By the 1960s the Derby’s status as an important piece of Americana, combined with the glut of media attention focused on Louisville during the first week of May each year, had transformed the event into a national stage. As baby boomers came of age and challenged the conventional wisdom of their parents’ generation, many of the American cultural and social battles of the 1960s and 1970s would be waged on that stage, including the clash between youth and the “establishment,” and the struggle for black civil rights.
The first of these conflicts to appear at Churchill Downs accompanied the young people who made Louisville an important date on their social calendar beginning in the early 1960s, in hindsight a relatively simple and innocent time as compared to the social and political environment at the Derby and around the world that would emerge just a few years later. These teenagers and collegians invaded the infield at Churchill Downs in unprecedented numbers, creating a visible “generation gap,” between the youth in the infield and the older folks across the track in the grandstand and clubhouse. In the 1950s the infield had been a place where adults could enjoy a “picnic” atmosphere, but by the mid-1960s the infield began to embody the “spring break” environment that it retains today, populated by a young crowd and dominated by college-aged revelers.
Group from Frankfort relaxes in the infield, 1950s. The picnic atmosphere in the Derby infield of the 1950s turned much more rambunctious in the 1960s. (Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.)
A Louisville reporter stationed in the Derby infield in 1965 spoke with some of the spectators, questioning them about their Derby experience as if they were members of an exotic species. “I’m out of my gourd,” shouted “a barefooted young blonde woman wearing the ‘omnipresent’ madras skirt.” Another college-aged reveler bristled at the large presence of law enforcement in the infield. “What makes this place so great is all the authority around,” the young man sarcastically explained. “I mean everywhere you look there’s fuzz or National Guard, or even Army. You know we can’t have fun unless there’s authority around.”1 Those who were paying any attention to the nominal reason for the party saw Lucky Debonair and Bill Shoemaker just outlast a hard-charging Dapper Dan to win the big race, the third Derby score for the popular rider.
By the mid-1960s young people, especially college students, were doing their best to create an environment of contained debauchery in the infield that contrasted with the stuffier setting across the track in the clubhouse. They were engaged in a mild form of social protest that was part fraternity party and part carnival right in front of their parents’ eyes. Not everyone understood what the teenagers and college students were doing at the Derby, but everyone knew that the party atmosphere helped attract people to Louisville for Derby Week. Even the Roman Catholic Church relaxed its rules and regulations; in recognition of the Derby’s status as an important civic holiday, in 1965 the Church announced that Louisville Catholics—natives and visitors alike—would be granted a Derby Eve dispensation from the rule against eating meat on Fridays. But, as is the case with each new generation, the baby boomers were unaware of the fact that the ground they were treading upon was not entirely new territory.
The Derby had possessed a certain antiestablishment air since the 1910s and 1920s, when vestiges of Victorian morality codes still lingered and activities like drinking and gambling were frowned upon by conservative segments of society. But the Derby had since become an American institution; this institutional status, combined with the national attention focused on Churchill Downs at Derby time, made it an ideal location for displays of protest and antiauthoritarianism. In an environment of conflict over the direction of American society, politics, and culture, the Kentucky Derby became a stage upon which various groups attempted to define America in a period of political and social unrest. The fact that the Derby was also a site of celebration of vestiges of the Old South only increased its attractiveness to progressive protesters and activists.
A new nod to bygone days celebrated at the Derby was born in 1963: the annual steamboat race on the Ohio River, which remains a popular part of the annual Derby Festival. The Chicago Tribune reported beneath the headline “Shades of Huck Finn!” that the scene surrounding the first Great Steamboat Race “was almost as it might have been in granddad’s day. Calliopes blared off key with those old time tunes. Bunting and flags fluttered in the afternoon’s raw wind.”2 The popular race between The Belle of Louisville and New Orleans’s Delta Queen was run for fourteen miles up and down the Ohio River, with a prize of a golden set of elk’s antlers awarded to the winner. The race evoked visions of Louisville in a time when the Ohio River played a more important role in the city’s economy and culture than it does today. The race also evoked images of a Twainian Mississippi River past that did not exactly match the reality of Louisville’s historical experience. The steamboat race may be responsible for the following description of the Kentucky Derby by racing historian and Baltimore Sun sportswriter John Eisenberg: “The event was an American Bacchanalia, the scent of big money and fast horses colliding with Kentucky bourbon and pretty women to create a weekend of Roman excess in a conservative Mississippi River town.”3
It is not entirely surprising that Eisenberg would confuse Louisville’s Ohio River with the Mississippi; the imagery associated with Louisville at Derby time had much more in common with Mississippi River cities like Memphis and New Orleans than it had with cities along the Ohio like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. In reality, Louisville was probably somewhere in between, but the romantically “southern” Louisville that played host to the Kentucky Derby in the imaginations of Americans would fit much better on the banks of the Mississippi, the river that had been romanticized in works like Huckleberry Finn and Show Boat.
In the spring of 1966 American newspapers were dominated by coverage of civil rights demonstrations and the war in Vietnam. But on the first Saturday in May, national attention again turned to Louisville. A cartoon that appeared in the Derby Day edition of the Louisville Times acknowledged this shift in attention. Below a drawing of U.S. soldiers wading through muck in a Vietnamese rainstorm with a helicopter flying overhead, the caption read, “Well, I hope they have a dry track in good ol’ Louisville today.”4
Journalists covering the buildup to the 1966 Derby echoed racing fans’ disappointment that the two most celebrated three-year-olds of the year, Graustark and Buckpasser, would not be able to run in the race because of injuries. Days before the big race, New York Times columnist Arthur Daley suggested that the 1966 Derby “bears an embarrassing similarity to ‘Hamlet’ without the Dane.”5 Despite the conspicuous absences, the race provided a compelling story line and was dubbed “Native Dancer’s Revenge” by journalists. The 1966 Derby winner was Kauai King, a son of Native Dancer, whose only loss in a twenty-two-race career had been in the Derby twelve years before. The “Grey Ghost” had been the first superstar in horse racing’s television age, and his son Kauai King would be the first Derby winner in the age of color television coverage of the event.
Derby spectators had been part of the “story” of the Derby for journalists from the very beginning, but by the mid-1960s there was a clear tone of curiosity and suspicion in the descriptions of an infield increasingly dominated by exuberant youths. One journalist reported, “The Derby is very ‘in’ these days because the [youth] which sets the fashions of our times has extended its stylish vandalism from the jazz festivals of Newport and the beach conventions of Ft. Lauderdale to the infield of the Downs. There is probably no place in America where ladies and gentlemen at their tea, a dowager reading a novel in a lounge chair, gaudily clad bandsmen, soldiers in combat clothes, kids perched on 12-foot ladders, the beatnik fringe of the college set and lanky young men in ten-gallon hats could merge and mingle so freely.”6 Though serious disturbances were rare, beginning in the 1960s the Derby infield became an increasingly rambunctious environment and gained a national reputation as a first-rate opportunity for youth to participate in unbridled revelry and to thumb their collective nose at the representatives of the old guard and the status quo situated across the racetrack in the grandstand.
As the Derby’s status as an American institution became more entrenched, the infield crowd and culture were increasingly targeted in journalists’ rants about the ills of society. Whereas some commentators were concerned about the hedonism on display in the Derby infield, just as many complained about the commercialization of the event. Though it was the commercialized status of the Derby in general that was ostensibly offensive to traditionalists, their complaints about excessive Derby-related souvenirs and paraphernalia possessed a tinge of elitist snobbery. The enormous crowds whose tastes were reflected in these items were part of the Derby spectacle, and part of what made the event interesting to a nation of television viewers. The infield scene was part of the show, as evidenced by the amount of journalistic attention paid to the goings-on there, yet many print journalists, particularly turf writers, seemed to find the masses and the products presumably marketed toward them to be distasteful.
There were “too damned many promotions,” one commentator lamented. “In addition to the traditional Derby mint julep glasses, there were stamps on sale, three different books, two different silver medallions, julep cups, limited edition prints, bracelets, charms, necklaces, trays, Wedgwood bowls, silver plates, regular plates, whiskey bottles, several plaques, hats, T-shirts, banners, balloons, buttons, [and] shingles from the roof.”7 Calling the Derby “formalized, certified, organized Americana,” columnist Frank Deford opined, “ ‘Kentucky Derby’ is a registered trademark and would surely be franchised if they could find a way to put ketchup on it.”8 Local businesses capitalized on the Derby each year in a ritual price and rate hike that the New York Times called an “annual orgy of greed and opportunism.”9 Another writer, using a nom de plume in the Thoroughbred Record, observed that the commercial emphasis at Churchill Downs on Derby Day detracted from the romance of the sport of horse racing. He called the grandstand “a monstrous people-processor,” and noted that in the infield “the throngs are penned in by eight-foot high chain-link fencing. They peer through the railings behind the winner’s circle like animals at the zoo. No wonder the newspapers come out with headlines like ‘Derby Decadence Reigns in the Infield.’ ”10
By the 1970s the cultural divide between the infield and the grandstand area had become even more rigid, mirroring rifts between generations, social classes, and political persuasions in American society at large. An artist named W. B. Park, assigned to cover the 1972 Derby for Sports Illustrated, declared, “Status consciousness and elitism are rife at Churchill Downs, and the higher you climb in the stadium, the thicker this atmosphere becomes. The pecking order runs from the surging masses in the infield up through the bleachers, seats in the Grandstand, boxes in the Clubhouse, and finally to the lofty Penthouse, enclosed, air conditioned and incredibly exclusive.”11 There had been social stratification at the Derby since the beginning, though the journalists who praised the “democratic” crowds had largely ignored it. But the disparity between the infield and the grandstand was becoming too great for journalists to ignore by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many journalists admitted that they could not understand the attraction of the infield, a place where one typically could not even see a horse.
Park described the 1972 infield as a vast melting pot of humanity: “Squeeze your way between the writhing, perspiring bodies in all stages of dishabille. . . . A thousand square yards of overlapping blankets, umbrellas, Kentucky Fried Chicken, discarded clothes, newspapers, clever hats, transistor radios, books, footballs, Frisbees, and fraternity banners. There are hippies, heads, straights, rednecks, coeds, jocks, teeny boppers, and weirdoes. It is a young crowd, a crowd only vaguely aware that horse racing is going on around them (when do they play ‘My Old Kentucky Home?’), and packed in there, eyeball to elbow. It is just as well; they couldn’t see anything if they wanted to.”12
In 1975 an editorial in the Blood-Horse expressed similar incredulity about the charm of the infield. “This year the admission price doubled, from $5 to $10, and the infield crowd was halved, total attendance dropping some 50,000 to 113,324. We can understand the thinking of those who did not return to the infield this year—increased admission price and a forecast of rain. We cannot account for those who did, for none of the races can be seen from the infield, and as a social gathering, it has no pizzazz.” The article went on to criticize the behavior of the infield patrons. “Overcast skies and knots of uniformed police reduced displays of nudity to some extent, but could not restrain some individuals who, through boredom and cultivated antagonism to barriers, broke through the chain-link fence to get to the backstretch rail. A thrown beer can struck [last-place finisher] Bombay Duck for no plausible reason.”13
Journalistic reports of the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol in the infield had been published since at least 1911, when the Courier-Journal described a “German village” beneath a tent in the middle of the infield in which “a score or more of coatless men, perspiring from every pore, were kept busy dispensing beer and sandwiches.”14 Activities like drinking and gambling, although considered taboo by certain elements of society, had been a part of the attraction of the Derby, and its infield, since the event’s inception, and part of the Derby’s appeal was the presence of all different kinds of people in the infield: gamblers, minorities, women, drunks, and thieves helped to create an environment of excitement. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the drinking, drug use, and nudity in the Derby infield were objectionable to some conservative elements of society seated in the grandstand. The Derby had become a site for challenging and reshaping American cultural and social norms.
Famed writer and Louisville native Hunter S. Thompson described the contrast between patrons in the clubhouse and those in the infield in a 1970 article for the short-lived Scanlan’s Monthly. The fame of Thompson’s piece would outlive the publication and give rise to what was later called Thompson’s “gonzo journalism.” Thompson described his attempt to access the more exclusive sections of the clubhouse at the Kentucky Oaks (a race for three-year-old fillies run the day before the Derby): “The only thing we lacked was unlimited access to the clubhouse inner sanctum in sections ‘F and G’ . . . and I felt we needed that, to see the whiskey gentry in action,” Thompson wrote. “The governor, a swinish neo-Nazi hack named Louis Nunn, would be in ‘G’ along with Barry Goldwater and Colonel Sanders. I felt we’d be legal in a box in ‘G’ where we could rest and sip juleps, and soak up a bit of atmosphere and the Derby’s special vibrations.”15
Thompson used his press credentials to acquire a “walkaround” press pass and soon found himself in a clubhouse bar, “a very special kind of scene. Along with the politicians, society belles and local captains of commerce, every half-mad dingbat who ever had any pretension to anything at all within five hundred miles of Louisville will show up there to get strutting drunk and slap a lot of backs and generally make himself obvious.” From his vantage point in the press box, Thompson described to his companion, an artist named Ralph Steadman assigned to illustrate the article, what would happen in the infield the next day. “That whole thing . . . will be jammed with people; fifty thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It’s a fantastic scene—thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles. We’ll have to spend some time out there, but it’s hard to move around. Too many bodies.”16
The Derby didn’t remain attractive to the infield and clubhouse crowds in spite of the presence of the other but because of the presence of the other, at least in part. As it had been for decades, the Derby was a place where the rich could misbehave and experience something a bit exotic and risqué. It was also a place where regular folk could come into contact—or at least share the same time, place, and experience—with the rich, famous, and powerful. The presence of each group contributed to the experience of the other.
Both the rich and the regular folk could return home with wonderful and fantastic tales for their friends. One man who had been coming to the infield for decades claimed that it had “gotten better year by year” despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the air had increasingly “become filled with Frisbees and the smell of marijuana.”17 In 1972 a female clubhouse patron at the Derby described to a reporter her view of the infield: “The only thing I have to say is that I’ve never seen as many naked men in my life.”18 To a certain degree the infield was simply a place where young people could gather by the thousands and have fun. But because it was a place where traditions were valued and ties to yesteryear were celebrated, the Derby infield also provided an opportunity for young people to extend a metaphorical middle finger toward “old ways” and “the establishment,” some representatives of which were seated right across the track in the clubhouse and grandstand. Public displays of nudity and sexual activity in the infield challenged gender norms and declared sexual liberation on a stage made bright by the Derby’s popularity and significance to national identity and culture.
For millions of American television viewers in the mid- to late 1960s, Kentucky became a destination of escape from the currents of change sweeping through American society. From 1964 to 1970 Daniel Boone was a staple of NBC’s primetime lineup, entertaining audiences with tales from a simpler time in frontier-era Kentucky. Actor Fess Parker played the title character in something of a reprise of his portrayal of Davy Crockett in the 1955–1956 Disney miniseries that had sparked a merchandising bonanza. Parker’s Boone wore a coonskin cap like Crockett’s, and he befriended people of all nationalities and skin colors, including Indians and runaway slaves, in the pursuit of righteousness and justice. This fictional depiction of Old Kentucky fit the long-held popular notion that Kentucky was more racially tolerant and harmonious than other southern states. In 1969 Parker would serve as grand marshall of the Derby Festival Parade in a nod to his television-born connection to the Bluegrass State, but as the Derby approached in 1967, tensions over race-based housing discrimination in Louisville underscored the fact that depictions of eighteenth-century Boonesborough on TV were a far cry from the complex realities of the late 1960s in America.
Couple attending the Kentucky Derby. Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky. 1976. (© Ted Wathen, 1976.)
Just as the Derby had been a stage upon which 1960s youth had challenged some of the tradition and culture of their parents’ generation, protesters including Martin Luther King Jr. used the platform that was Louisville during Derby Week to speak out against racial discrimination in the city’s housing market in 1967, as the city and nation were becoming more culturally fractured and polarized than they had been at the beginning of the decade. The glut of media attention focused on Louisville during Derby Week ensured that anyone promoting a cause would receive plenty of exposure. Just as significantly, the Derby symbolized a tradition and history that was both American and Southern, making a Derby Week protest against race-based discrimination all the more poignant and controversial.
On May 2, 1967 (the Tuesday of Derby Week), the feature race at Churchill Downs was the Derby Trial Stakes, but five black teenagers stole the spotlight by running onto the track during the first race in front of ten horses barreling down the homestretch. In demonstrating their support for the open-housing protesters, the young men employed a tactic previously attempted in 1913 by suffragette Emily Davidson at the Epsom Derby in England: in support of women’s rights, she attempted to interfere with King George V’s horse Anmer during the race. Whereas Davidson suffered a fatal fracture of the skull in the process, the teenaged protesters at Churchill Downs were uninjured, diving to safety in the track’s infield as the horses approached. Jockey Bill Shoemaker responded lividly to the dangerous act, telling reporters, “If they get out there again, somebody’s going to get run over.”19 Another jockey threatened, “If they get out there again, I’m going to nail them. If they want to play games, we’ll play games.”20
Later that week, a reburial ceremony at Lexington’s Man o’ War Park for jockey Isaac Murphy (who had been nationally famous in the nineteenth century and largely forgotten since) provided an opportunity for opponents to express disapproval of the protests. Andrew Hatcher, assistant press secretary to the late president John F. Kennedy, told the crowd gathered for the ceremony, “Isaac Murphy was not interested in black power or green power but was content to let his own talent and abilities as a rider carry him to success.”21 The Thoroughbred Record favorably compared Murphy with the “members of Murphy’s race” who “marched and chanted and flaunted picket signs.”22
Others, however, praised the activism. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leader Hosea Williams told reporters, “Those children did a great thing. They brought to light on a national arena the problems here in Louisville.”23 The problem Williams referred to was the failure of Louisville city leaders to pass a proposed open-housing ordinance for the city that would address Louisville’s unofficial but habitual practice of denying blacks the opportunity to purchase or rent housing in traditionally white neighborhoods. The Louisville Board of Aldermen had voted down the proposed ordinance in April, sparking a series of protest demonstrations throughout the city. Threats of trouble from open-housing supporters, combined with the disruption at Churchill Downs, led to the announcement that the Derby Festival Parade scheduled for later that week would be cancelled to “protect the best interests of the participants and spectators.”24 City leaders acknowledged that the threat of disturbances came from both open-housing supporters and opponents, but the executive director of the Kentucky Derby Festival Committee, Addison F. McGhee, placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of black protesters when he explained that “a small city has completely capitulated to a dissident minority.”25
Open-housing advocates clearly had the attention of Louisville leaders, and they were threatening more action if their demands were not met. “No open housing, no Derby” was a rallying cry heard around Louisville as Derby Day approached. But Mayor Kenneth Schmied assured the city that nothing would prevent the running of the ninety-third Kentucky Derby: “The Kentucky Derby is one of the world’s greatest sporting events, and we will do everything possible to see that it is run in its richest tradition.”26 Governor Edward T. Breathitt used stronger language, assuring Derby-goers that he would do “whatever is necessary” to make certain that the event would be undisturbed.27 “The Derby must be run. It is our state’s showcase,” Breathitt told the director of the Kentucky State Police, Ted Bassett. “We’re on national television. We’re going to have 100,000 people coming through the gates at Churchill. The race is a huge economic entity. Tell me what you need, and we’ll get it for you.”28
Because of the bright spotlight shining upon Louisville during Derby Week, the city’s housing battle became a national issue. National groups including the SCLC and the Ku Klux Klan stormed into the city, fully aware that the nation’s eyes were fixed upon Louisville during the first week in May. The day after the on-track incident, plain-clothed leaders of the KKK, along with a handful of robed members, visited the track to offer to help police “keep order” there. One leader told reporters that “thousands” of Klansmen would attend the Derby that Saturday. “The Kentucky Derby is an important national event,” the Klansman explained, “and we don’t see that it has anything to do with open housing. We suggest that they either bar Negroes from Churchill Downs Saturday or find some other way to control them.”29
Later that day, the Reverend Martin Luther King arrived in Louisville to aid in the organization of protests planned for Derby Week. “The matter is now at a crucial stage and we must use all our resources to get open housing in Louisville,” King explained at a news conference. He declined to comment on whether the open-housing supporters would attempt to interfere with the Derby on Saturday, adding, “I’ll have to confer with the leaders here before I can say anything about that.”30
Uncertainty loomed in Louisville throughout the week about what might take place at the Downs on Saturday. Law enforcement groups even took seriously the possibility (reported via a tip from a Mafia-related informant in Detroit) that protesters were planning to gather in the infield near the starting gate where they would disrupt the start of the Derby by blowing dog-training whistles to prevent the horses from being loaded.31 Late on Derby Eve word leaked from the King camp that there would be no disruption of the Derby. King announced there would be a demonstration downtown, but there would be no such presence at the Derby. King admitted his fear that tension and hostility amid the expected Derby crowd of one hundred thousand could spark a race riot.
Despite these assurances, a major police and military presence was in place at Churchill Downs on Derby Day. Twenty-five hundred National Guardsmen, state troopers, and local law enforcement officers were at the track, which resembled an armed camp. As post time for the big race approached, National Guardsmen formed a ring around the inside of the one-mile track at intervals of twenty-five feet, armed with riot batons, creating a barrier between the infield and the race participants. “I want you men to look to the left, and I want you men to look to the right,” one officer barked, “and if anybody comes over [the fence] I want you to hit ’em in the head.”32 The Courier-Journal noted, “Only a few Negroes were in the big infield, and they appeared to go unnoticed by the crowd. What tension there was appeared directed at badges and helmets.”33 A cartoon in the Derby Day edition of the Louisville Times was a telling comment on the state of affairs in Louisville and in the nation at large. The drawing depicted a military tank in motion, with the caption, “Are they sending us to Vietnam, Mac—or Churchill Downs?”34 The infield truly looked like occupied territory.
Like the threats of disturbance and violence at Churchill Downs that day, the equine action on the track failed to meet expectations. The post-time favorite Damascus entered the Derby off an easy score in the Wood Memorial Stakes, New York’s most important Derby prep. Though he would go on to be voted champion three-year-old and horse of the year for 1967 on his way to the Hall of Fame, Damascus could manage no better than third for jockey Bill Shoemaker after becoming unnerved by the large crowd before the race on what was a hot and humid afternoon. Darby Dan Farm’s Proud Clarion was a surprise winner at odds of more than 30-1 under the urging of jockey Bobby Ussery.35
The fact that the eyes of the nation annually focused on Louisville in the first week of May placed the city’s problems in a spotlight and made Louisville a stage with a national audience during Derby Week. Any disturbance in Louisville would have received more national attention the first week of May than at any other time of the year, but this was a conflict with clear racial overtones: the Derby’s historical association with the Old South made this battle more contentious and more significant than those in other cities. The Derby’s lofty place within American culture increased the stakes for both sides of the conflict. Neither the black protesters nor their opponents wanted to lose such a high-profile battle, and neither side wanted to allow the other to affect the tone or the identity of the Kentucky Derby—or the nation—in any way.
As trying a time as 1967 had been for Churchill Downs, things would get even worse the following year. History books and souvenir julep glasses show that Calumet Farm won the Kentucky Derby for a record eighth time in 1968, but the story is much more complicated than it might appear. Dancer’s Image, a son of Native Dancer, finished first in the 1968 Derby, and Calumet’s Forward Pass crossed the finish line in second place. Dancer’s Image’s jockey, Bobby Ussery, “with a hippie haircut and a hippie grin, waving two fingers at the crowd,” crossed the finish line first for the second year in a row, becoming only the third jockey (and the first white one) to accomplish that feat.36
The colt was owned by Peter Fuller, a wealthy Massachusetts businessman and former amateur boxing champion who had invited controversy in the previous month when he donated the prize money he won in one of Dancer’s Image’s Derby preps in Maryland to the recently widowed Coretta Scott King, whose husband had angered city and track leaders the previous year with his Derby Week protests in Louisville. The Thoroughbred Record expressed disapproval of the gesture, claiming that Fuller had “made a mistake of injecting the racial situation into thoroughbred racing when he donated the Gold Cup purse to the widow of M. L. King.”37 Fuller later recalled that his gift to King led to the reaction from racing gentry of “Let’s jump on this guy in no uncertain terms. It became something that it should not have become.”38 He ruffled more feathers once he arrived at Churchill Downs for Derby Week, brashly predicting victory for his colt, going so far as to rehearse the walk from his box seats to the winner’s circle, and demanding that Churchill Downs president Wathen Knebelkamp increase his ticket allotment from four to fifty to accommodate his large group of friends and family, threatening that he would not run his colt if his needs were not met.
On the Tuesday following the Derby, Churchill Downs stewards released the following statement: “The chemist of the Kentucky State Racing Commission has reported that the analysis of the urine samples taken from Dancer’s Image, winner of the 7th race on May 4 1968 contained phenylbutazone and/or a derivative thereof. Pursuant to Rule 14.06, when said sample indicates the presence of such medication, such horse shall not participate in the purse distribution, and, under the rules of racing, the wagering on said race is in no way affected.”39 The drug in question, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug prescribed to treat joint pain, commonly referred to as “bute” and sold under the brand name Butazolidin, was regularly prescribed for human and equine athletes at the time but was not allowed to be in a horse’s system on race day in Kentucky.
The rule was clear regarding the distribution of purse money but left some ambiguity regarding which horse would be the official winner of the Kentucky Derby. News reports were calling the ruling a “disqualification” of Dancer’s Image. But the stewards’ ruling actually used no such language, only a prohibition against Dancer’s Image receiving any prize money. The decision of the stewards to award the $122,600 first prize to the owners of Forward Pass began a four-year process of appeals and hearings filled with allegations, rumors, and confusion that would ultimately cost Fuller $250,000 in legal fees, and perhaps much more in lost stud fee revenue, as the title of Kentucky Derby champion would almost certainly have raised Dancer’s Image’s value for breeding purposes. In December 1968 the Kentucky Racing Commission declared Dancer’s Image the record-book winner of the Derby but awarded the first-place purse to Forward Pass. In 1970 a Franklin County Circuit Court decision awarded the first-place money to Dancer’s Image; then in 1972 the Kentucky Court of Appeals overturned the circuit court ruling and awarded the money to Forward Pass. Later that year the Kentucky State Racing Commission, appointed under a new Democratic gubernatorial administration, officially named Forward Pass the winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby. The long course of action frustrated everyone involved, even the ultimate “winner,” Lucille Markey, widow of Warren Wright and owner of Calumet Farm, whose experience with the process left a sour taste in her mouth and caused her to boycott all Kentucky racing for a time.
Knebelkamp tried to give the controversy a positive spin: “If there’s anything good that comes out of this, it is that everyone will see how effectively racing polices itself. This will hurt Churchill Downs temporarily, but in the long run it will help.”40 Churchill Downs leaders believed that they were serving their event and society by applying strict interpretations of existing regulations. Racing historian William Robertson agreed: “So long as a rule is in the books, it ought to be respected—even if it’s a rule against mare’s milk. The rule should not be changed merely because it pinches at the moment. A rule which never pinches is worthless.” Robertson then took the opportunity of the controversy to air his opinions on the state of American society in general: “There is ample opinion that the ban against [bute] is no good. I happen to feel that it is not as bad as the free use of the drug would be. On the other hand, it seems to be the fashion nowadays to literally wallow in self-criticism. When rioters riot and looters loot, it is not the fault of the rioters and looters but the fault of the ‘system’ controlled by non-rioters and non-looters, who thereupon are expected to engage in morbid introspection and go into fits of penitence. Nuts to that.”41
Forty years after the fact, Fuller still believed that he had been treated unfairly in a racist environment that surrounded the Derby and the Kentucky horse industry. “I mean, baby doll,” Fuller opined in 2008, “the Civil War was still pretty good down there. I’ve heard from people there who say we absolutely got screwed and from other people who say, ‘please, Peter, shut up and go away.’ ”42
Perhaps leaders of less culturally significant events could have resolved controversies differently in 1968. But in the sociocultural environment of the late 1960s, Kentucky Derby officials would not have wanted to appear soft on drugs or tolerant of rule bending. The Derby was a part of American national culture and national identity. In an era when the definition and direction of the United States were being contested, leaders at the Derby took a stand for law and order. Leaders at two other high-profile sporting events took a similar stand in 1968. At the 1968 Masters, Argentine golfer Roberto De Vicenzo signed an incorrect scorecard after finishing the tournament tied for first place, resulting in his disqualification, despite the precedent of a more lenient interpretation of the rules.43 Later that fall at the Mexico City Olympic Games, Americans John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their black-glove-clad fists during the playing of the American national anthem on the medal stand after the two-hundred-meter sprint in order to raise awareness of racial injustice in the United States. Like leaders at the Derby and the Masters, Avery Brundage, the International Olympic Committee president and former United States Olympic Committee president, took a stand for “law and order” and banned Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village and saw to it that they were removed from the U.S. Olympic team.
In a year chock-full of controversy in the sports world, Sports Illustrated put the Derby scandal on its cover, calling it “the story of the year.”44 The storm at the Derby made large waves in American popular culture. CBS News was prepared to run the story on Walter Cronkite’s newscast under the headline “Derby Winner a Hop-Head” until a racing correspondent explained that the drug did not actually “hop” a horse—it was an anti-inflammatory medication.45 The broad media coverage that accompanied the controversy until its conclusion in 1972 was a testament both to the significance of the Derby to Americans and to the pervading sociocultural environment.
It should not be surprising that in the most divisive of times in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Kentucky Derby found itself squarely in the middle of controversies so representative of a divided nation. The Derby was one of America’s signature events, making it a fertile battleground for those who wanted to influence national culture. In the late 1960s, events like the Kentucky Derby were bastions against the tides of change that threatened the traditional order of American society. They were institutions at a time when institutions were being questioned and challenged. The Derby was representative of an established American tradition and culture. This institutional status the Derby had attained attracted groups that wanted to influence national opinion, direction, and identity.
The next major attempt to make use of the Derby spotlight to influence public policy and attitudes emerged out of the white backlash to desegregation, specifically the forced busing upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1971 decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. Because of threats of disturbances made by groups opposed to court-ordered busing in Louisville and the surrounding suburbs, the police presence at the 1976 Derby was greater than ever before. The track had installed barbed wire atop the fence that surrounded the infield area after some of the infield crowd at the previous year’s Derby broke through the fence in order to get closer to the backstretch railing. The threat of violence and the new prison-yard décor at the infield cast a pall over the atmosphere. Unlike 1967, when threats of disturbance ultimately proved to be empty, protesters made their presence felt in 1976.
Tension had been high in Louisville since the previous September, when the court orders to bus students to schools outside their neighborhoods in the interest of achieving racial diversity were first implemented. Manifestations of the tensions included major riots, bonfires, school boycotts, a KKK presence, and a cross burning at a white suburban Louisville high school.46 At the 1976 Derby an antibusing group, the National Organization to Restore and Preserve Our Freedom, distributed handbills around the track calling for a chant after the singing of “My Old Kentucky Home.” The flyer proposed that supporters shout the slogan “Stop forced busing and we’ll stop fussing.” A helicopter trailing a banner with an antibusing message was also spotted above the track periodically throughout the day. The real disturbance, however, came after the Derby horses passed the stands for the first time during the race. A grenade spewing green smoke hurled from the infield landed on the track, but crisis was averted when a National Guardsman used his helmet to remove the object before the horses appeared again.
A photo of the incident appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune with the accompanying caption “Violence Hits Derby.”47 The event was not given much attention in the major Louisville papers, however. There was no specific evidence that the smoke bomb was related to the antibusing movement, but the environment at Churchill Downs in 1976 again demonstrated that the Derby was a national stage. The Derby was part of the national identity, and Derby-goers felt entitled and compelled to make known their visions for the proper direction for American society and culture.
The antibusing movement grabbed plenty of attention at the 1976 Derby, but another major theme that year was the American bicentennial. Ads and promotional material wrapped the event in red, white, and blue, as they had previously during the First and Second World Wars. A reporter described the unusual number of American flag bowties to be seen as well as the usual assortment of horse-related neckwear and “Kentucky colonel” black string ties. Even the lead ponies were decked out in patriotic colors at Churchill Downs in 1976.
When the starting gate opened, Bold Forbes and jockey Angel Cordero broke alertly and maintained their lead over heavily favored Honest Pleasure all the way around the track for a wire-to-wire victory. Called “the Puerto Rican Rolls-Royce” by Cordero, Bold Forbes had been born in Kentucky and sold at auction there as a yearling, but had raced extensively in his owner’s native Puerto Rico. The press played up the horse’s “Latino ethnicity,” just as it had in 1971 with winning colt Canonero II, born and sold at auction as a yearling in Kentucky before being shipped to Venezuela. When Canonero II returned to his native state to take American horse racing’s biggest prize, American sportswriters dubbed the colt “the Caracas Cannonball” and “the pride of Venezuela, a South American kid who came north to beat the yanqui at his own game.”48 The media’s focus on the ethnicity of Derby horses and riders in the 1970s reflected a national interest in the subject of ethnicity, as illustrated by popular and award-winning 1970s films such as Fiddler on the Roof, The Godfather, Rocky, and Saturday Night Fever. Interest in “foreign” horses like “the Puerto Rican Rolls-Royce” and “the Caracas Cannonball” at the Derby would continue to grow in the decades to come as the Thoroughbred industry became increasingly global and as major international owners made the Kentucky Derby an important goal of their racing programs.
The United States was a nation looking for inspiration in the 1970s. The war in Vietnam, Watergate, a problematic economy, and the unfulfilled hope of the 1960s had damaged the national psyche. In this environment, Americans found heroes in unusual places, including on the racetrack. Though they were incapable of patriotic rhetoric, the three American Triple Crown champions of the 1970s, Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed, were celebrated as examples of American strength and success in times that were not the country’s brightest, and these equine stars would find no brighter stage than the Derby. As Secretariat made his way through the Triple Crown in 1973 he was featured on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and Sports Illustrated. Newsweek editor Osborne Elliott remarked, “We’re going from Watergate to the starting gate.”49 California racing secretary Jimmy Kilroe said of the great horse, “I think he absolutely revitalized racing. We must believe in something.”50 After Secretariat annihilated the field at the 1973 Belmont Stakes, turf writer Arnold Kirkpatrick wrote, “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that he is the finest athlete of any race, color, family, genus, or species ever to have lived. . . . His name is Secretariat and, with a crushing 31-length victory in the 105th Belmont Stakes June 9, he sent practically every sportswriter and racing fan in the country rushing for his thesaurus in search of the Ultimate Superlative. It has been found. The Ultimate Superlative is Secretariat himself.”51
Though no horse would soon match the popularity of the great Secretariat, both Seattle Slew and Affirmed would join him on the list of Triple Crown winners in the 1970s. Owned by a pair of thirty-something couples, Mickey and Karen Taylor and Jim and Sally Hill, Seattle Slew had been purchased for $17,500 at the Fasig-Tipton July Yearling Sale in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1975, a relative bargain in hindsight. Slew showed early brilliance, and was named champion two-year-old of 1976. The following year he cruised through the Triple Crown undefeated for his career, the first horse to accomplish that feat, with the ownership keeping a high profile throughout his career, serving as living advertisements for the sport.
1973 Triple Crown champion Secretariat, in retirement at Claiborne Farm. (Photos by Z.)
The following year Affirmed and teenage jockey sensation Steve Cauthen captured the attention of the nation in sweeping the 1978 Triple Crown. They had the help of a foil in Calumet Farm’s Alydar, who finished second to Affirmed in each of the three Triple Crown races. In 1979 Spectacular Bid fell just short in his attempt to join the ranks of Triple Crown champions, but he earned a place alongside Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, and Alydar among the elite horses of the 1970s and of the twentieth century.
Each of these horses not only contributed to the popularity of horse racing as a sport, but also helped to further the Kentucky Derby’s status as a national event in the 1970s, a time when Americans were seeking American heroes but having difficulties finding them among the human set. As one reporter explained, “The Kentucky Derby is more than a horse race. It’s an American institution, perhaps the only one left. The Derby has survived a hundred springs, despite wars and riots, despite panics, depressions, recessions. It flourishes because everyone believes it’s a ritual handed down from a more elegant century. The Derby’s anachronistic caress soothes the nation with visions of bluegrass farms and mint juleps and Kentucky colonels.”52 Another journalist placed the appeal in the context of 1970s turmoil. “In these days of Watergate . . . when the basic concepts of what is right, proper, [and] respectable are being slapped smartly about the head and shoulders, [the Derby] emerged in welcomed, sharp relief.”53
The 1974 Centennial Derby shattered attendance records when 163,628 spectators passed through the turnstiles. (That record would eventually be broken, but not until 2011.) The success of Secretariat the previous year had enhanced the status of the Derby, but his exploits were not the focus of the media coverage and promotion of the 1974 Derby. The fact that it was the one hundredth running of the race was the major story that year. Kentucky was also celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the state’s first permanent settlement at what would later be called Harrodsburg. The two anniversaries combined to create unprecedented interest in and attendance at the Derby. Part of the appeal of the Derby for many spectators had long been the desire to be a “part of history.” For those who wanted to participate in history making, the one hundredth Derby would be “one for the ages.” Kentucky governor Wendell Ford boldly predicted, “The 100th Kentucky Derby will be the greatest thing that ever happened on the face of the United States.”54 He was not laughed out of the building. The advent of the centennial Derby turned everyone into nostalgic romantics.
In a preview of the 1974 Derby, New York Times columnist Joe Nichols included an excerpt from the Courier-Journal’s first Derby Day edition in 1875, in which B. G. Bruce had predicted that the Derby would still be a major happening one hundred years later. Nichols commented, “Never in the history of an activity to which predictions are a very part of its existence has any prophecy been so accurate.”55 Another writer previewing the centennial Derby tried to explain why there was such a popular fascination with the Derby’s past: “For an instant, for one blessed instant the first Saturday afternoon of each May, the world pauses in its headlong plunge to nowhere. What transpires here? Why this concentration of attention on a contest between animals long outmoded as a means of transportation? Nostalgia has its part in the degree of fascination. Even the youths are transported here to an earlier and perhaps a happier time.”56
Steve Cady, writing for the New York Times, explained the appeal of the Derby in terms of “My Old Kentucky Home”:
Played on any other day, it sounds like a minstrel-show anachronism. Played on the first Saturday of May, while America’s finest three-year-old thoroughbreds step onto the track at Churchill Downs, the cornball flavor of “My Old Kentucky Home” turns to pure magic. It can transform a cynic into a romanticist, make a poet out of an engineer, bring a horse-lover to the verge of tears. Even touts and pickpockets and ladies of the night have been known to pause long enough to hoist their mint juleps when they hear it. They’ll all be there next Saturday in Louisville when racing’s most nostalgia-drenched song is played again before the 100th running of the Kentucky Derby. Millions of other Americans, many of whom don’t know a fetlock from a furlong, will be watching—and listening—on television.57
Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford was similarly moved by the magnitude of the hundredth Derby, writing, “Under the twin spires, in the aura of the bluegrass spring, any good man will cloud up when they play My Old Kentucky Home and cry outright when he realizes he is standing in one of those rare places where beauty and history bisect for an instant. He’ll order a mint julep or two—not minding that it is corny—and salute a hundred Derbies past and a hundred more ahead.”58
England’s Princess Margaret was one of over 163,000 in attendance that year. The New York Times described the enormity of the crowd: “In a swirl of 163,626 spectators that ranged from streakers and flagpole climbers to a princess, the 100th Kentucky Derby was staged today in such a sea of humanity that Custer’s last stand might have been held in the infield without special commotion.”59 The record crowd on hand to be a part of centennial Derby history, and the millions watching—and listening—at home saw Cannonade defeat a record field of twenty-three starters for two well-respected horsemen, trainer Woody Stevens and jockey Angel Cordero. In a decade in which Americans were inundated with reports about an unpopular and losing war, presidential scandal, and a floundering economy, the Derby was a part of both the American past and present that Americans could be proud of. The equine heroes celebrated in the 1970s were not capable of singing their own praises, but they were also incapable of lying, cheating, stealing, or negatively affecting domestic or foreign policy.
Part of the celebration of a romantic past at the Derby in the 1960s and 1970s included a “rediscovery” of its connection to memories of the Old South that had been downplayed in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1961, the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, souvenir concessionaires at the Derby did “rapid business” selling replicas of Civil War soldiers’ hats. Sales were “about evenly divided between Confederate and Union caps.”60 In 1963 Churchill Downs president Wathen Knebelkamp recalled a strange ticket request that he had received from an Iowa man who told the Churchill executive that although he was from the North, he’d always admired the South. He concluded his letter, “I hate Lincoln, he was a heel,” presumably under the assumption that this declaration would increase his chance of acquiring tickets.61 The United States was a century removed from the Old South, yet the idea that social order and racial harmony had existed in that time and place continued to be attractive, and the Derby continued to be a place where people could celebrate such a memory. In 1965 the Courier-Journal described faces of modernity confronting images of the past at a time when the United States was itself approaching a cultural crossroad: “To some—the romantic and the curious—the Kentucky Derby is a pilgrimage, a hopeless hope for an intimate glimpse into history’s pages of a bygone era. It’s a little jolting, though, to those who have conjured up a soft image of the Old South’s gracious living suddenly to be charged $20 to park an automobile on somebody’s front lawn. But inside the Old South’s heritage and tradition come to life, softly and elegantly.”62 Despite the signs of modernity all around, patrons found the Derby’s southern flavor pacifying.
Churchill Downs president Lynn Stone attempted to articulate what the attraction of the Derby was for the thousands who made their way to Louisville each year to witness the event. “It’s the South,” he explained. “It’s the horses, the gambling, the tobacco, the whiskey. It’s the river town, the farms, the mint juleps. It creates an antebellum image.”63 This lingering association between the Derby and the Old South, the “antebellum image,” might well have contributed to President Richard M. Nixon’s decision to attend the Kentucky Derby in 1969, making him the only sitting president to witness the event (although at least seven other former or future presidents have attended the Derby while out of office).
Nixon had attended the previous year’s Derby as a guest of Kentucky governor Louie B. Nunn while campaigning for the presidential election to be held in the fall, promising to return the following year if elected, which was quite a promise since no sitting president had attended any horse race since Rutherford B. Hayes. Nunn held Nixon to his promise, glad to have some positive national attention for the Derby after the doping scandal the previous year. The governor boldly claimed that the visit was “the greatest thing that ever happened to Kentucky.”64 The president tried to articulate his own enthusiasm over attending another Derby but missed the mark. “I have been sports-minded all my life. I like the intense competition and skill of the participants, and there is a great thrill in watching great horses run,” Nixon told reporters, in what may be the least colorful description of a Derby experience ever offered.65
After a brief stint in the governor’s box, Nixon became restless. “I can’t stay up here . . . where they think all these rich folks are,” Nixon complained. “I’ve got to get down there where the bettors are and where the horse people are.”66 He managed to maneuver through the crowd for a quick tour around the ground level, Secret Service in tow, for a round of handshakes, but the presidential security team balked at Nunn’s suggestion that the president join him in the infield after the race for the trophy presentation. To Nixon, ever politically conscious, even a decision to back one horse over another was a risky venture: after the race Nixon turned to reporters and said, “I guess I lost,” but some of his aides insisted that the president had in fact been cheering for the winner, post-time favorite Majestic Prince.67
Nixon’s decision to attend the Derby at all is telling. On the surface, his presence could be viewed simply as a chance to enjoy a day of racing with friends and to relax like the rest of the one hundred thousand spectators at the Downs that day. But “Derby Dick,” as some sportswriters were calling him that weekend, was at the Downs only long enough to be able to claim to have been there. Despite the signs of modernity all around, the Derby’s lingering connection to the Old South in the minds of Americans suggests that Nixon’s presence at the Derby, like with his decision to attend a college football game in Arkansas later that year, might have had another motivation.
On December 6, 1969, the University of Texas and the University of Arkansas met in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for the Southwest Conference football championship. The two teams were undefeated and ranked one and two in the Associated Press college football poll. Journalists were predicting a showdown for the ages. Adding to the significance of the game was the fact that both teams’ players were all white. Prior to kickoff a group of black students threatened to storm the field if the Arkansas band played “Dixie” after a Razorback score as it usually did. The band did not play “Dixie,” and the president’s visit was capped off by a locker room presentation of a plaque to the victorious Longhorns.68
Nixon’s appearances at these major sporting events in Arkansas and Kentucky seem to fit into his “southern strategy.” In 1967 Kevin P. Phillips was working on a groundbreaking book (that would be published two years later), The Emerging Republican Majority, in which he argued in favor of exploiting various prejudices for political gain. Hired to join Nixon’s 1968 campaign, Phillips advocated an “outer South strategy,” encouraging the Nixon camp to abandon the Deep South strategy that Barry Goldwater had used to carry “George Wallace States” in 1964. He argued that an attempt to appeal to the Deep South would alienate voters in other states. Instead, Phillips suggested that the campaign concentrate on voters in the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and the Piedmont Regions of the (politically safer) South. In time, the outer South strategy worked. After carrying only thirty-two states in his narrow 1968 presidential win, Nixon won landslides throughout the nation in 1972, winning forty-nine states in one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history.
Even as late as 1969 the Kentucky Derby still qualified as a “southern” event. But Kentucky was not the politically dangerous Deep South; it fit into what Kevin Phillips would have called the outer South. Even in an attempt to win more southern minds and votes, Nixon could not have risked alienating a silent majority of Americans who still had fresh memories of fire hoses and attack dogs in Alabama with a presidential appearance at an event that was off mainstream America’s collective radar. The Derby was safe; it was benignly “southern” and still very much “American.” Derby fans found solace in the sanitized version of Dixie they encountered at the Derby.
Advertisers tying Kentucky and the Derby to the Old South in their marketing campaigns did so in a more subtle fashion in the 1960s and 1970s than they had earlier in the century. Overt references to plantations, white masters, and black servants in whiskey advertisements, which had been popular in the 1930s, had disappeared in the 1940s, yet a perception among Americans that a quiet connection existed between the modern Kentucky Derby and the Old South had remained. Whiskey advertisers had generally been reluctant to market their products as southern in the 1960s. But in the 1970s products were advertised as affording consumers a chance to access a simpler and gentler time—free from “uppity” blacks and “contemptuous” feminists—with an escape to the Old South. Rebel Yell, “the unreconstructed Bourbon,” was advertised in local newspapers to Derby-goers throughout the 1970s. “If you’re visiting from the North, this could be your only chance to enjoy the South’s most luxurious libation,” one print ad claimed, “because like this one Saturday and this one race, this one bourbon is available only below the Mason-Dixon line.”69 J&B Scotch, a product not generally associated with the South, tried a similar approach in an ad that depicted a luxurious home situated on a Deep South plantation beneath live oak trees with the caption “For your old Kentucky Home.”70
No less an authority than Bill Corum, coiner of the phrase “Run for the Roses” and the president of Churchill Downs from 1950 to 1958, acknowledged the major role that the memory of the Old South played in the creation of the identity and experience of the Derby. “To some of us, the echoes of the old starting drums still linger over the ancient Downs,” Corum explained. “The rustle of taffeta, the sense of a world apart, the gentle laughter, the rebel scarlet silk of the Lost Cause, and the reverence for the Thoroughbred are there like an unseen mist, an unforgettable aura when you’re a part of it for the first time.”71
This nostalgia for a place that never really existed in a time no one could actually remember pervaded descriptions of the Derby in the 1970s, but not everyone savored the preservation of the memory of the Old South. “While the singing of ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ at the Kentucky Derby is a cherished tradition and brings tears to the eyes of whites,” Clarence L. Matthews wrote in the Louisville Times, “the song’s lyrics are likely to evoke resentment from blacks. Most black people are equally chagrinned at the sight of other blacks dressed in antebellum costumes and wearing ‘Aunt Jemima’ like bandanas [while] serving burgoo” at the Kentucky Colonels’ reunion barbecue that traditionally concluded Derby Week festivities. “There is no nostalgia in slavery,” Matthews concluded.72
Journalistic references to the Old South in conjunction with the Derby would again dissipate in the 1980s, but the popularity of the event would not, demonstrating the complex nature of its appeal in that it could accommodate accelerating changes in American society and culture and thrive in the increasingly global environment of Thoroughbred racing and breeding. In the 1960s and 1970s various groups had used the national stage at Louisville at Derby time to challenge the status quo and to influence the nation, and these efforts had further increased the national visibility of the Derby. The success of national equine heroes at the Derby at a time when Americans needed diversion also helped to further entrench Kentucky and its signature event in American culture. This in turn fueled growth in the Kentucky breeding industry, a development that would raise the stature and significance of the Derby to international levels in the coming years.
