themselves, without need of jockey or crowd.

As the spotlight goes up on the centerpiece of the sport, Kentucky is looking for a middle road between the health of the horse and the health of the sport. That discussion isn’t going to stop, nor should it.

But beginning on a cool Sunday morning under the famed Churchill Downs spires, Kentucky’s historic party begins again.

"The Kentucky Derby, whatever it is—a race, an emotion, a turbulence, an explosion," author John Steinbeck once wrote in Louisville's Courier-Journal, "is one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things I have ever experienced."

Happy Derby to all.