Mage’s Kentucky Derby win: A salve for horse racing’s wounds

LOUISVILLE — At nineteen minutes past seven on Saturday evening, under pale clouds with a thick spring wind brushing past, two men in green golf shirts and khaki trucker hats tossed a blanket of roses across the withers of Mage, a three-year-old chestnut colt who had won the 149th Kentucky Derby at 15-1 odds in just the fourth start of his life. The garland weighs about 40 pounds, more than one might expect from a strip of ceremonial blossoms, but that’s just the flowers, and doesn’t include the weight of racing’s reputation, which comes tethered to this moment every year on the first Saturday in May. The Derby usually proves itself a sturdy foundation upon which a sport wobbles and remains (mostly) upright, regardless of the weight. This year it was an especially heavy lift.

As Mage circled the Downs and the 1 ¼ miles of the Derby, voices rising higher from the crowd of 150,335, with that cacophonous and indecipherable desperation that can only come from a game with 20 – check that, 18 – teams, building to a withering crescendo at the wire, and then startlingly dissipating into a buzz, he ran in the vapor trail of 10 days not quite like any run-up in the recent – or any — history of the Derby.  Before Derby Day, the numbers were these: Five horses dead at Churchill Downs, including one Derby entrant, in the six days from April 27 – May 2; five horses scratched from the body of the Derby field, the most since 1936; one trainer suspended and another disregarded, a member of the Hall of Fame, no less.

Sadly, it didn’t stop there: Two more horses died on Saturday, in Derby undercard races. Chloe’s Dream, a 3-year-old gelding making her second career start; and Freezing Point, a 3-year old roan colt. Both were euthanized