The 150th Kentucky Derby will be run on Saturday, May 4, at the famous Churchill Downs racecourse. The sesquicentennial celebration is shaping up to be a good one, with a loaded field of competitors backed by the always-high energy surrounding the Louisville race track. It should be a memorable race.
As post time approaches, it is important to take stock of the horses the audience will see on the racetrack and the odds each has to win. Part of what makes the Derby so popular is that there are very few regular competitors. The audience is annually introduced to a new grouping of horses and jockeys. There is comfort in the familiar, true, but there's always something special about the Derby and the horse that gets to capture lightning in the bottle yearly.
Here's what this year's crop looks like.
Kentucky Derby Horses 2024
Below is a full list of the 20 horses (and their morning line odds to win, as of time of publication) participating in this year's Kentucky Derby, as per the event's official website.
Fierceness: 5-2 Sierra Leone: 3-1 Catching Freedom: 8-1 Forever Young: 10-1 Just A Touch: 10-1 Dornoch: 20-1 Honor Marie: 20-1 Just Steel: 20-1 Track Phantom: 20-1 Stronghold: 20-1 Reilience: 20-1 Mystik Dan: 20-1 Catalyic: 30-1 T O Password: 30-1 Endlessly: 30-1 Domestic Product: 30-1 Epic Ride: 30-1 Grand Mo The First: 50-1 Society Man: 50-1 West Saratoga: 50-1
Each year, 20 horses are permitted to run in the Kentucky Derby. It was not always this way, however. The first Kentucky Derby, held 150 years ago, had 15 horses in the field and the number fluctuated from year to year until 1974. That year's Derby featured 23 horses, which prompted criticism from assembled media and the jockeys themselves. From 1974 on, the Derby was capped at 20 horses to ensure the field was competitive without putting too many bodies on the racetrack.
It's also part of what makes the Derby unique. Other major horse races, such as the Preakness and Belmot Stakes, have a maximum of 14 horses participating every year. When the question was raised a few years ago of why the Derby stuck with 20 instead of whittling down the field to match other events of its ilk, the length and popularity of the race was cited by Churchill Downs' senior director of communications, per the Courier-Journal.
In short, the Derby's 1 1/4-mile distance permits there to be more horses on the track, and as the capstone event of the year it can be afforded a larger field.
How Does a Horse Qualify For the Kentucky Derby?
To qualify for the 2024 Kentucky Derby, each horse in the field had to run in a series of designated races, titled The Road to the Kentucky Derby. These races, which number in the dozens, take place all over the world between each Derby. The top five horses in each race are awarded a certain number of points.
At the end of the racing season, the top 20 horses in terms of points totaled throughout the year are awarded a post at the Kentucky Derby.
Now you're primed and ready to engage in the horse racing discourse for this year's Kentucky Derby. Enjoy the race.
The chemo port is hidden beneath three layers of shirts and peals of laughter. Larry Demeritte is having far too much fun these days to waste precious time worrying about the cancer assailing his body. There is a dream horse to train, a dream race to run, a late-career climax to soak up.
Demeritte is flashing toothy smiles and telling jokes outside Barn 42 at Churchill Downs, the happiest man in racing’s happiest place this time of year. It’s the last Saturday in April, which means we’re approaching the first Saturday in May, the high holy day in American thoroughbred racing. The 70-something trainer (he won’t give up an exact age) has the first Kentucky Derby runner in his life in West Saratoga, a typical Demeritte bargain find that he’s turned into a graded stakes winner.
Demeritte eyed the gray son of Exaggerator in the auction ring in September 2022, one of the last horses up for bid at that Keeneland Yearling Sale in Lexington. He counseled owner Harry Veruchi to spend $11,000 for the colt, and Veruchi named him after the street he grew up on in Littleton, Colo. West Saratoga has since returned $460,140 in purse money on that modest initial investment.
Now, West Saratoga will try to win the $5 million Derby on Saturday. He is a long shot at 50–1, winless in his last four starts since capturing the Iroquois Stakes at Churchill last September. But Demeritte is an even longer shot—to be here with a horse, yes, but really to be here at all.
Demeritte says he was first diagnosed with cancer in 1996 and given five years to live. He says he was diagnosed again in 2018, and endured a bone marrow transplant at Vanderbilt University. He was given six months that time. He’s still here, radiating optimism and joy.
“I always say, doctors can’t count,” Demeritte says with a high-pitched giggle. “The doctor said I have cancer. I don’t say that, O.K.? I’m gonna do the treatments just in case they’re right, but I don’t look at it like I have anything wrong with me. I don’t ever sit and worry about what I have or what I’m dealing with.”
This is what Demeritte says he’s dealing with: multiple myeloma and amyloidosis. He gets a five-hour chemo treatment via a drip once a month in Frankfort, Ky. The most recent round of chemo was last week, knocking him back for a couple of days and limiting his duties with the string of horses he stables in Lexington. His legs swell up and fatigue sets in after working all day.
“There were some days when I didn’t think I’d survive,” he says. “I’d go to bed and I’m so sick and my prayer is, If I don’t wake up on this side, God will wake me on his side.”
The eternal wake-up call hasn’t come. And so Demeritte keeps showing up at the barn in the morning—representing his native Bahamas and diversity in horse racing, where he will be just the second Black trainer to saddle a Derby horse since 1951.
He drove his Toyota Tundra west on Interstate 64 to Louisville with a horse trailer attached and West Saratoga onboard late last week. He oversaw the colt’s final major pre-Derby workout Saturday. After a lifetime at the racetrack—including the last 48 years in the United States—the best medicine for Larry Demeritte now is seeing West Saratoga.
“Some days, my boys have to give me a ride home, I’m so sick,” Demeritte says. “But what’s the use staying at home feeling sorry for yourself, when the horses are going to bring a smile to your face watching them train? No, you’ve got to get up and go. Then go back home afterward and lie down after they make you feel good.”
Says Veruchi: “[The horse] is keeping him alive.”
West Saratoga is a long shot in the Kentucky Derby, but won the the Iroquois Stakes at Churchill last September.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
Larry Demeritte doesn’t hunt pigeons at Churchill Downs anymore. But he did, half a lifetime ago as a fresh American immigrant, in the 1970s.
Demeritte says he was living in one of the barns on the Churchill backside where he was working as a groom. He put his childhood Boy Scout training to work, climbing on the barn roof with a slingshot to take aim at the birds that have roosted there since time immemorial. That was dinner.
“When you’re a Boy Scout, you learn survival,” he says. “So all we’d do is take a little rice, cooked rice, put it in a brown paper bag and go and get the sling and get the little birds. We put them on a hanger and barbecued them. You had to learn how to catch fire with one match. I know what it is to survive.”
Eating pigeons was part of life growing up in the Bahamas. So was going to the racetrack, where Larry’s father was a trainer. He and his brothers would get out of school at noon on Fridays and catch a ride on a neighbor’s truck to the track—against the wishes of his mom and grandmother.
“We’d get a beating every Friday night, but that didn’t matter,” Demeritte says. “We’d go every Friday to the races.”
As a teenager, Larry began training his own horses. He says he had 25 horses by age 19 and was winning training titles. But he’d been smitten by Secretariat winning the Triple Crown in 1973 and knew he wanted to experience American racing. He came to the U.S. in ’76 as a groom, starting at the bottom.
In 1977, he was the groom for Silver Series, a talented horse that won five races that year, including the Hawthorne Derby, Ohio Derby and American Derby Handicap. “I slept with this horse,” a young Demeritte told the Chicago Tribune during that summer run of wins.
By 1981, Demeritte struck out on his own as a trainer. Early returns were meager. He was 0-for-48, according to Equibase statistics, before breaking through with Tom Tale in December ’84. Demeritte’s business remained modest; he was a quintessential ham-and-egg trainer on the Kentucky circuit, working the claiming game and looking for bargains at sales.
The Derby was a dream, but a fuzzy one. Demeritte didn’t often trade in horses of that caliber. He ran some horses on the Derby Day undercard, and the 1998 Louisville Courier-Journal Derby special section included a photo of Demeritte and his wife, Beryl. The caption on the picture noted that Demeritte’s tie was “bearing the coat of arms of his native Bahamas.” (Another photo subject in the special section that year was “New York developer Donald Trump” who “brought Melania Knauss, of Vienna, Austria, to the Derby.” Trump told the paper he was betting on Stephen Got Even in that Derby; the horse finished 14th.)
The following year, Demeritte guided the $3,000 purchase of a yearling named Daring Pegasus. Veruchi was a co-owner, his first partnership with Demeritte. A strong 2-year-old campaign had the horse on the 2001 Derby Trail, but the step up in competition in Derby prep races was more than Daring Pegasus could handle.
Demeritte moved into the realm of six-figure annual purse earnings in the 2000s but never landed a breakthrough horse. In ’10, he finally recorded his first graded stakes win with Memorial Maniac (that remains Demeritte’s highest-earning year, at $459,616). He didn’t win another until West Saratoga captured the Iroquois last fall.
Demeritte and West Saratoga are both long shots.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
“I told the boys in the barn, this is our big horse,” Demeritte says. “This is the first horse I’ve trained in a long time that has gears. You have to manage him right. I feel like the route we took was the best route for him, to get him here without a lot of stress. When the right day comes with the big boys, he’ll be ready for them.”
The big boys are probably not game-planning to beat West Saratoga. But all Derby dreams are alive at this juncture, and Demeritte is as optimistic about this race as he is about his cancer fight.
“Oh, he knows he’s going to win,” says Veruchi, who walked to the old Centennial Race Track as a kid in Colorado, then went on to own a car dealership. “He says we’re going to win. I always ask him, ‘What if we don’t do good in this race, do you have a Plan B?’ No. No Plan B.
“Fifty-to-one, horse don’t know. He has no idea what the odds are. All he knows is he’s going to get out there and run his ass off.”
Time-honored tradition calls for the winning trainer of the Derby to meet the media on the Sunday morning after the race. It’s an easy duty, basking in the glow of a lifetime achievement. But if West Saratoga wins the Run for the Roses, don’t look for Larry Demeritte at Barn 42 on Sunday.
He says he will be at Fork of Elkhorn Baptist Church in Midway, Ky., as usual, taking part in worship services and a men’s discussion group. Veruchi went to church with Demeritte this past Sunday.
“My encouragement is always that the men reach out to the young men in the church,” Demeritte says of his discussion group theme. “I have a good Sunday school with a lot of men successful in life. We have to reach the younger people, so they can have hope. Kids give up too easily. That’s something I don’t want to see. I want a kid to follow their dream and find their goal in life and work at it, and be successful at it.”
The Derby has had an endless wellspring of people and animals that are easy to root for. Larry Demeritte and West Saratoga now join that age-old list. But Demeritte sees his role more as a representative for several groups than the object of affection.
He’s here for Black people in racing, who once dominated the Derby in its early days but have been marginalized for more than a century. It’s why he employs several young Black assistants, such as Donte Lowery, the exercise rider and groom for West Saratoga, who says his boss “inspires me in a big way.”
Demeritte and Lowery laugh together outside of the barn.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
“That’s why I do what I do,” Demeritte says. “And that’s why I help keep young people around me. That’s my encouragement. I don’t want it to take this long for Donte or my other boys at the barn to have to wait this long to go to the Derby as a trainer. That’s my goal.
“We are linked. When something goes bad, they group us as a Black community. So if something good is happening for the Black community, why wouldn’t I bring them along? Let them experience the goodness of this country. There is so much good here in America. I get so upset when I see the kids not appreciating their country.”
He’s here for cancer patients. The Kentucky Oaks on Friday is a long-standing breast cancer awareness day, rife with pink regalia and a survivors’ walk on the track. Derby Day now has its own rallying cry for those fighting the disease.
“I feel, I guess, like I’m on a mission,” Demeritte says. “The Kentucky Derby’s great, but I feel it’s deeper than that. If I can be [an] encouragement to people with cancer, if I can help someone, encourage them to make their journey easier, that’s what I want to do.”
And he’s here for his Bahamian brethren. About 20 family members will be at Churchill on Saturday, many of them coming from the Bahamas, here to see a moment decades in the making and wholly improbable.
“This means a whole lot, more than really I can describe,” Demeritte says. “This goes very deep. I feel like I’m representing a lot of people, O.K.?”
Larry Demeritte is representing a lot of people with a smile on his ageless face and a chemo port in his chest. He is a long shot in the Kentucky Derby and in life, a guy who shouldn’t be at Churchill Downs Saturday—literally and figuratively. But a bargain colt has brought him this far, and now there is no keeping him away, no keeping him down.
The dominant news of the day in Kentucky on May 17, 1875, was the death of John C. Breckinridge, a U.S. Congressman turned Confederate Civil War general. Breckinridge died at the age of 54 at his home in Lexington, Ky., a divisive historical figure. His obituary filled several columns in the next day’s The Courier-Journal newspaper.
On page 4 of that Courier-Journal, a relatively modest headline read, “Derby Day.” The accompanying story chronicled the Kentucky Derby victory by the colt Aristides, in what the paper termed “a brilliant inauguration of the Louisville Jockey Club Association.” The founder of the association was Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., grandson of William Clark, one of the principals in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The originator of the Derby traces his sire line to the early days of the United States, when President Thomas Jefferson commissioned two explorers in 1804 to traverse the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. That’s how deeply intertwined the Kentucky Derby is with American history.
The Courier-Journal declared that first Derby day to be “a great success at every foist, and the promise of the future assured.” That promise has been kept. That future has remained assured far longer than the newspaper could have envisioned at the time.
The 150th Kentucky Derby will be run Saturday, the longest continuously contested sporting event in the United States. The race predates the automobile and the airplane, radio and television, Edison’s light bulb and Einstein’s relativity. It is the anchor of American sporting longevity.
Wars, contagions and economic calamities have not unmoored it. World War II necessitated moving the 1945 edition to June, but the race was run. The COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t cause a cancellation, though it did present such a threat that the 2020 race was pushed into September. Evolving societal tastes, concerns about equine safety, a million other things to do—none have interrupted an event that began with Ulysses S. Grant in office, one decade after Robert E. Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox Court House.
There were 37 states in the union at the time of the first running. The Rose Bowl, which began in 1901, is called the Granddaddy of Them All—but the Derby could be the Granddaddy’s daddy.
From 1877 winner Baden-Baden to Joe Biden, the Derby abides. From 1899 winner Manuel to Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Derby endures. From 1958 winner Tim Tam to TikTok, the Derby prevails.
In a world of unsettlingly swift change, the sameness of the Kentucky Derby is a powerful force. The traditions are immovable.
It has always been run at Churchill Downs, named for two men who were cousins of Clark and provided the land for the track in Louisville’s South End. It has always been run on the dirt course. It has always been a race for 3-year-old horses. It has, since 1896, been a 1¼-mile race, shortened from the 1½ miles of the first 21 runnings. That’s never going to change.
An overall view of Churchill Downs.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
For 146 of the 149 previous editions, it has been run in May—and since 1946, the first Saturday, specifically. The dogwoods bloom, the Kentucky bluegrass grows thick and the Derby comes, every spring. On the calendar of iconic vernal sporting events, there is the Masters, the Derby and the Indianapolis 500. The Derby is 59 years older than the former and 36 years older than the latter.
Churchill isn’t quite Saint Andrews, which was established in 1843, but it’s ancient by American sporting venue standards. The signature Twin Spires were built atop the grandstand in 1895, 17 years before Fenway Park unveiled its Green Monster. The white-paneled grandstand has been remodeled many times, with additions and enhancements annually (a spectacular $200 million, multilevel paddock addition debuts this year), but it retains an old-world feel.
The history is palpable. The names of every Derby winner are on the grandstand walls in chronological order; the barn area on the backside of the track is timeless. Walk by Barn 42, peep in Stall 21, and it’s easy to imagine Secretariat’s chestnut head poking out of there 51 years ago, before Big Red broke the Derby record at 1 minute, 59⅖ seconds, a legend in the making. Listen to the horse’s hooves thump on the dirt during predawn training and you can envision the great Citation doing the same thing, in the same place, 76 years ago.
Ron Turcotte aboard Secretariat (left) edges ahead of Laffit Pincay Jr. aboard Sham (right) near the finish of the 99th Kentucky Derby in 1973.
The Courier-Journal-USA TODAY Sports
For the 150,000 patrons who will flood the massive property on Central Avenue on Saturday—at lamentably exclusive prices, with the cheapest admission tickets now soaring to $130—the same rituals play out every Derby day. What keeps these traditions alive? Simple but powerful things: cold, hard cash; nostalgia; vague romance; one hell of a party; and an incredibly dramatic two-minute race.
The allure of making a buck on who wins and loses is deeply ingrained in sporting culture, but horse racing might have been the original gambling gateway drug. It’s an old sport that embraced wagering early on and never let go. With most American sports betting illegal outside of Las Vegas for decades, racetracks were one place to get down a few bets without needing a bookie and a low profile.
Correspondingly, there are generations of Americans who went to the racetrack with their parents and saw them place wagers (maybe two dollars, maybe $2,000) at the windows. There is a throwback appeal to buying an actual, print Daily Racing Form or track program, decoding the hieroglyphics of the past-performance charts, then handing over paper currency in exchange for a betting slip. (More and more racing fans conduct business on their phones, of course, but mutuel clerks are by no means extinct.)
The romance stems from a slightly different form of nostalgia. Nobody wears formal attire to sporting events anymore—except at the Derby. This is the women-in-hats, men-in-seersucker capital of the world, a dress-up day that runs the fashion spectrum from classy to gaudy. (The fit checks help make the Derby a highly Instagrammable event, which boosts popularity with younger generations.)
A woman wears a derby hat for the 2023 Kentucky Derby.
Louisville Courier-Journal-USA TODAY
Mint juleps must be consumed, even if those purchased from track vendors would make high-end mixologists cringe. Cocktail culture has had a renaissance in America, but at Churchill Downs, it never left. The party aspect is very much part of the Derby experience for many patrons. (When it’s time to stagger out after about 10 hours on-site, a large number of those beautiful people are drunk, dazed and disheveled—and wishing they wore more sensible shoes.)
The race itself is exquisitely unchanged. The horses and jockeys still largely do their jobs in the same way they always have (though training methods and breeding philosophies have changed more substantially). Thoroughbreds are faster today than they were in the 1870s, but not necessarily faster than in the 1970s. (They’re also less durable.)
Then and now, they’re beautiful animals in motion and at rest, which is part of what has always drawn talented writers to the sport. When you combine all the elements of the Derby—the massive crowd, the revelry, the buildup to the razor-sharp tension of the competition itself—the elements of romantic storytelling are always present. From the great Sports Illustrated writer William Nack, recounting his first Derby as a teenager in 1958:
“I can still see the writers gathered around that coppery bright chestnut, Silky Sullivan, already a stretch-running immortal, as his groom gave him a sudsy, warm bath on the patch of grass outside his barn. … The sun was up and counting change at her old lemonade stand in the sky, and a thin patina of sweat made Tim Tam’s chocolate coat glisten in the tree-sifted light. He was coming to the race beautifully, his eyes afire, as though lit by a Bedouin torch passed down through generations, from the windswept deserts of Arabia to the ancient rolling leas of England and Kentucky.”
Similar passages could be written this week, though perhaps not as lyrically. The morning gallops, the sudsy baths, the sunbeams warming horses and humans—the eternal Derby week sensory experiences have been handed down. So, too, have the rhythms of the race—the explosion of noise when the starting gate opens, the charge into the first turn, the jockeys parrying for position through the backstretch and making bold moves on the far turn, the withering stretch run to the finish line as roars rain down, the jubilation of the winners. Two minutes and change packs a reliable emotional wallop.
Despite that sameness, each year carries its own sense of urgency. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event for the equine competitors. A thoroughbred foal crop of some 30,000 is whittled down across three years to no more than 20 who load in the starting gate. “You don’t get any do-overs,” says trainer Todd Pletcher, who will saddle favored Fierceness on Saturday.
Massive amounts of brain power are exerted in trying to figure out who will win, but then the gates open and randomness is in play. In a two-minute event, a single jockey calculation or miscalculation can make all the difference. A single stroke of good or bad racing luck can decide who goes down in history. Some horses, like Seattle Slew in 1977, confirm their greatness on Derby day. Some horses fluke their way into fame and fortune; the last two Derby winners, Rich Strike in 2022 and Mage in ’23, never won another race.
The first Kentucky Derby game story in The Courier-Journal in 1875 rhapsodized about the performance of Aristides: “Right gallantly did the game and speedy son of Leamington and Sarong answer the call on his forces, for he held his own all down the stretch in spite of the most determined rushes on the part of Volcano and Verdigris, and slashed under the wire the winner of one of the most fastest and hardest run races ever seen on the track.”
Saturday, they will run that race for the 150th time. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will be.
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