The first Sunday in May featured horse racing in Arkansas rather than Kentucky, but it carried with it the promise that the Run for the Roses would take place this year, even if it had surrendered its spot on the calendar for the first time since World War II.
The race is scheduled for Sept. 5 at Churchill Downs, but a great deal of uncertainty remains. Will the race be run before empty stands because of the novel coronavirus pandemic? Will it be run at all, if conditions haven’t significantly improved by late summer?
“We’re going to run the Kentucky Derby in 2020,” Churchill Downs President Kevin Flanery said Saturday. “Matt Winn (the late president of the racetrack) famously said, ‘I don’t care if there are two horses on the track and two fans in the stands, the Kentucky Derby will be run.’ That’s true today as well.”
The Derby was moved from its traditional spot on the first weekend of June in 1945 because of the war. James F. Byrnes, who led the office of war mobilization, explained that the war effort needed the manpower used to keep racetracks running, with gasoline and trains used to take fans to the track better used elsewhere.
“There is only one thing to do,” Winn, who helped raise the Derby into prominence, told the Courier Journal at the time. “Obey the boss.”
Victory in Europe came three days after the race was to be run, and Byrnes reinstated horse racing. The Derby went off on June 9.
Churchill Downs officials plan to start holding races without fans on May 16, and Bill Carstanjen, the track’s chief executive, is “fairly optimistic” that this year’s Derby will take place come September.
“There’s still going to be social distancing issues,” Carstanjen said in a call with investors and analysts last week. “Whatever is capable of being done in this country in four months, whatever can be done, whatever is the maximum acceptable processes and protocols, that’s where we’ll be. That’s what we’ll be offering and that’s what we’ll do. So I’m fairly optimistic. I’m more than cautiously optimistic. I am optimistic that we’ll find a way through this.”
As for the races that took place Saturday, trainer Bob Baffert’s Charlatan and Nadal, both heavily favored, won their divisions in the $500,000, Grade 1 Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park. Baffert was the trainer when American Pharoah and Justify won the Triple Crown in 2015 and 2018 respectively.
Charlatan took the lead out of the gate and never looked back, winning for the third time in three races and covering 1 ⅛ miles in 1:48.49 and paying $2.80 in the Division I race. Basin finished six lengths back and Gouverneur Morris was third. The race marked the stakes debut for Chalatan, whose first two wins at Santa Anita Park were by a combined 16 lengths.
“They told me we were smoking,” jockey Martin Garcia said afterward. “I went (three-quarters) in 1:09, and he was just galloping. He did it all within himself. I felt someone coming at the (three-eighths pole), and I let him go. He just took off. That’s a sign of a really good horse.”
In the Division II race, Nadal took the lead in the second turn and held off charges by runner-up King Guillermo and third-place Finnick the Fierce to win with a time of 1:48.34. Nadal is undefeated in four races.
The pandemic threw off racing’s springtime Triple Crown races. The Preakness was scheduled to fall on May 16, but that is on hold and could perhaps take place two weeks after the Derby, this time in mid-September. The third leg, the Belmont Stakes, also is on hold, with the New York Racing Association assessing its options for the stakes race scheduled for June 6 at Belmont Park. It, too, could be moved to a later date.
The Breeders’ Cup, the final big event in racing, is set for Nov. 6-7 at Keeneland in Lexington, Kentucky.
