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Tom Law 
Orb and Departing coming together again to meet in Saturday’s Preakness Stakes is certainly not an anomaly, but a showdown between former pasture mates is far from ordinary even in today’s era of smaller foal crops and precisely plotted racing careers.
Claiborne Farm is on a roll, a position it is quite used to, and the news scroll on the farm’s website tells the story.
Orb became the 10th and first Kentucky Derby winner since 1995 born and raised at the Hancock family’s Claiborne Farm in Paris, Ky. The Malibu Moon colt was bred and is owned by longtime Claiborne clients Phipps Stable and Stuart S. Janney III and won the Derby almost 83 years after the farm’s first Derby-winning graduate, eventual Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox, won at Churchill Downs.
This Is Horse Racing is pleased to occasionally showcase works of fiction and non-fiction about the world of racing. The following fiction piece by R. C. Lages was printed in The College Voice, the award-winning student newspaper of Mercer County Community College in New Jersey. The Voice publishes 2,300 copies of each monthly print edition and the publication’s online edition averages more than 3,000 reads per month.
Art Preston put it simply and succinctly to his longtime advisor Rich Decker when discussing the future of two-time Jockey Club Gold Cup and recent Westchester Stakes winner Flat Out sometime late last year.
Kentucky Derby 139 is in the books. The winner left Churchill Downs Sunday morning and was back the stall at Belmont Park he hadn’t seen since late last fall by mid-afternoon. Talk quickly shifted from the Derby to the Preakness. Happens every year. We live in such an instant age that nowadays its always about what’s next, but the Triple Crown will forever be like that. Two weeks isn’t much time.
The day of the 139th Kentucky Derby seemed to begin as a rather subdued affair, due to near-constant rain, but no force of nature stops the excitement of this day.
The clock stopped at one minute, 59 and 2/5 seconds when Secretariat crossed the finish of the 1973 Kentucky Derby. Two weeks later the red chestnut won the Preakness Stakes and three weeks after that he romped in the Belmont Stakes to sweep the Triple Crown. Ron Turcotte was in the saddle each time and even though it’s been 40 years, he remembers it like it was yesterday.
Everywhere you turn today and tomorrow everybody will offer up an opinion on the Kentucky Derby. The race and its supporting program didn’t become the biggest handle day of the year on the American racing calendar by chance, so the trio of handicappers from This Is Horse Racing will take a dip into the pool and offer up their picks for Saturday’s stakes at Churchill Downs. We won’t count these against the overall standings, but bragging rights will of course be in the line.
Churchill Downs, Derby week. Even before the crowds fill every spare inch of the grandstand, the infield, and the paddock Derby magic is already there. Perhaps it is just from the excitement of the race being so near at hand. I had not yet experienced Churchill in Derby week until the actual day itself, and it was a bit of a revelation to feel this magic already.
