In the third instalment of his series celebrating the 150th anniversary of America’s biggest race, Steve Dennis remembers one of the unlikely outcomes in a storied historical past
If you need to get forward, get a hat.
Men used invariably to put on hats. Newsreels and old images inform the story. Now hardly anybody wears a hat; baseball caps don’t rely. Nevertheless, deep within the fashionable mythology of the Kentucky Derby there’s a hat, an enormous black cowboy hat, an endu
ring emblem of one of the unlikely winners of the race in its lengthy historical past.
The man within the black cowboy hat was Bennie ‘Chip’ Woolley, a former bareback rodeo rider who by the point the solar had set on Louisville on the primary Saturday in May had educated two winners in 2009.
The first was a two-furlong maiden at his native observe, Sunland Park in New Mexico. The second was the Kentucky Derby.
That, although, was nonetheless another victory than his horse had managed. Mine That Bird was Canadian champion two-year-old colt the earlier yr, however had been overwhelmed in each his begins in stakes grade at Sunland Park that spring, his solely races for Woolley.
Nowadays, Mine That Bird wouldn’t get anyplace close to the Derby – the gelding wouldn’t have sufficient ‘Road to the Kentucky Derby’ qualifying factors. Back then, although, participation rested on earnings in Graded races, and he had picked up almost $140,000 for successful the G3 Grey Stakes at Woodbine. Several horses dropped out of competition, as they at all times do, and Mine That Bird was in.
The fable unfolds like a tapestry, gold gleaming at each flip. Sunland Park is about 1,500 miles from Churchill Downs. Woolley may have put Mine That Bird on a airplane, however as an alternative he loaded him right into a trailer behind his pickup truck and hit the blacktop for a 21-hour highway journey.
“We’ve been doing that with horses for a million years. I don’t know why that caught on as such a big story,” he advised the Amarillo Globe-News.
No big deal
It might have been because Woolley drove all the way with his right leg in plaster, having broken it in a motorbike spill two months earlier. With his left foot working the gas and the brake, both eyes on the road and one ear cocked for any sound from the trailer, the phlegmatic Woolley certainly had his hands full. “No big deal,” he said.
You’d have taken your hat off to him, if you happen to had been carrying one, which you almost definitely weren’t, as a result of no-one does today. Woolley was.
He wore it by means of the build-up to the massive race, as nameless a determine on the backstretch as an enormous Texan in a black stetson on crutches sporting a lavish horseshoe moustache may presumably be.
Mine That Bird was over 50-1 in a 19-runner discipline – the morning-line favorite I Want Revenge was scratched on raceday morning – and was equally nameless to bettors.
They favored new favorite Friesan Fire, winner of the Louisiana Derby, or Santa Anita Derby winner Pioneerof The Nile, or Florida Derby runner-up Dunkirk. Or they favored one thing else, however no-one favored Mine That Bird. And when he trailed the sector by the size of a metropolis block across the clubhouse flip, they figured they had been proper.
Mine That Bird moved nearer, swished previous a handful of stragglers on the flip, and as they made the highest of the stretch Borel flicked him off the rail to cross a rival after which dived again to the within. He was going quick now.
Scraping the paint
Mine That Bird was to this point again that the racecaller and the cameraman missed him. He was to this point again that he wasn’t coated in kickback from the sloppy observe. But his jockey Calvin Borel – nicknamed ‘Bo-rail’ for his ardour for scraping the paint off the fence – had been right here earlier than, and he knew the best way out.
Borel had received the 2007 Derby on Street Sense from an identical position – he would additionally win the 2010 Derby on Super Saver, on whom he sat a lot nearer – and he bided his time, watching all of it occur like a Zen grasp, earlier than unleashing his unconsidered mount on the experience of a lifetime.
Approaching the eighth-pole, Borel keyholed him by means of a spot on the Bo-rail so shortly that he was two, three lengths forward earlier than anybody knew what was occurring. The longshot Mine That Bird was successful the Derby, and it grew to become plain that racecaller Tom Durkin had no clue who this interloper was. He didn’t get out Mine That Bird’s identify till the sixteenth-pole, when he was 5 lengths clear and widening.
“A spectacular, spectacular upset,” he vamped, clutching at straws. “Mine That Bird has won the Kentucky Derby. An impossible result here!”
Another part of town
Impossible, but true. Mine That Bird hit the wire 6¾ lengths clear, the opposition in another part of town, and Borel gestured wildly to the sky, to himself, to his horse. Then the little effervescent Cajun genius cried.
“I wish my mother and father were here to see what I have accomplished in my life,” he sobbed into the shoulder of post-race interviewer Donna Barton Brothers.
“Those cowboys came with a good horse,” said Bob Baffert, trainer of runner-up Pioneerof The Nile. And while Borel howled and high-fived his way back to the winner’s circle, a person in an enormous black hat waited quietly in his second of glory.
“A lot of people didn’t know about you, didn’t know about your horse,” stated NBC man Kenny Rice. 
Woolley had his reply prepared. “They’ll know me now, won’t they?” he drawled, a contact acidly, earlier than hobbling away to fulfill his miracle horse. He threw his arms round Borel, and his hat got here off. Someone picked it up, and Woolley put it proper again on.
The barely plausible story of what was then the second-biggest upset in Kentucky Derby historical past was later immortalised within the movie 50 to 1, though there can be no Hollywood ending for Mine That Bird, who ran second within the Preakness, third within the Belmont, and by no means received one other race.
But, , Chip Woolley nonetheless wears that hat.
• Visit the Kentucky Derby website
‘A little white-faced Canadian-bred used America’s biggest race as springboard to changing into the world’s biggest stallion’
Kentucky Derby anniversary: ‘Uncle Sam’s most well-known race started life as British as heat beer and detached dental hygiene’
Jay Hovdey’s Favorite Racehorses: Smarty Jones – ‘You know, this is America’s horse!’
View the latest TRC Global Rankings for horses / jockeys / trainers / sires
