The 2024 Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs came right down to the wire.
Mystik Dan edged Sierra Leone and Forever Young by a nose on Saturday, surging ahead on the final turn and barely holding on to secure an upset victory.
The race was so close it took officials several minutes to officially proclaim Mystik Dan as the winner.
Mystik Dan, guided by jockey Brian Hernandez Jr., previously finished third at the Arkansas Derby in March and won the Grade III Southwest Stakes in February.
“Brian just did an amazing job,” Mystik Dan’s trainer Ken McPeek said after the race. “Just a brilliant, brilliant jockey and ride.”
McPeek completed a career Triple Crown as a trainer, previously winning the Preakness in 2020 with Swiss Skydiver and the 2002 Belmont Stakes with Sarava.
Mystik Dan will have a chance to notch the second title of a Triple Crown pursuit on May 18 at the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore.
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 racingâs happiest place this time of year. Itâs the last Saturday in April, which means weâre approaching the first Saturday in May, the high holy day in American thoroughbred racing. The 70-something trainer (he wonât give up an exact age) has the first Kentucky Derby runner in his life in West Saratoga, a typical Demeritte bargain find that heâs 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 50â1, winless in his last four starts since capturing the Iroquois Stakes at Churchill last September. But Demeritte is an even longer shotâto 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. Heâs still here, radiating optimism and joy.
âI always say, doctors canât count,â Demeritte says with a high-pitched giggle. âThe doctor said I have cancer. I donât say that, O.K.? Iâm gonna do the treatments just in case theyâre right, but I donât look at it like I have anything wrong with me. I donât ever sit and worry about what I have or what Iâm dealing with.â
This is what Demeritte says heâs 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.
âThere were some days when I didnât think Iâd survive,â he says. âIâd go to bed and Iâm so sick and my prayer is, If I donât wake up on this side, God will wake me on his side.â
The eternal wake-up call hasnât come. And so Demeritte keeps showing up at the barn in the morningârepresenting 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 coltâs final major pre-Derby workout Saturday. After a lifetime at the racetrackâincluding the last 48 years in the United Statesâthe best medicine for Larry Demeritte now is seeing West Saratoga.
âSome days, my boys have to give me a ride home, Iâm so sick,â Demeritte says. âBut whatâs 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, youâve got to get up and go. Then go back home afterward and lie down after they make you feel good.â
Says Veruchi: â[The horse] is keeping him alive.â
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 doesnât 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.
âWhen youâre a Boy Scout, you learn survival,â he says. âSo all weâd 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.â
Eating pigeons was part of life growing up in the Bahamas. So was going to the racetrack, where Larryâs father was a trainer. He and his brothers would get out of school at noon on Fridays and catch a ride on a neighborâs truck to the trackâagainst the wishes of his mom and grandmother.
âWeâd get a beating every Friday night, but that didnât matter,â Demeritte says. âWeâd go every Friday to the races.â
As a teenager, Larry began training his own horses. He says he had 25 horses by age 19 and was winning training titles. But heâd 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 â76 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. âI slept with this horse,â 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 â84. Demeritteâs 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 didnât 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 Demeritteâs tie was âbearing the coat of arms of his native Bahamas.â (Another photo subject in the special section that year was âNew York developer Donald Trumpâ who âbrought Melania Knauss, of Vienna, Austria, to the Derby.â 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 â10, he finally recorded his first graded stakes win with Memorial Maniac (that remains Demeritteâs highest-earning year, at $459,616). He didnât win another until West Saratoga captured the Iroquois last fall.
Demeritte and West Saratoga are both long shots.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
âI told the boys in the barn, this is our big horse,â Demeritte says. âThis is the first horse Iâve 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, heâll be ready for them.â
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.
âOh, he knows heâs going to win,â says Veruchi, who walked to the old Centennial Race Track as a kid in Colorado, then went on to own a car dealership. âHe says weâre going to win. I always ask him, âWhat if we donât do good in this race, do you have a Plan B?â No. No Plan B.
âFifty-to-one, horse donât know. He has no idea what the odds are. All he knows is heâs going to get out there and run his ass off.â
Time-honored tradition calls for the winning trainer of the Derby to meet the media on the Sunday morning after the race. Itâs an easy duty, basking in the glow of a lifetime achievement. But if West Saratoga wins the Run for the Roses, donât 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 menâs discussion group. Veruchi went to church with Demeritte this past Sunday.
âMy encouragement is always that the men reach out to the young men in the church,â Demeritte says of his discussion group theme. âI 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. Thatâs something I donât 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.â
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.
Heâs here for Black people in racing, who once dominated the Derby in its early days but have been marginalized for more than a century. Itâs why he employs several young Black assistants, such as Donte Lowery, the exercise rider and groom for West Saratoga, who says his boss âinspires me in a big way.â
Demeritte and Lowery laugh together outside of the barn.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
âThatâs why I do what I do,â Demeritte says. âAnd thatâs why I help keep young people around me. Thatâs my encouragement. I donât 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. Thatâs my goal.
âWe are linked. When something goes bad, they group us as a Black community. So if something good is happening for the Black community, why wouldnât 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.â
Heâs here for cancer patients. The Kentucky Oaks on Friday is a long-standing breast cancer awareness day, rife with pink regalia and a survivorsâ walk on the track. Derby Day now has its own rallying cry for those fighting the disease.
âI feel, I guess, like Iâm on a mission,â Demeritte says. âThe Kentucky Derbyâs great, but I feel itâs 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, thatâs what I want to do.â
And heâs 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.
âThis means a whole lot, more than really I can describe,â Demeritte says. âThis goes very deep. I feel like Iâm representing a lot of people, O.K.?â
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 shouldnât be at Churchill Downs Saturdayâliterally and figuratively. But a bargain colt has brought him this far, and now there is no keeping him away, no keeping him down.
This week, University of Kentucky redshirt sophomore Jackson Smith announced his commitment to the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers from the transfer portal. Smith spent the previous two seasons with the Wildcats where he never saw game action, but was twice named to the SEC academic honor roll.
Extremely excited to continue my academic and athletic career at WKU! Go Tops! pic.twitter.com/RtOPUHeFzr
Smith was an extremely accomplished specialist in high school, winning National Specialist of the Year three years in a row (2019, 2020, 2021) from ProKicker.com. The same outlet named him as #1 kicker/punter in the 2022 recruiting class. Smith is also the son of former All-SEC punter Andy Smith, who also played at Kentucky.
Current WKU field goal kicker Lucas Carneiro, also a redshirt sophomore, was a CUSA honorable mention after going a perfect 47-for-47 on PATs in 2023. He was 9-12 on field goal attempts last season. The starting punter position will be different in 2023 after Tom Ellard's transfer to Division II's Northern State University.
WKU will open the 2024 season on August 31 at Alabama.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency issued a news release that raised eyebrows and revived suspicions in thoroughbred racing. In the first four months of 2024, the CBPâs Port of Cincinnati office intercepted eight shipments of venom from snakes, scorpions and spiders, plus other substances used as performance enhancers in horses.
The venoms have been used at racetracks as numbing agents for horses, allowing them to run through injuries. The shipments were coming from Mexico, according to the release, and some were headed to people âwith nexus to racing or other horse performance venues.â
With the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, this drug bust was another periodic reminder of the drug cloud and attendant equine safety issues that hover over horse racing. So was the recent New York Times documentary, âBroken Horses,â which examined the spates of equine deaths that rocked the sport last yearâincluding 12 at Churchill Downs in the weeks before and after the Derby, which led to an unprecedented shutdown and relocation of the trackâs spring meet. And there was the news from Oaklawn Park in Arkansas about two horses under the care of trainer Tim Martin who died suddenly this week.
There are many people attempting to clean up the sport, and progress has been made. The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) is making strides as a regulatory body, though resistance persists in some corners. In general, racetrack equine deaths have declined over time (though there was a slight rise last year, up from 1.25 per 1,000 starts in 2022 to 1.32 in â23). Itâs harder now to sweep aside horse deaths without some measure of accountability.
But controversies past and present are always close at hand. Take a glance at the entries for the Derby, and a couple of names provide context for the inner conflicts of racing.
One is trainer Saffie Joseph, who will saddle Catalytic in the Run for the Roses. Last year at this time, Joseph was sent packing from Churchill after two of his horses died suddenly, Parents Pride and Chasing Artie. Joseph was suspended and his Derby colt, Lord Miles, was not allowed to run. âI was a scapegoat,â Joseph said at the time, inferring that the track had to find someone to punish amid a cluster of pre-Derby horse deaths.
By the end of June, Joseph had been reinstated at Churchill after a Kentucky Horse Racing Commission investigation. "We remain deeply concerned about the condition of Parents Pride and Chasing Artie that led to their sudden death,â said Bill Mudd, president and chief operating officer of Churchill Downs, Inc. âHowever, given the details available to us as a result of the KHRC investigation, there is no basis to continue Joseph's suspension.â
Joseph, who said he has never spoken to Churchill CEO Bill Carstanjen, is wondering where he needs to go to have his reputation restored after necropsies of the horses did not conclude anything nefarious.
âIt crushes you,â he says. âIâm glad everything worked out and the truth was revealed. One of the horses had rat poison in itâthey said that the level wasnât enough to cause it, but theyâre not going to say that. But if you look at the report, it says that. Did that cause it? We donât know.
âI knew we didnât do anything. It destroys you.â
Kentucky Derby horse Track Phantom is co-owned by Brewster and trained by Steve Asmussen.
Matt Stone/The Courier Journal / USA
Another name: Clark Brewster, part owner of Derby runner Track Phantom. Heâs better known in racing as Bob Baffertâs voluble, caustic and contentious lawyer.
Baffert is the biggest trainer in the sport and also a current pariah at Churchill. He won a record-breaking seven Kentucky Derbys but had to give the last one back, the 2021 triumph by Medina Spirit, which was stripped after the horse tested positive for a prohibited race-day medication. That has spurred an endless feud between Baffert and Carstanjen.
Baffert initially was assessed a two-year ban from competition at Churchill, knocking him out of the 2022 and â23 Derbys. Baffert sued Churchill in March â22, but the case was dismissed last year. Then last July, the suspension was extended another year, with a Churchill release saying that "Mr. Baffert continues to peddle a false narrative concerning the failed drug test of Medina Spirit ⊠A trainer who is unwilling to accept responsibility for multiple drug test failures in our highest-profile races cannot be trusted to avoid future misconduct."
That showdown added another chapter this spring when Amr Zedan, owner of the Baffert-trained standout Muth, attempted to sue his way into this Derby. That suit, which cited âCarstanjen egomaniaâ in arguing that Baffert was being unfairly punished, also was unsuccessful. But Muth looms as a potential Preakness favorite and Triple Crown spoiler two weeks after the Derby.
On the slight chance that long-shot Track Phantom wins the Derby, keep the cameras rolling on Brewster. If he encounters Carstanjen in the winnerâs circle it could be spicy.
Churchill Downs has gone to massive lengths to gussy itself up for the 150th Derby, sinking $200 million into remodeling its paddock area. The result is a three-level masterpiece of modern architecture that dramatically modernizes the place. It is primarily targeted for use one weekend a year by the rich, of course, but will also be enjoyed and appreciated by everyday racegoers for years to come.
There is change on the other side of the grandstand as well, less glamorous but more closely aligned to the survival of horse racing: The dirt racing surface has been redone. Itâs darker and, some trainers said in recent days, deeper than it had been. A new fleet of tractors harrow the dirt between races and during morning training hours, and new methods of testing the track have been implemented. The horses are wearing biofeedback sensors that can help spot issues with stride and potentially flag developing injuries. A safety management committee composed of trainers, jockeys and other track workers meets once a week.
How much will all that help? It remains to be seen. But the changes are a tacit acknowledgment that the one thing that can kill horse racing is the killing of horses.