Dream Team

There is a frozen moment, right before the start of the Kentucky Derby.

- Tim Layden

It is a moment of infinite possibility, in which every horse runs with wings, every bet is cashed, and the racetrack is once again a cathedral of sport. Last Saturday it looked like this: 20 horses rocking in the starting gate, a hulking piece of green iron, well past the top of the home stretch, almost to the brick wall that separates Churchill Downs from the street beyond. Late afternoon sunshine slanted across a racetrack slick from three days of rain, like a sheet of brown ice. It sounded like this: a buzz, a gasp and then a roar from the throats of nearly 160,000 fans who had waited a year to witness this again. And it felt like this: a question, about to be answered at last.

The winter and early spring had been mostly empty. Promising young horses had run fast, and then slowly. They had been healthy, and then injured. They had won, and then they had lost. There was no front-runner in the class. Mastery, trainer Bob Baffert’s colt, might have been the favorite, but he was injured in March, a symbolic blow. On the day before the Derby, Baffert’s horse Abel Tasman won the Kentucky Oaks, a race for 3-year-old fillies that is famous inside racing but largely unknown outside it. Afterward Baffert promised that clarity would come in the Run for the Roses. “There hasn’t been a horse that separated himself from the pack,” said the white-haired man who has the most familiar face in racing. “The Kentucky Derby will do that.”