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Last year’s winner, Sweetnorthernsaint, was the Kentucky Derby favorite. This year Todd Pletcher, one of the top trainers in America, split up his best three-year-olds to give himself two chances at a Derby starter. Any Given Saturday ran in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct (a race once won by Secretariat). Cowtown Cat was sent to Stickney.
Saturday’s crowd at Hawthorne Race Course was the biggest I’ve ever seen there, but I’ll bet three quarters of them couldn’t tell you who won the Illinois Derby. They weren’t there for horse racing. “I wonder if they’re going to be giving away gold today,” said a woman in front of me at the program booth. They weren’t, but as soon as I walked in the door an Abe Lincoln impersonator shook my hand. Off to the left the Bud Girls were posing for pictures with gamblers. And the track was giving away T-shirts, but only in size XL.
The ostrich races were more exciting than the Illinois Derby, and more honest than the camel races. Two of the ostriches threw their jockeys, but the winner, Pecky Hart (named after Hawthorne’s director of mutuels, Michael P. “Packy” Hart), got the smoothest ride I saw on any animal all day. His jockey leaned back in the saddle, sitting like a harness driver, perfectly in rhythm with his mount’s bobbling gait.
