CRAWFORD | Bill Mott returns to the Derby with a different kind of horse, and a rare opportunity | Derby News

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Bill Mott has always had a pretty clear idea of what a Kentucky Derby horse is supposed to look like.

It is supposed to be seasoned and educated. It is supposed to have learned its lessons early, preferably at two, when the stakes are smaller and the consequences more forgiving.

It is, in other words, supposed to be ready.

Chief Wallabee is… getting there. Though it must be said, not too terribly long ago, Mott would not have brought him to this race.

He has run three times. He is talented, still learning, occasionally distracted, and recently equipped with blinkers to help him focus on the task at hand, which is a polite way of saying he sometimes forgets what that task is.

And yet, his stall at Churchill Downs is right next to 2025 Derby winner Sovereignty's. The two have been going to the track together this week. Maybe something is rubbing off.

By Mott's own long-held standards, this would not be the usual path to the first Saturday in May. Chief Wallabee didn't run at two. He arrived at the Derby through a late opening in the field, not a carefully constructed campaign. He is, in the classical sense, not the blueprint.

Then again, the blueprint keeps getting redrawn.

And on the backstretch at Churchill Downs this week, the people who watch horses for a living have been revising their opinions. Chief Wallabee has become what they call the “wise guy” horse, the one the insiders are quietly moving toward. At 8-1, he is the fourth betting choice in Nick Tammaro’s morning line, and the new oddsmaker at Churchill said he assigned those odds based on the colt’s sharp training, and Hall of Fame trainer.

Last Monday, Chief Wallabee worked five furlongs in 1:00.01, galloped out powerfully through six furlongs, and did it all with Junior Alvarado offering little encouragement at any point. It was, by any measure, a serious work.

Mott did not dress it up.

"I feel good about our horse," he said. "I think he's training very well. A little less experience, a later start, but he's very talented and has a wonderful disposition."

That's about as effusive as Bill Mott gets.

A year ago, Sovereignty wowed everybody. Chief Wallabee hasn’t quite done that. But he has wowed as many folks as anyone else so far this year.

Still, Mott notes, Sovereignty came into last year's Derby with a foundation. Three races at two. A stakes win at Churchill. A strong Fountain of Youth. He arrived proven. Chief Wallabee has arrived talented.

"He lacks the experience and doesn't have the foundation Sovereignty had coming in," Mott said. "But sometimes talent can make up for that. I don't make any predictions. But he's capable."

What has changed — and what hasn't — is where the story lives.

For decades, Mott trained as if the Kentucky Derby were something that might happen, not something that had to. He built horses for the long run, not the early headline, and if that meant arriving at Churchill Downs a little less often than some of his peers, so be it.

The Derby did not define him.

Now he has two of them. One that arrived after a 23-minute inquiry, and one that needed no explanation at all. The second one, as he admitted at the time, felt better.

And if Chief Wallabee runs well enough on the first Saturday in May, Mott would become just the seventh trainer ever to win consecutive Derbies — the first since Bob Baffert did it in 1997 and 1998.

He was asked this week whether the Derby had caught up to him, or whether he had caught up to it.

"I've always believed that a Derby winner needed to have run as a two-year-old," he said. "Of course, we're not in that situation. It seems like everything is changing a little bit. There's a lot of horses coming in with fewer races."

That doesn't mean he has suddenly become someone else. But the modern Derby doesn't wait for the perfect horse, and Mott knows it.

There is one more layer to this Derby for Mott, and it is not entirely uncomplicated.

His son Riley is here too, with horses of his own in the race. The father will be watching from a careful distance from his wife Tina, whose rooting interest may be split. But Mott confesses he knows which direction the split falls.

"I'm going to stand away from her," Mott told Jennie Rees of the Kentucky HBPA this week, with a slight smile, "just in case one of Riley's is running good."

He was asked about the dynamic, rooting for his son while running against him.

"There's no question about it," he said. "She'd be excited for me if we were running well. But believe me, she would like nothing more (than for Riley to win). I hope we both run well. It's so hard to win these races. Just to finish in the top four is a big accomplishment. It really is."

And so here he is again, a year after finally experiencing the Derby the way it was meant to be experienced, standing on the same backstretch, his champion in the next stall, watching a different kind of horse try to learn the same lesson.

He will not tell you this is any different. He will say what he always says, that every horse is its own case, every year its own story, every race its own challenge.

And he will mean it.

But he also knows something now that he didn't always have to consider.

When the opportunity shows up, it doesn't always wait for the perfect horse.

Sometimes it just asks if this one will do.