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A mindboggling Kentucky Derby upset — 45 Comments

1. So there’s hope for the Phillies to win the 2022 World Series!

2. PA Cat:

   Only if they’re on horseback.

3. On first viewing the ground level cameras Derby day and while wholly ignorant as to the results I was particularly grabbed by Rich Strike’s rightward head tilts down the stretch. Looked to me he was clearly eyeing that leader, bound and determined to outdo the bugger. Power on, dude.

4. One of the two greatest Triple Crown races ever (the other being Secretariat’s overwhelming run at the 1973 Belmont).

5. I love those middle distance track races where everyone knows that the star (human) athlete has a phenomenal sprint at the end. Then you watch the others killing themselves to get many 10’s of meters ahead of the star before they get close to the finish.

   In this case, it doesn’t appear that people were very aware or convinced of Rich Strike’s ability to have a fantastic finish.

6. They could always change their name….

   Philadelphia Fillies….

   There. That should do it.

7. He tore up the track at the end of that race passing all of them as though they weren’t really running. What a horse…

   BUT Sonny Leon was absolutely magnificent. Fearless.

8. I believe the horse-racing term for an underdog/long shot is a dark horse.

9. That was actually more exciting to watch than Lou Costello riding Tea Biscuit in
   “It Ain’t Hay.”

10. Simply incredible. That aerial video shows the unlikelihood of it all very well. Rich Strike is so boxed in. Even if it was a well known horse, known to be a strong finisher, a lot of jockeys would not have found that path through.

    This article does a good job of explaining the miracle we all witnessed. It’s not long and does a good job of covering the key points, https://www.ksdk.com/article/sports/explainer-how-81-1-shot-rich-strike-won-the-kentucky-derby/63-e03f0c67-dd4e-4134-ad24-f6424634f927

    HOW DID HE WIN?

    Think of the horses like race cars. There’s a finite amount of fuel in the tank. The faster you burn the fuel, the quicker the tank empties. And that’s exactly what happened in the Kentucky Derby.

    Summer Is Tomorrow was the leader after a quarter-mile, or two furlongs. He covered that distance in 21.78 seconds — the fastest time in Kentucky Derby history. No horse can sustain that pace for 1 1/4 miles. And Summer Is Tomorrow wound up finishing last in the 20-horse field, 64 1/2 lengths behind Rich Strike.

    It wasn’t just Summer Is Tomorrow. Many horses went out on a blistering pace, because so many trainers and jockeys had decided their best move was to get close to the lead for the opening portions of the race.

    The biggest indicator that this was going to be a wild finish probably came when track announcer Larry Collmus briefly stopped his rundown of which horse was where in the field at the half-mile mark. “The opening half-mile was — WHOA! — blazing fast, 45.36 seconds,” Collmus said.

    Those fuel tanks were emptying far faster than anticipated.

    At that half-mile mark, Rich Strike was ahead of only two horses. He was sitting in 18th place.

    HOW DID RICH STRIKE PASS SO MANY HORSES?
    Two answers: He ran by some, and some, as they say in racing, stopped running.

    Technically, that last part isn’t true. All 20 horses were “running” when they crossed the finish line. Nobody “stopped.” But some simply ran out of gas, meaning their all-out sprints had become little more than a gallop or a jog.

    Rich Strike had tons of fuel left. He also had one other major advantage: He was near the rail.

    It’s simple math: The closer one is to the rail, the shorter of a distance one has to run. Most of the contending horses as the leaders turned into the stretch and headed home were fanned out wide across the track, moves that made their trips a bit longer.

    This is where Leon had a huge decision to make. He had to get around Messier, one of the early leaders who was fading fast. Leon decided to veer slightly to his right and get around Messier, then dove back down toward the rail to finish Rich Strike’s run. It was almost as if nobody saw him coming.

    They saw him at the end. That’s all that mattered.

11. Here’s a link to the NBC footage: https://youtu.be/wIYD42DV3Ro

12. Again, I recommend reading the whole article I posted because it also gives interesting information about the horse, the jockey, the trainer and the owner and the longshot that Rich Strike even got into the starting gate, let alone won. The entire story is as amazing as Rich Strike’s run!

    Regarding the sports journalist’s comparison to fuel in the article I linked, it’s an effective analogy, but it’s actually the opposite. Fuel for animals are calories. A horse race like that has almost nothing to do with calories. The horses don’t run out of energy. They run out of oxygen.

    I ran a lot of events and distances in track and I typically ate nothing for hours before a race. Some guys liked to eat, others didn’t, but what’s in your stomach has little to do with it. For humans, any race over 200 meters includes a calculation about conservation of oxygen (for thoroughbred horses my guess is that distance is around 400 meters, roughly a quarter mile). In a flat out sprint an in shape human uses most all available oxygen in about 20 seconds and cannot gain enough to replace what has been used while continuing at that pace. Horses, being animals, have the same problem.

    When the oxygen is gone aerobic activity becomes anaerobic activity and lactic acid accumulates in the muscles; forcing them to slow and eventually stop.

    So, if an animal is running a distance longer than its “all out sprint” distance (~200 meters for in shape humans, ~ 400 meters for in shape horses) decisions have to be made. The jockey does his or her best to guide the horse through those decisions. As the article points out, The jockeys of the leaders decided to go all out and hope their rides could hold on through that anaerobic phase. Rich Strike, perhaps due to the awful draw of the horse’s position at the gate, went out slowly, or at least not otherwordly, as the leaders had.

    It’s not just that Rich Strike had a good sprint in the final straightaway, Rich Strike was still able to sprint at top speed because he had not used up all his oxygen and had built up less lactic acid than the leaders.

13. JohnTyler,

    Nearly as exciting as watching Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush’s patient, Hi-Hat, win the steeplechase in, “A Day at the Races.”

    Unfortunately the real life Chico was less fortunate over his many, many days at the races. Hopefully Phil Mickelson had some money on Rich Strike.

14. Barry Meislin @12:50pm,

    Groan!

15. Yes, Rich Strike’s aggressive pass to the right of Messier was a thing of beauty! He seemed to swing his head as he passed as if to say goodbye. And the announcer never even mentioned him until he was moving past the horses (temporarily) in first and second!

16. That horse had an extra gear.

17. Neo:

    Since you can now see, go to the Belmont Stakes. Triple Crown, baby!

18. Rufus T. Firefly:

    Apparently, according to some videos I saw, Rich Strike is a horse that likes to hold back and then sprint. That’s the pattern of all his races. Of course, he never was in a race like this before. But the jockey was going with the horse’s predisposition.

19. That predisposition is important; I call it attitude. I once had a horse who was retired from the track. When we did trail rides with friends, no matter where we were at the beginning we would some how end up in the front of the group. It wasn’t so much a burst of speed, but that horse picked a path that slowly but surely got us to the front. I got used to it and when an open stretch appeared would just sit back and enjoy the ride. He evidently had a dislike of looking at horses rumps. He had a bad knee and eventually I got him a “job” riding fence on a rescue ranch.

20. Thanks a lot Neo, I was on line chatting and seeing comments on it but was doing plumbing so missed the race until now, Rich Strike just had another gear than the other horses and was something to see.

21. His pulse-quickening zoom from deep in the pack couldn’t help but call to mind immortal Big Red himself.

22. They could always change their name….

    Philadelphia Fillies….

    To make that name change legit, they’d have to transition like that other Philadelphia-based athlete, Lia Thomas. Can’t see Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber doing that, no way! (Come to think of it, maybe Lia could be persuaded to change xer name yet again.)

23. I can vouch for attitude or predisposition in human runners. All the guys I ran with had “race profiles” and we knew the attitudes of many of our opponents. Even in all out sprints, 100 and 200, some guys were slow out of the blocks, some shifted into high gear after 30 yards… Some guys had to have someone pressing them to run their fastest, others faded when someone pressed them. Some guys ran their own race no matter what anyone else was doing.

    I’m sure the great jockeys are expert at intuiting what what their ride prefers and knowing how the horse will react to the race conditions and what the other horses are doing.

    I was astounded at how aggressively Rich Strike weaved through those narrow channels. A lot of great, fast horses would not do that.

24. This is an interesting article that breaks down average Derby paces by furlong: https://edge.twinspires.com/racing/analyzing-25-years-of-kentucky-derby-pace-fractions

    If you read it you’ll understand why the leading jockeys went out so hard; that trend has been successful lately. It will also show you that Rich Strike isn’t completely rare in how he ran so hard in the final furlong. His fast, final furlong pace was more typical of horses and Derby’s in the ’90s and early 2000s.

25. May remind one of Dave Wottle’s extraordinary victory in the ’72 Olympics in the 800 meters…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tPlnNMKSc

26. If it were a Hollywood movie I would fault the screenwriters for going overboard with improbabilities.

    Rich Strike wasn’t one of the 20, Derby horses.
    A few minutes before the deadline Rich Strike’s team was phoned and notified there would be no scratches, so they began to prepare to close up shop with hopes of getting to another race.
    Just prior to the deadline a horse did scratch and Rich Strike’s team got the call he was in.
    He had few indications that he could be a threat in this field.
    If I remember, the announcer only said his name once during the race until the final seconds. For about one minute, 30, he was barely noticeable in the race.
    And where he was positioned coming off the final turn it wouldn’t even seem Secretariat could extricate himself from that position and get to the front of the pack.

    Really amazing. A thing of true beauty!

27. Thanks for that, Barry. I know of the race, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the footage. Amazing.

28. It was a great victory and a great derby, even if the damn horse cost me quite a bit of money. The interview with the jockey, who I’d never even heard of, was great! So happy for him and his family.

29. Wow, that is amazing. I’m not a horse race watching person, have only seen a couple live on television. For some crazy reason I got chocked up at the end of that race, in a good way, for the horse and jockey.

30. “OH MY GOODNESS!!”
    Thanks, Neo. I likely would not have seen this but for you.
    What sdferr said on May 9, 2022 at 12:43 pm.
    Right after I saw the first video, I thought, “this has gotta be made into a feature film.”

31. steve walsh,

    There’s a somewhat corny, not particularly noteworthy, ’80s, coming of age movie called, “Vision Quest.” A main part of the plot is a High School boy decides to commit a year to becoming a good enough wrestler to beat a guy in his state who is a machine. Unbeatable.

    It’s a neat little premise, and the type of movie Hollywood used to make to inspire young people to work towards self-improvement. However, there was one scene that I found worth remembering. An older guy the kid works with (I think the guy is a cook in a diner) talks about how his life never amounted to much, but he was watching a soccer match in a seedy motel room and saw Pele do an impossible, backflip, bicycle kick, upside down shot to win a game. The guy, watching alone, broke down and cried because that moment showed him the potential that humans are capable of.

    Someone else here mentioned they cried when they saw Secretariat win by 7 lengths, or whatever it was. I’m sure that same feeling is part of why neo loves ballet. It is good for us to occasionally witness impossible things as a reminder of what is possible.

32. Just looked up fast Derby time — 1:59 2/5 by Secretariat. Thanks to Steve Sailer I’ve already seen both the amazing Rich Strike comeback, AND the amazing ’72 Dave Wottle win in the 800.
    https://www.unz.com/isteve/kentucky-derby/

    Steve also recommends the movie The Black Stallion – who goes outside to overpower & win, rather than the faster, shorter inside track.

    2:02 is not quite in the top 10, but in top 20; his finish was really strong – I think he could have started his move maybe 20 yards sooner. But he was boxed in, as the overhead shows much much better than the usual ground level view.

    I saw Dave “live on TV” when he won in ’72; was in high school running mediocre cross-country, but not liking track so much; was great to watch it again.

    Rufus is so right about oxygen, far more than calories. The 200 is a sprint; today many winners can sprint essentially the whole 400, but I was only able to keep up a fast pace. The 800 is a very very fast pace, not quite a sprint until the last 100.

    I recall after college running a mile in a Corporate Cup, two man teams. I was the third fastest on our EPRI team, but then #2 pulled a hamstring and cancelled. So I ran so that our fastest guy could try to win, which he did about 4:34 (??); my fastest ever time was 4:56 (had never broken 5 before or since). BUT, I started my final faster pace with about 300 yards left, passed about 6 runners, and ran out of gas in last 20 yards, with 5 guys passing me as I’m struggling to breathe in finishing.

    “OMG the longest shot has won the Kentucky Derby!” (5th view while writing, and smiling).
    https://news.yahoo.com/rich-strike-wins-kentucky-derby-001050261.html

    at 80:1 odds, the second longest shot winner behind 1913 Donerail 91:1, ahead of Country House (2019) 65:1.

    Really glad, and only slightly surprised, that Neo covers this AND dancing and politics too!

33. Here’s a story about a different kind of upset. Dick Francis wrote wonderful mysteries all set in the racing world. He “turned his hand to writing mysteries because he did not want to be remembered as ‘the man who lost the Grand National’ horse race . . . Francis was Britain’s top [steeplechase] jockey in 1956 when he rode the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch, in the Grand National . . . He was far ahead, less than 50 yards from the finish line, when Devon Loch, though unhurt, suddenly collapsed, allowing another horse to win the race.”
    Dick Francis said that as he was coming in for the win, the crowd started cheering well ahead of the finish since it was the Queen Mother’s horse. Devin Loch startled and the rest is the rest.
    Here’s the race: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=62fPLtL8h7s
    BTW, Devon Loch was fine, went on to win a race several months later.

34. @ Eva Marie > “Here’s a story about a different kind of upset. Dick Francis wrote wonderful mysteries all set in the racing world.”

    I just now got to the computer after a week-end with family, and Dick Francis immediately came to mind.
    Everything I know about horse racing, I learned from his books!

    Of course, if this was one of his stories, there would be a plot-line about how the owner/trainer/jockey of Rich Strike (or a bookie perhaps), recognizing his potential, deliberately did something to get one of the horses struck so he could run.
    Then there would be some people killed to cover up their tracks, and probably one of the losing jockeys/trainers/owners would Have Suspicions, and so forth.

    Thanks for the link to the 1956 race. I read about that in Francis’s autobiography “The Sport of Queens,” but watching it actually happen was amazing.

35. That damned horse did a bellyflop. Strangest thing, Devon Lock.

36. I didn’t have any idea how horses are selected to run in the Derby.
    The first post is kind of a primer, and the second has more details on the prep races that have to be run.

    https://www.theplaidhorse.com/2021/11/17/how-horses-qualify-for-the-kentucky-derby/

    https://pennhorseracing.com/stories/how-does-a-horse-qualify-for-the-kentucky-derby/

    This one gives some interesting odds –
    https://www.americasbestracing.net/lifestyle/2021-how-horses-qualify-the-kentucky-derby-beginners-guide
    “When you hear that winning the Kentucky Derby is a once-in-a-lifetime event, that’s a literal statement. Only 3-year-old Thoroughbreds are eligible to run in the big race, so the competition is fierce and a second chance at glory isn’t coming next year. Look at it this way: This year’s Derby contenders were all born in 2019. There were 19,295 Thoroughbred foals (aka baby horses) born that year, and only 20 horses can run in the Kentucky Derby. That means that there’s about a one in a thousand chance that any given Thoroughbred born in 2019 will make it to the 2022 run for the roses, and a one in 19,295 chance of winning. If you’re a horse owner, there’s literally a better chance that you’ll win an Oscar at some point than score a victory in the Kentucky Derby this year.”

    Rich Strike’s story may win an Oscar too, if someone takes up the challenge to make a movie about him.
    BTW – is that a great name for the horse or what?

37. Here is some footage of all three races by Secretariat for the Triple Crown win.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–FbQqU-vAc

    Also, buttressing the relationship of oxygen as a significant factor in winning:

    https://www.horseracingnation.com/news/The_Tremendous_Size_of_Secretariat_s_Heart_123

    He had the breeding to be a great race horse, but he also had something that made him more powerful and unique. His heart was more than twice the size of an average horse.

    In Pure Heart, originally published in the June 4, 1990 issue of Sports Illustrated, Bill Nack reports the words of Dr. Thomas Swerczek, who performed the necropsy that discovered just how big Secretariat’s heart was.

    “We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”

38. This is a very nice article about the trainer – also a long-shot hero!
    (Dick Francis would have loved his story.)

    https://news.yahoo.com/trainer-eric-reed-nearly-lost-003657147.html
    “Trainer Eric Reed nearly ‘lost everything’ in a barn fire. Now he’s a Kentucky Derby winner”

    A Lexington-based trainer, Reed entered the Derby with just one graded stakes win in his career.

    The win came six years after a devastating fire caused by lightning killed 23 horses at his Mercury Equine Center in Lexington.
    …
    Only 13 animals made it out of the fire alive.

    “When we drove up on that that night, I told my wife, I said, ‘We’ve probably lost everything,'” Reed said. “By the grace of God, the wind was blowing in a direction that kept it from getting to the other two barns. The next morning when we saw the devastation, because this happened in the middle of the night, I just thought of all the years and all the stuff we had done to get this beautiful farm and have this happen, that something might be telling me it’s the end of the line.”

    Instead, Reed was touched by the large number of people who came out to help in the aftermath of the fire. Many were friends. Others were strangers who had seen the story.

    Several high-profile trainers, who Reed did not name, reached out with promises to help him find clients and horses in the aftermath of the fire.

    “I think that kept me going,” Reed said. “Then I just decided I wasn’t going to let it take me out. Thank God, we’re here today.”

    As Reed struggled to make sense of the improbable win, he stood alongside his father, Herbert Reed, a former trainer who never reached the heights his son just had. Herbert was a former assistant trainer under Mack Miller, who won the 1993 Kentucky Derby with Sea Hero.

    “If you find something you love to do, you never work,” Herbert Reed said. “He found something he loved to do, and he’s good at it. I’m as proud as I can be of him.”

    The chances of Reed even having a horse in the field were astronomical.

    The trainer of Ethereal Road, D. Wayne Lukas, had won the race four times with 49 career starts, second-most of any trainer. Reed, meanwhile, does not even have a Wikipedia page.*
    …

    “I never thought I would have a Derby horse,” Reed said. “I never tried to go to the yearling sale and buy a Derby horse. I just wanted to buy my clients a horse that would keep them happy, have some fun and make a little money. If we got a good one, terrific. This was never in my thoughts.”

    That approach to racing is one that Francis cites approvingly in many of his books.

    *He does now.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Reed_(horse_trainer)

39. More than you ever wanted to know about horses, in posts that I found while tracking down references in the story about Rich Strike’s owner, Rick Dawson.

    https://news.yahoo.com/oklahoman-rick-dawson-bet-eric-032714029.html

    Rich Strike is Dawson’s first Derby horse, the first, too, for jockey Leon and trainer Eric Reed. On Saturday they accomplished a feat veterans sometimes work for decades to achieve and never do.

    Dawson aspired for years to own horses, he said, but it took a round of golf to get him in the game.

    [friend of a friend of a friend connected him with the trainer]

    “I got in it because I loved it, and it was interesting. It was fun,” Dawson said. “I was at a point in my life where I had the time and the energy, wanted to go to the farm, wanted to go — and I learned the business. And Eric was so great about teaching me. If I asked him a stupid question, he didn’t say, ‘That’s a stupid question.’ He would just — he would give me a great answer and truthfully, and I would learn from that. And that’s how we built what we built.”

    On Saturday, what they built made history in the Derby, an upset for the ages given Rich Strike’s history.

    Reed claimed him for Dawson’s RED TR-Racing after a $30,000 maiden-claiming race at Churchill Downs.
    “We actually tried to claim another horse in that race as well and we got out-shook,” Reed said.

    The claiming race was Rich Strike’s only win before the Derby.

    In five races since, he’d finished third twice, fourth once and fifth once.

    Rich Strike wasn’t supposed to be in the Derby, but a late scratch from D. Wayne Lukas-trained Ethereal Road opened the door.
    …
    “We always thought if we could just get in — just give us a shot. We’re getting better. We love to go long. Mile and a quarter, it was right in our wheelhouse.”

    That’s how it looked Saturday, in a dazzling run that Dawson hoped for but couldn’t have predicted.

    “I’ve never, ever felt that life puts a cap on what you can do and there’s nothing you can do to change it,” Dawson said. “I’ve never believed that. I always thought, ‘I’m as smart as the next guy. Maybe I can figure it out, maybe I can’t,’ but I always kept trying. And here we are.”

    https://horseracingsense.com/what-is-a-claiming-race-maiden/

    https://www.courier-journal.com/story/sports/horses/kentucky-derby/2022/05/06/ethereal-road-scratched-kentucky-derby-2022-rich-strike-draws/9673112002/
    Written before the race, but doesn’t tell WHY the horse was withdrawn; the story did indicate what the jockey intended to do, which was exactly what happened.

    “Get a good break and work over to the inside,” Reed said of plans for breaking from the No. 20 post. “Start picking them up midway on the backstretch and then pass them all before the finish line.”

40. AesopFan: thanks for the Secretariat footage.
    Yes, Eric Reed could have come out of a Dick Frances mystery. All three – jockey, trainer, owner – have great personal stories.

41. John Stewart’s song about Secretariat:
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IFx68BIfMiM

42. What a great post and comment thread this is — thanks, Neo and everyone, for all the information, historical tidbits and video links. I had forgotten it was Derby weekend, heard dimly about an underdog winning, but had other things on my mind and didn’t follow up until this post enlightened me. Then Mr Whatsit and I spent yesterday evening watching the footage over and over, then watching Secretariat win the 1973 Belmont, then looking up Seabiscuit and then watching Rich Strike again. (That Secretariat run will always put a lump of wonder and awe in my throat.) The stories of everyone involved in this — horse, trainer, jockey, owner — are so improbably novelistic. If it were a movie, people would scoff at the over-the-top corniness — but I have always been an unapologetic fan of this particular brand of corniness, especially when it occurs in real life.

    As for Dick Francis, I grew up on his mysteries, handed on to me by my horse-loving mother one by one as they came out each year — but I never knew the 1956 Grand National story. It sheds such light on his protagonists, who were often washed-up jockeys trying not to be embittered by injuries, failures or other strokes of ill fortune that had sidelined them from promising racing careers. No wonder Francis wrote those characters so convincingly — he was speaking from his own painful experience. AesopFan, thanks for the hilarious Francis plot proposal. Now, all I ask is that you rejigger the ending a little, so that Rich Strike and his humans somehow turn out to be the good guys after all.

43. It reminded me a little of Secretariat’s Kentucky Derby win

44. Pingback:Something Wonderful: Rich Strike Strikes It Rich with 57 Seconds of Horse Racing History

45. I remember that day.
    My dad loved to gamble, in poker, and at the track (he was MUCH better a poker). I’d spent enough time at Thistledown to know the likely outcome of that race.
    It was something to see. I remember watching, and the people around me did go silent. None of us could believe it.
    But, boy, would I have loved to have some money on this recent race!

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