San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Medina Spirit gives Baffert record 7th win
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When an afterthought named Medina Spirit roared out front early, fought, fought some more and held off Mandaloun through the stretch to win the 147th Kentucky Derby on Saturday evening, he gave some grand favors to some Hall of Fame horsemen.
He awarded a record seventh Kentucky Derby win for trainer Bob Baffert, and he bestowed upon 49-year-old jockey John Velazquez a fourth Derby win, a second consecutive and a third in the past five years.
He did all this as a horse with two wins and three seconds coming in, the most recent a runnerup finish at last month’s Santa Anita Derby.
“I cannot believe he won this race,” Baffert said to NBC afterward, having just passed Ben A. Jones’s six wins that had stood for 68 years until Baffert equaled it just eight months ago. “That was him. It was all guts.” He soon added, “I’m so spoiled bringing these heavy-duty horses in here, but that little horse has got a heart.”
The race emblematized that as Medina Spirit, off at 12-1, bested some louder rivals, edging by half a length Mandaloun. Mandaloun came in half a length ahead of third-place Hot Rod Charlie, who went off at 5-1 and hotly liked. And Hot Rod Charlie ran a head ahead of Essential Quality, the favorite who left the gate at 5-2, didn’t generate much attention through the race and wound up fourth, the first loss of his six-race career. Of the bunch, Mandaloun ran with the longest odds at 28-1 but also as a hip pick among some track intellectuals.
It all happened on an impressionist painting of a day at the pretty old giant of a track that seemed to stage also a return to vivid life as the second Derby of the coronavirus pandemic. Post time boasted its 75 degrees and its paucity of clouds after a recent spate of drenched Derbys. Long
before Medina Spirit went to the front and held that spot, the country’s oldest continuous sporting event served as something of a symbol of the country’s slow molt from the throes of the pandemic.
Where the postponed Derby of Sept. 5 reeled with a lousy hush, this on-time Derby seemed rather lush. Where that late-summer Derby of 2020 featured only a smattering of spectators, those with connections to the entries, Churchill Downs let in an announced crowd of 51,838, about 40 percent of normal but well above the abnormal of 2020. Instead of what felt like a non-Derby,
this became a partial Derby, a manageable Derby for an event generally unmanageable.
Vivid colors returned, the pinks and oranges and baby blues. Flowers atop hats again proliferated. Couples walked hand-in-hand and argued only anecdotally. Cigars dangled from the mouths of young men. Social distancing had waned as a concept. The old sounds came back, including the age-old sighs of those losing money out loud. The infield returned to a partial life of its various and cherished sins. With the food and beverage policy for this pandemic Derby, ticket
holders qualified for free food and beverages.
Bars, shuttered last time, reopened. Non-frightening lines formed outside them. At the bourbon stands, people got free mint juleps.
They did not seem to mind. As they wagered simultaneously with multitudes off the track and afar, they fiddled somewhat with the odds of the favorite.
Essential Quality, who had begun the morning as a 2-1 favorite given his unbeaten past, stood at 5-2 by 6 p.m., then 3-1, then 5-2, with an array of other horses holding rights to be hopefuls. It
was another peg in a long, long Derby story starring Essential Quality’s ownership.
The story began in 1992, when the man who would become the world’s uppermost patron of the sport, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, entered the Derby as part-owner of Arazi, the runaway favorite after a Breeders’ Cup Juvenile win in November 1991 at Churchill Downs that looked like part of his lineage might be a Formula One car.
Arazi ran eighth in Derby hubbub, and Sheikh Mohammed was off toward Derby shortcoming.