Late Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs, thoroughbred horse trainer Larry Demeritte walks in step with a three-year-old colt named West Saratoga, a longshot entrant in the 150th Kentucky Derby. (But an entrant, just the same, no small thing). As a practical matter, Demeritte’s walk will take him from a barn on the Churchill backstretch, clockwise (reverse) around the first turn and down the homestretch, then through a tunnel to the track’s new supersized paddock theater. It doesn’t take long. Unless you started 74 years ago, pointed headlong toward a life of poverty and struggle in the Bahamas, not just far from the splendor of the Derby, but from any assurance of a long or successful life.
Unless, along the way, you were born to a teenaged mother and raised with 13 relatives by a fearless and unrelenting grandmother in a tiny home in the capital city of Nassau. Unless you lost your father to an injury while riding the same species of animal that defines your life; and your mother to the same illness that would shape it. Unless you came to the United States and experienced a limiting racism, but vowed to never complain about it. Unless you have been a cancer patient for three decades, pushing past ominous prognoses with such uncomplaining fervor that most of your care team will join you at the Derby.
And unless you are competing so low in the thoroughbred hierarchy, a place where horses cost less than small cars, not more than large houses, that you dream of competing only because everybody dreams of competing. And unless 20 years ago you met up with a guy named Harry Veruchi, whose life experience is nothing like yours, but whose appetite for pulling profit from (relatively) inexpensive horses aligns perfectly with yours; and in September of 2022 you picked out a gray yearling and Veruchi paid a very modest $11,000 and named him West Saratoga, not after the famous resort racetrack, but after a long, wobbly street in his boyhood home of Englewood, Colorado.
Unless, since coming to the United States in the mid-1970s, you have made a point of attending the Derby in person almost every year, even though you rarely had a horse running on the card (and never in the Derby). Your first was in 1977, when Seattle Slew won, the first leg of his Triple Crown; he was purchased for a paltry $17,500 (still shy of $100,000 in today’s dollars). An omen? Unless you came to the Kentucky Derby all those years, just in case. “Every year I go to the Derby because I’m practicing,” says Demeritte. “So when I get there, I know how to act.
Unless, all those things, and this weekend you become the first Black trainer to run a horse in the Derby since Hank Allen in 1989 and just the second since 1951. In which case, that walk is a thousand small steps in the dirt that measure a lifetime.
The Kentucky Derby is the oldest continually contested sporting event in the United States -- 150 years without a pause. The first Derby was run only 10 years after the end of the Civil War, on an undeveloped tract of land (all tracts were undeveloped in 1875) where Churchill Downs still stands today. It has been run during two World Wars and two global pandemics, and delayed only twice, in 1945 and 2020. A person who witnessed that first race could have great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren watching on Saturday. The Wright Brothers invented the airplane 28 years after the first Derby, and today wealthy attendees arrive and depart on private jets. Racing looks more similar to its ancestral form -- horses running counterclockwise with jockeys on their backs -- than many sports, but the Derby has endured into a modern America that bears almost no resemblance to the country that existed at its beginnings.
There is no single explanation for such sustained durability. In the present, it is insufficient to call the Derby the biggest event in its sport, and more correct to say it is bigger than the struggling sport of thoroughbred racing itself, a sui generis moment every spring. (So big, in fact, that it can exclude the most famous trainer in the sport and his many fast horses, and reasonably expect no downtick in popularity outside the noisy inner circle of the game). It takes place at a bucolic-sounding venue that has been aggressively expanded for decades until it resembles in scale America’s giant football stadiums; its once-towering twin spires now dwarfed like museum pieces. It survives because it is a tradition, a date circled on calendars, and because its name is embedded in our culture. Any horseman will tell you that an outsider will always ask, Have you ever won the Kentucky Derby? And its keepers have leveraged all that familiarity into a Disney World of the parimutuel and the Bacchanalian, drenched in mint julep, beneath ostentatious hats and one old, controversial song. It works and it sells.
And something more: At the Derby, the Little Man can still win. Successful underdogs are beloved across the breadth of American sport, but increasingly rare in a sports ecosystem powered by elite -- and expensive -- discovery mechanisms among the youngest athletes and staggering investments at the professional and (now) college level. In the arms race to greatness, Cinderella is endangered. But not at the Derby, at least not fully. Syndicates formed from like-minded billionaires spend millions on baby horses, in hopes of winning not just the Derby, but the breeding competition that follows. But the race decides who wins.
Last year Mage won the Derby at 15-1 odds; he had been purchased for $290,000 and afterward his primary owner said, correctly and unironically, "[$290,000] in the real world, is a lot of money, but in horse racing it’s just a respectable number, but by no means a lot of money.” Two years ago Rich Strike snuck into the Derby field a day before the race and rolled down the lane to win at 80-1 odds; he had been claimed for $30,000 a year earlier, the ultimate outsider. Thirteen years before that Calvin Borel took Mine That Bird from last to first on a hardpan rail to win at 50-1. Funny Cide was a solid racehorse horse who won the 2003 Derby, but charmed with a story of high school buddies who started their horse racing careers with a $5000 stake each and purchased the eventual Derby winner for $75,000. In the 20-horse Derby, contested by animals that are the emotional and physical equivalent of rawboned human teenagers, the unthinkable happens. Regularly.
On Saturday, West Saratoga might not be the longest price in the Derby field, but his number will more closely resemble an offensive lineman’s than a quarterback’s. Demeritte purchased him for that $11,000 price at the popular Keeneland yearling (one-year-old) sale in September of 2022, where horses can sell for many millions or a few thousand, neither guaranteed to win a damn thing. Demeritte was on site in Kentucky, Veruchi was on the phone at his home in Arizona. Demeritte watched West Saratoga walk in the sales ring -- he fancies himself a keen judge of horseflesh and likes to say things like, “I look at the athlete, not the paper.” Meaning: appearance over pedigree, which is something horse-pickers with a small budget always say. Also: “I don’t buy cheap horses, I buy good horses cheap.” He told Veruchi West Saratoga was a looker with modest breeding, “nothing spectacular.” Veruchi authorized Demeritte to spend up to $20,000. The bidding stopped at $11,000.
With that gavel drop, West Saratoga became the most recent (metaphorical) offspring of an on-and-off relationship formed in the early 2000s when one of Veruchi’s partners introduced him to Larry at Keeneland. It was the type of strange bedfellows partnership that often blooms in the oddball world of racing -- a Black trainer from the Bahamas and a retired, white owner from Arizona by way of Colorado. Both racetrack lifers, in very different ways, on very different paths, with a common pursuit.
Demeritte first. He was born in 1949 in the Bahamas; he tries to guard that birthdate fiercely in hopes that his age won’t discourage some owner from seeing what he’s done with West Saratoga and giving him a more regal horse to train. But birthdates are difficult to guard. Demeritte says his father was Thomas Demeritte, a horse trainer himself, and his teenaged mother was named Mabel, who eventually gave birth to eight boys. Larry is the second-oldest of the eight. Demeritte says he was moved very young to live with his paternal grandmother, Maqueen Demeritte, who raised 13 children in her small home. “My mother was 15 or 16 years old,” says Demeritte. “A 15-year-old girl can’t raise no kids.”
Demeritte describes a life of poverty, but not despair. “I tell people, we were poor, but our home was loving and we had faith. Some days I would go off to school and my grandmother couldn’t even give me lunch. She would say ‘Larry, you go to school, you home, the Lord will provide.’ I would go to school, and I would go in the bushes at lunchtime and eat berries and then come home and there would always be something to eat. Sometimes it would be oatmeal, but there was always something.” Demeritte says his grandmother also served up tough love and life lessons that he summons up today:
Never blame anyone else if you’re not having success. Look inward.
And: Larry, you’re gonna have to be twice as good to be equal.
Demeritte’s father lived outside Nassau, and trained horses. Larry and several of his brothers pitched in. There was a dirt corral in the backyard where Thomas broke young horses. Larry started training his own horses in his late teens and early 20s and had success at Hobby Horse Hall Race Track, where the horses ran clockwise like in England, and which was closed in the late 1970s and now is the site of a resort hotel. In 1976, Demeritte moved to the United States with the assistance of Bahamian gynecologist Archie Donaldson, a Black man who owned horses in the U.S., and employed a Black trainer, Oscar Dishman. That year, Demeritte went to work for Dishman, and a year later, saw Seattle Slew at the Derby.
He has worked 48 years since, backing up Dishman and others at tracks in Chicago, Florida and Kentucky. He helped manage famed owner-veterinarian William O. Reed’s Mare Haven Farm, near Lexington, while working to establish his own training career on the side, which proved difficult. Trainers are reliant on owners; most owners are white. Demeritte aggressively refuses to publicly blame racism for any lost opportunity.
“One interview could never cover the things I went through,” says Demeritte. “But I don’t want this to be a racist thing. I don’t want this to be a negative thing, because then that’s what people will dwell on. White guys struggle in this game, too.” He says he hears his grandmother’s voice. Look inward. “‘I’ll just say I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from achieving my goals.”
That includes loss. He says both his parents died after he moved to the U.S.; his father was killed after falling from a horse that he was breaking in his backyard. His mother died of cancer. And there is his own illness: Demeritte was diagnosed and treated for male breast cancer, and after that, in 1996, was diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma, a pre-cancerous form of the blood cancer. In the mid-2010s, that advanced into full-blown multiple myeloma with amyloidosis, a condition in which the myeloma makes a protein that grows in the patient’s organs and is difficult for the body to dissolve. According to Dr. Rickey Myhand, a hematology oncologist who has been Demeritte’s primary caregiver since 2017, Demeritte has incurred heart failure, kidney infections and blood clots in his lungs. He received a stem cell transplant at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2018 -- “That’s a big deal,” says Myhand -- and still undergoes monthly chemotherapy infusions, which can be debilitating; and treatment to reduce fluid in his heart. Demeritte recalls once having been given a survival prognosis of six months, although Myhand says five years is a more common estimate. He has far outlived both.
All of this Demeritte has endured with uncommon strength. “He has always been upbeat and positive about things,” says Myhand. “His work is difficult for him, with his illness, and I’ve seen him get a little down, but never grumpy or angry. He’s very forthright, honest, kind.”
Harry Veruchi is on his cell phone now, talking to me about Larry Demeritte. “He’s just an amazing guy,” says Veruchi. “He doesn’t want to make a big deal that people didn’t want to hire him. He doesn’t want to make a big deal about his cancer.” Veruchi pauses and becomes emotional. “Excuse me.” Another pause. “I want this more for him than I want it for myself, because, you know, I don’t know how many more chances he’s going to have.”
That is a remarkable thing for Veruchi to say, because he is one of those people -- like the Funny Cide gang; like 2014 Derby winner California Chrome’s lightning-in-a-bottle owners, who hit the equine genetic lottery and nearly won the Triple Crown; like Mine That Bird’s cowboy connections -- who at age 71 is statistically very unlikely to get another chance of his own (to be fair, it would be unlikely if Veruchi was 31). But that serendipity also creates a type of gratitude that the hedge fund consortiums could never fully appreciate.
Veruchi was born in Rockford, Illinois and raised in Englewood, Colorado, six blocks from Centennial Racetrack, which was opened in 1950 and closed and torn down in 1983. He grew up a racetrack gremlin, scurrying into and around Centennial with his buddies, one of whom was Doug Peterson, who grew up to be a thoroughbred trainer and handled Seattle Slew for a while and died at age 53. Veruchi was also a jock who was a sure-handed, slow-footed, 6-2, 200-pound wide receiver who desperately wanted a shot at the college game. He says Colorado coach Eddie Crowder recruited him and told him, “Harry, I know there’s nothing you can’t catch but you’re too slow.” He went to Northern Colorado University, played one year and then kept on with competitive flag football into his 30s. (His quarterback was Joe Rutigliano, brother of former NFL coach Sam Rutigliano).
He left college, went to work as a truck driver, then took over the liquor store his father owned in Denver. Veruchi sold that in 1979, when he was 27, went in with his brother on a used car lot on West Colfax Ave. in Denver, and did well enough to retire at 55. “People see me, with a nice house and a nice car,” says Veruchi, “and I tell them I sold used cars for a living and they say, ‘What?’ I won’t know any other owners at the Derby. I don’t have that kind of money. I’m not a high roller, I’m not chic. I’m just down to earth.” He had bought his first horse in 1982; the game was a nice match for his money skills and a fair replacement for flag football, which ended, he says, “when I started pulling hamstrings, and everything else.”
Veruchi’s ownership philosophy is simple: “I just want to have fun.” He buys yearlings for about what he paid for West Saratoga, anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000, sometimes with partners. He says he’s well in the black for his career, with earnings as high as $1.7 million in a season. When Larry Demeritte pitched West Saratoga to Veruchi, he said, “I think this horse is gonna be something special.” Veruchi, thought, I’ve heard that from other trainers about horses and that’s nice, but I’ll agree with you when he breaks out of the gate and wins. That didn’t happen until his fifth maiden start, because those races are often sprints and Demeritte was convinced West Saratoga would prefer longer distances, like the Derby’s 1 1/4 miles, and didn’t push him to go fast early. “He’s a smart horse,” Demeritte says. “And he’s got all the gears.”
West Saratoga entered the Derby picture last September with a victory at 12-1 odds in the Iroquois Stakes right at Churchill Downs and then qualified for the race with a second place finish in the March 23 Jeff Ruby Steaks at Turfway Park, worth 50 points in the arcane Derby scoring system, plenty to make the field. He’ll be a longshot, but the game’s bigger players have already been impressed: Veruchi turned down a prospective buyer who offered $50,000 for a five percent share of the West Saratoga. For now. “Never say never,” says Veruchi, speaking like a guy who built a comfortable life selling used cars.
As for Larry Demeritte, he wants roses, too, but also speaks of the race with a piety born of suffering and survival. He understands that success is a complicated measure. On Saturday he will embrace the company of those present to support him and dwell on the memory of those absent. His breath catches as he talks about the young girl who brought him into the world and then left it long before he did. “She would be so proud,” says Demeritte. He saddles West Saratoga with a longshot’s dream of winning Kentucky’s 150th Derby, but he walks with an ethereal appreciation for running his first.
Tim Layden is writer-at-large for NBC Sports. He was previously a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 25 years.