THE SILENCE OF CHURCHILL DOWNS
Track president promises fans: ‘Derby will be run this year’
TLOUISVILLE, Ky. he silence was overpowering. The emptiness was inescapable. The message was undeniable.
No Kentucky Derby.
No rousing exclamation point on the two-week community celebration that Louisville organizes, executes and celebrates around a mile-and-a-quarter race for 3-year-old horses on the first Saturday in May. At least not on 05/02/20. No hats. No cigars. No mint juleps. No $100 window. No coolers. No racing forms. No binoculars. No celebrities. No limousines. No sunscreen. No torn betting tickets. No roses.
No people.
No horses.
No race.
The world had known for 46 days that the coronavirus pandemic forced Churchill Downs to push Derby 146 back four months until Sept. 5.
Hold your breath. Hope for the best. Stay safe. Stay healthy.
But as the sun drifted higher in the spectacular cloudless sky embracing the mammoth, empty Churchill grandstand before 9 a.m. Saturday, the message resonated more powerfully than it did in the original March 17 news release. No Kentucky Derby. On a day when Derby weather was a sure bet to be as remarkable as it has been in at least five years, the inability of more than 150,000 fans to wedge into the infield, back stretch, paddock, grandstand and Millionaire’s Row seemed particularly cruel — and on everybody’s mind.
“The Kentucky Derby will be run this year,” Churchill Downs president Kevin Flanery said.
About 30 media members gathered at the track to document the first Saturday in May without a Derby since 1945 when World War II was winding down.
Nobody was waved inside without a mask or until their temperature was checked by JoAnn Sandbach, a nurse who has worked at the track since Lucky Debonair won the Derby. That was 1965. Flannery said it again. “We’re going to run the Kentucky Derby.”
In fact, he said it a third time, delivering the message with purposeful resolve for everybody who loves the race and the highoctane adrenaline the Kentucky Derby injects in this community.
Flannery was not the only one motivated to confirm his passion.
When I drove west on Central Avenue while making my way into the track before 8 a.m., six excited senior citizens walked the opposite way on a mostly empty street.
They made their way to the Barbaro statue parked in front of Gate 1. They were dressed in their Derby finest. They gathered at the statue to snap pictures.
More than two hours later, when I departed the track, four more groups were in the same spot, huddled with Barbaro, recording a similar moment.
“The Derby is not just two minutes,” Flanery said. “It’s a feeling in this community.”
Inside the track, the messages were understandably mixed. Fresh plantings of bright red geraniums were aligned in the shape of a horseshoe in front of the Derby’s winner’s circle that faces the grandstand.
Leftover pieces of masking tape remained on the trophy presentation platform, a guide for where Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was supposed to stand while presenting the winner’s trophy late Saturday afternoon.
But inside the paddock, the time on one of the large Longines tower clocks was off by six hours. Merchandise inside the dark gift shop sat in boxes, not positioned on shelves.
The barn area remained the ghost town it had been all week. There was no trash, but there was also no anticipation.
Four large, white tarpaulin tents that are annually used by the local television stations, including WDRB, to protect the sets for their morning shows had been repurposed. They will become the area where back side workers will be tested for COVID-19 when the Churchill barns reopen May 11.
Darren Rogers, the track’s senior director for communications, said The New York Times and Washington Post dispatched photographers to join local news crews in recording the moment for history.
Everybody wanted pictures. Of the finish line. Of the Twin Spires. Of the first turn.
Of the emptiness and chipped paint at Barn 19, Stall 4, the silent spot that was home for Country House before his controversial victory in Derby 145 a year ago.
First, the NCAA tournament was canceled. Then the Masters was postponed. Now the Kentucky Derby. The coronavirus started turning the sports calendar upside down in the second week in March. Now it had officially silenced the first Saturday in May.
But like the Masters, the Kentucky Derby is more than a date on a calendar. The Derby agreed to a delay, not a surrender. The passion and the noise and the zaniness and the fashion and the joy will return, hopefully in September.
“The Kentucky Derby will happen in 2020,” Flanery said.
You can go to the windows on that.