The roar at Churchill Downs wasn’t for the favorite. It rarely is at the Kentucky Derby, but this one hit different.

Golden Tempo, a 23-1 longshot nobody at the betting windows seemed to want, came from dead last to win the 152nd Run for the Roses on Saturday — and in doing so, handed Cherie DeVaux a piece of history 151 years in the making. She is the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner.

DeVaux, 44, wasn’t a celebrity hire or a dynastic name. She mucked stalls for the late Chuck Simon, served a long apprenticeship under trainer Chad Brown, and didn’t hang her own shingle until 2018. She was 36 years old, burned out on making other people’s horses faster, and ready to bet on herself.

Her first win came 11 months later. The pandemic slowed everything down. She kept going. A Breeders’ Cup victory in 2024 announced her as a serious operation. Saturday, in her first-ever Derby entry, she topped all of it.

Golden Tempo broke poorly and settled at the back of the pack early. Jockey Jose Ortiz — riding the Derby for the 11th time, still searching for his first win — bided his time. The colt began picking off horses on the far turn. By the top of the stretch, he was flying.

He passed favorite Renegade — ridden by Ortiz’s own brother, Irad Ortiz Jr. — just before the wire, winning in 2:02.27. Longshot Ocelli finished third. More than 100,000 people at Churchill Downs witnessed it. The realization seemed to hit the crowd in waves.

“I don’t even have any words right now,” DeVaux said afterward. “I just can’t. Just so, so, so happy for Golden Tempo. Jose did a wonderful job, a masterful job of getting him there. He was so far out of it.”

A Trainer’s Long Road

DeVaux is just the 18th woman to saddle a horse in the Kentucky Derby, and the second female trainer to win any Triple Crown race — Jena Antonucci got there first with Arcangelo in the 2023 Belmont Stakes. Before Saturday, the closest a woman had come to winning the Derby was Shelley Riley, who trained Casual Lies to a second-place finish in 1992.

In the days before the race, DeVaux moved from downplaying the historical significance to embracing it. “Being a female in this industry, the standards aren’t always equal,” she told reporters during Derby week, according to NBC News. By the time she faced cameras after the win, the role-model mantle had settled comfortably on her shoulders.

“I’m glad I can be representative of women everywhere,” DeVaux said in a postrace interview. “We can do anything we set our minds to.”

In her victory press conference, she reframed the moment: “Being a woman or my gender has never really crossed my mind in this. The thing that really has become apparent to me is not everyone has the same constitution I have mentally.”

A Brother’s Duel

The subplot was almost as good as the main story. Jose Ortiz, who also won the Kentucky Oaks roughly 24 hours earlier, beat his brother in a Derby for the first time. After 10 failed attempts, Ortiz finally got his roses.

“I just wish my grandpa was here,” Ortiz said. “But I know he’s looking from heaven.”

DeVaux did not commit to running Golden Tempo in the Preakness Stakes on May 16, saying she wanted to see how the horse came out of the race. The sport’s last Triple Crown winner remains Justify in 2018.

The winner’s share of the $5 million purse was $3.1 million, according to CBS Sports — a nice payday, but secondary to what DeVaux carried out of Churchill Downs. Twenty years of labor, a horse nobody believed in, and a place in a record book that had been all men, all along.

Sources