Derby 🏇🌹DeVaux: local tears, reactions
Saratoga reacts to its own Cherie DeVaux after she makes horse racing history at the 152nd Kentucky Derby.
Hey, Saratoga,
So where were we all on Saturday evening while one of our own was making history in front of 25 million viewers?
The build-up, the reactions, the chills, the tears…
Cherie DeVaux, the Saratoga native with the bear hugs, who so lovingly nursed Lady Eli back to health … we knew you when.
— Abby
🚨 Cut-off for Wednesday’s Dinner Club is 6:30 p.m. TODAY. 🚨
I hope to meet you there! I’ll be waiting at The Misfit after dinner to hear alllll the gossip. And Seen in Saratoga will be with me, snapping happy pictures.
Saratoga pride
The electric build-up, the pro athlete who cried, and all the local reactions as Cherie DeVaux becomes the first female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby.
The buildup
NBC’s Donna Brothers — legendary jockey and half-time Saratoga resident — does her very last Kentucky Derby walkover (after previously announcing her retirement) with trainer Cherie DeVaux, whose horse Golden Tempo enters the race with 23-1 odds and José Ortiz aboard. “I’m hoping you become the first female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby,” Brothers tells Saratoga native DeVaux.
In place for the big race, DeVaux gives her surrounding friends and family a huge hug as she settles down to watch the 152nd Run for the Roses, sporting a confident red jacket and custom Golden Tempo sneakers. “I might pee my pants,” she tells America’s Best Racing, which has her mic’d up for the race.
Just three days after being called up to MLB, new Yankees pitcher Elmer Rodriguez tunes in to the Kentucky Derby to root for his cousins, who are none other than star jockeys José Ortiz and Irad Ortiz Jr (José was piloting for DeVaux; Irad was aboard the favorite, Renegade). Watching alone, Rodriguez was “more nervous” than during his own debut with the Yankees, he would tell the New York Post. “I don’t know why. I started crying.”
Therapeutic Horses of Saratoga’s Kimberly Weir — on a flight from Phoenix to San Diego — struggles with the plane’s Wi-Fi, but the delay caused by Great White’s scratch kept her from missing the most exciting two minutes in sports. “Moments after we landed, I was cheering with my random seatmate,” she says. “I turned up the volume and played it for the whole plane to hear!”
“Electric energy,” Emily Mopsik calls the mood at the Sponsor-a-Scholar Derby Party at The Lodge.
The history-making race
Golden Tempo is so far in last place for the first part of the Derby that he isn’t even on the tracking screen — leaving DeVaux struggling to keep her eye on him. “They have little chiclets [with the horses’] numbers,” DeVaux says on the Today show this morning. “And he wasn’t even on that screen, which is pretty hard to do.”
Irad, aboard Renegade, “[feels] like a winner…for a second” after following Tyler Gaffalione around the final turn and taking the lead.
As José passes his big brother on the right, Irad — he tells Maggie Wolfendale the next day — calls out his brother’s name.
As DeVaux sees Golden Tempo making his run for it at the top of the stretch, she starts pounding the wooden barrier between her and the track. “Come on, José!” is all she gets out — screaming her battle cry exactly 10 consecutive times.
As José crosses the finish line for his first Kentucky Derby win, he and Irad — who finish 1-2 — briefly grasp wrists in a beautiful show of brotherhood that sweeps the internet.
DeVaux’s now-famous bear hugs cause her mic to go in and out. “Oh my god” can still be heard a whopping 17 times until, at last, out of breath, the first-ever female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby heads to the Winner’s Circle.
Reactions
“When she won?” says Saratogian Becca Beers, who watched with other locals on the Hall of Fame’s oversized screens. “All women felt the power shift. And then the Saratoga pride…It was pretty epic.”
“I am so excited she won and that I got to know her when I was shooting the races!” says veteran photographer Cathy Duffy. “Lady Eli was a horse that was very special to her, and it means a lot to me that I got to photograph them together.”
“She was always an extremely hard worker,” Chad Brown — for whom Devaux was an assistant for eight years — told Daily Racing Form. “She has carefully managed that horse, he’s been consistent. She made an equipment change a couple of races ago and the horse has maintained a consistent pattern and that’s the sign of a well-managed horse. Well deserved to her and her team, they work hard.”
“HERStory made at the Kentucky Derby,,,” reads a post to X by non-local Flavor Flav, who made headlines for inviting the female Olympic hockey team to Vegas. “Congratulationz Cherie Devaux on making history and earning yourself an invite to Flavor Flav’s SHE Weekend in Las Vegas so the world can celebrate you,!!!”
“If I wasn’t in the race I would have rooted for her,” Mike Repole, owner of Renegade, told the Lexington Herald Leader.
“Loyalty with Cherie,” José said when asked after the race how he chose to ride Golden Tempo. “Working with her all winter at Fair Grounds. We always knew we sort of have a lot of ability … she has been very loyal to me, so I feel like I should give that back. And I knew always Golden Tempo was going to be my mount.”
“It really is an honor to be able to be that person for other women or other little girls to look up to. You can dream big, and you can pivot. You can come from one place and make yourself a part of history.”
Cherie DeVaux