Justify wins rain-soaked Kentucky Derby
Colt that didn’t race at age 2 breaks 136-year curse.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — With a run of exquisite command and mastery given a capable and chaotic field of 20 colts, the veritable greenhorn Justify won the 144th Kentucky Derby on Saturday evening on a track officially marked sloppy but closer to deluged.
He established himself as a cemented star after snaring the lead with a half-mile to go and keeping it from there. He also rewrote a couple of the rigid sentences and charts of the Derby’s monumental record book.
The son of the late Scat Daddy and the mare Stage Magic from Glennwood Farm in Versailles, Ky., Justify became the first horse in 136 years to win the Derby after not having raced as a 2-year-old, following at long, long, long last upon the 1882 surprise winner, Apollo. He made his trainer, Bob Baffert, only the second to win the event at least five times, inching Baffert past D. Wayne Lukas and Herbert “Henry” Thompson and into second place alone, one shy of Ben A. Jones and the six he collected between 1938 and 1952. And when he made sure the stretch charges of Good Magic from the outside and Audible from the rail lacked the mustard to reach his flank or catch his eye, he had Derby savants presuming him among the more accomplished of the 144 champions.
“He’s got that ‘it’ factor,” the uncommonly fit 52-year-old jockey Mike Smith
told NBC just afterward.
“It took a great horse to do what he did today,” Baffert said right after that.
Having gone off as the 5-2 favorite, Justify quickly found his way to the brink of the lead, next to early pacer Promises Fulfilled, rounded the first turn of the 1¼-mile race, got to the backstretch and commenced making sure the race would be about him one way or another. He finished 2½ lengths in front of the Blue Grass Stakes winner Good Magic, with the Florida Derby winner Audible another head behind that.
The longest shot in the field, Instilled Regard at 85-1, came fourth. Perhaps the biggest mystery and curiosity in a race full of them, the second choice Mendelssohn, wound up last. It was all heady business given that the 2017 Breeders’ Cup had passed and the new year had dawned and gotten going and then gone on a good while before Justify even raced.
He began on Feb. 18, then followed on March 11 and April 7, all at Santa Anita and the third one in the Santa Anita Derby. In those three races, he had beaten a combined 14 horses. Of particular note might have been that race on March 11, when he ran in the mud and seemed to relish it. Come Saturday on what some called the rainiest day in Kentucky Derby history, with up to three inches having fallen through the day, he would race against five more horses than he had in his own career, yet he and those around him would relish it even more.