May 4 (UPI) — Mystik Dan held on through the final yards to win a wild, three-way battle to the wire in Saturday’s 150th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, with Blue Grass Stakes winner Sierra Leone second and Japan’s Forever Young third.
Third in the Arkansas Derby in his last start, Mystik Dan got the jump on the field with an inside move at the top of the stretch and opened up a daylight lead with a furlong to run.
But the two main rivals, bumping and grinding, kept coming, and it took the photo finish camera to separate them at the finish.
Louisiana Derby winner Catching Freedom finished fourth and Japan’s international racing image was burnished as its second entry, T O Password, reported fifth.
Mystik Dan, a Goldencents colt, is trained by Kenny McPeek and was ridden by Brian Hernandez Jr.
The trainer-jockey combination also won the Grade I Kentucky Oaks a day earlier with Thorpedo Anna. It was only the fourth time in the 150-year history of the races that a trainer has saddled the winners of both the Derby and Oaks in the same year.
“I’m really proud of that,” McPeek said. “But what are you gonna do? You only pick one horse at a time.”
The finish was so tight that Hernandez thought, but didn’t know, that Mystik Dan had won.
“The longest two minutes I’ve spent in my life, waiting for them to hang that number up,” he said. “It was exciting when we hit the wire, but I wasn’t sure if we won, so it was quite a rush to sit there and wait for it.
“I always told myself I was never going to step into the Derby winner’s circle until I could do it on the back of a horse. Now, to be able to live that dream … I was a 6-year-old kid, riding my bike around my grandparents’ farm, telling them all that I was going to win the Kentucky Derby some day — and here we are.”
Starting from the No. 3 gate in a field of 20 enabled Mystik Dan to take a forward position in the race, avoiding the traffic issues that often prevent the best horses from reaching competition.
When the field swung out of the stretch turn, Hernandez cut things so close, he said, that his left boot actually scraped the rail.
“When we cut the corner, I thought, ‘Man, we have a chance to win the Kentucky Derby,'” he said.
His chances were helped during the stretch battle as Sierra Leone lugged in, bumping repeatedly with Forever Young. Whether the contact cost either of them the noses by which they lost, racing will never know.
Sierra Leone came into the race with three wins from four starts, and finished second by a nose in the Grade II Remsen Stakes in December in the other. Trainer Chad Brown bemoaned his missed chance but praised the Gun Runner colt.
“He’s a tremendous horse. We’re so proud to have him. He just came up a little short,” Brown said. “The Derby gods can be cruel sometimes. Some trainers never win one.”
Forever Young’s performance was, if anything, even more impressive. He won his first two starts in Japan, and then traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he was fully extended through the stretch to win the Group III Saudi Derby.
He followed that with a victory a month later in the Group II Saudi Derby in Dubai, again using a relentless stretch run to catch the leader, South American-bred Auto Bahn.
Catching Freedom’s fourth-place finish followed the Louisiana Derby victory and a third, behind Sierra Leone, in the Grade II Risen Star, also at Fair Grounds in New Orleans.
The surprise of the day was T O Password. The Copano Rickey colt had only two previous starts, both in Japan. The second of those was by a head in the Fukuryu Stakes at Nakayama Racecourse, the final and deciding leg of the “Japan Road to the Kentucky Derby.”
He, too, might have fared even better at Churchill Downs but for a slow start and traffic issues.
The Triple Crown series now shifts focus to Pimlico Racecourse in Baltimore, where the Preakness Stakes awaits May 18.
Mystik Dan’s part-owner, Lance Gasaway, clutching the gold Derby trophy, said, “We’ll discuss it.”
The Preakness most likely will include some talented “new shooters,” including horses trained by Bob Baffert, who is banned from Churchill Downs and unable to contest the Derby for a third straight year.
