Flatter: Drama is all wet this week at Kentucky Derby 2024

Louisville, Ky.

Dawn broke dripping wet Friday at Churchill Downs. That is about as much drama as there has been during this Kentucky Derby week.

What a difference a year makes. At this time a mere 52 weeks ago, the backside buzz got to the point that we needed that beekeeper who swooped into the Arizona Diamondbacks game Tuesday to get rid of that intrusive hive.

It may be a curse to put this out in the universe, but things have been eerily quiet this week. Thankfully. So far as we know, all the horses have come back to their barns in good order. And so far as we know, no one has been caught with a drug positive, although the returns have been limited to just the equivalent of absentee ballots.

Yes, it is still early. They go through this in the final hours before Super Bowls, too. We had no notice about Max McGee or John Matuszak or Barret Robbins when they went overtime with last call. If the Kentucky Derby is about to have a Janet Jackson moment, there will be no advance notice.

It has been so quiet this week that a mass email that Churchill Downs sent out was abnormally conspicuous. It was an admonishment not to post security-breaching photographs of those credentials that we in the media wear like those placards hanging from the necks of spelling-bee contestants. That, too, was a nod to the NFL, which has sent out its own version of that warning for years.

The rumor mill is always a round-the-clock proposition during Derby week. Remember how accurate it was last year? It was the subject of this very column when the scuttlebutt predicting exits by Saffie Joseph Jr. and Continuar and eventually Forte would come true.

This year it is Honor Marie, whose trainer Whit Beckman had a rhabdo scare that temporarily kept him from walking. Fortunately, he got out of the hospital and back to his barn this week.

Gossip, however, says his little colt who finished second in the Louisiana Derby might not make it to the gate Saturday. Trying to pour some herbicide on that grapevine, the horse’s owners at Legion Bloodstock turned to X on Thursday night and wrote, “We can confirm that the rumors about Honor Marie being scratched are absolutely false. He is training better than ever, and we are looking forward to seeing the best version of himself come Saturday.”

So there. Then again, Todd Pletcher dismissed the rumors about Forte before the scratch that was heard around the racing world on Derby day last year. In the meantime we hurry up and wait.

A couple of my own predictions about the buildup to this Derby have been wrong. I thought by now that the national media who parachute in would have revisited the 13 horse deaths from last spring. Yes, 13. That we know of. Or the absence of Bob Baffert for going on three years. Yes, three. That we know of.

There have been a few stories written here and there and some conversation on radio shows and on one particular podcast that has my grimy fingerprints all over it. But neither subject has been repeated very loudly.

“There’s a place and a right point to mention it, to explain what’s happened, but to sit there and spend another five or six minutes on an issue we’ve gone over the last three years,” NBC’s Mike Tirico said Tuesday about whether the Baffert story will be retold to millions of TV viewers Saturday. “I don’t know if that’s the best use of our time at this point.”

The subject of the dying horses never even came up in that NBC media conference. When it was raised in that agenda-driven New York Times documentary last week, only 118,000 people watched, according to Nielsen. I suppose that total will rise with on-demand views on Hulu, but it does not seem likely to grow larger than the number of patrons who will descend on Churchill Downs on Saturday.

“We thought we might respond, but why bother if no one saw it?” one industry executive told me on the backside this week.

For the first time in maybe five years, this Derby has felt less like a cursed event and more like a day at the races. Fancy that. Maximum Security and COVID and Medina Spirit and fatalities and scratches get mentioned now like they are little more than by-the-way asides.

In my world this week I have had far more conversations about whether the good Fierceness or bad Fierceness will show up and whether the pace and traffic will suit Sierra Leone. The debates over Baffert have been replaced by much louder arguments about whether that horse from Japan will conquer that curse from the United Arab Emirates.

Three months ago I declared that the absence of Baffert horses would make Saturday’s race little more than Kentucky Derby 149 1/2. I still believe the race has been watered down the way the 1980 and 1984 Olympics were diluted by the absence first of the United States and then of the Soviet Union. But the spectacle has not gone away.

Churchill’s new $200 million paddock is breathtaking. It truly combines the best features of the parade rings at Meydan and Longchamp and even Gulfstream Park. I have heard comparisons to the Roman Colosseum more than a few times. I also heard that it gets weirdly hot in there when the temperature rises as it did Thursday afternoon, so that bug might have to be worked out.

The new racing surfaces have come back with cautiously good reviews. Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated said the added cushion in the dirt of the main track “sounds less thumpy.” Put that in your vernacular. And so far there has been nary a discouraging word about the turf course that was nothing but tattered trouble the past year-and-a-half.

Depending on when this is being read, the next 24-36 hours will make the difference between whether we really have gotten back to the classic Kentucky Derby experience, be it the corporate spin of roses and hats and juleps and thundering hooves or Hunter S. Thompson’s now 54-year-old declaration that the whole thing is decadent and depraved.

In my own feeble attempt to offer some epilog of normalcy, I can say I am sitting on a live futures ticket that I bought while I was at the National Horseplayers Championship in Las Vegas. What sweeter words could there be than Fierceness at 18-1?

Well, I just thought of five more. They all came back safe.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.