Every time that amazing 400-yard run comes on the screen, the inclination is to reach for the remote and turn off the fast-forward. Horses simply don’t run as fast as Mine That Bird ran from the three-eighths pole to the eighth pole in the Kentucky Derby,

when the gelding passed 18 horses in slightly more than 20 seconds.
It was, however, quite real. Why it happened is a question with no obvious answer at the moment. Whether it can happen again will be determined as the 50-1 Derby winner races on, first in Saturday’s Preakness at Pimlico.
Whatever Mine That Bird does in Baltimore, the horse will have to do it without Calvin Borel, whose fearless, perfectly timed ride was certainly a major factor in the upset. Borel will ride Kentucky Oaks winner Rachel Alexandra, and Mike Smith will ride the Derby winner.
As good as Borel was, and he was great, a jockey can’t make a horse accelerate through all those holes. Mine That Bird did that, something the horse had never done before. Perhaps the horse just needed to be ridden differently, taken out the back door, relaxed and made a giant run. Or he loved the mud. Or the rail was golden. Or the horse just got really good at exactly the right moment. Or some combination of all of them.
Whatever that was, Mine That Bird, the mystery horse from New Mexico, will always be the winner of Derby 135.
“I do not know that it was a fluke, but I guess we’ll find out down the road,” said Chip Woolley, the gelding’s trainer.
Mine That Bird might have made the cover of Sports Illustrated, but the gelding got from Louisville to Baltimore on Tuesday the same way he got from New Mexico to Louisville — in a van driven by Woolley, who still is nursing a broken right leg. The van was scheduled to get a police escort early Tuesday evening from Interstate 70 before the Baltimore Beltway and then on to Pimlico.
Woolley did not commit to the Preakness right after the Derby because he never thought the horse would win. After a few days watching his horse, the decision was made.
“I think the Derby winner needs to run in the Preakness,” Woolley said.
The final Derby TV ratings were the biggest in 20 years. Now, with Mine That Bird and Rachel Alexandra in the Preakness, this is a race not to be missed.
“We are excited at the prospect of seeing the first four finishers from the Kentucky Derby and the superstar filly in the Preakness,” said Tom Chuckas, Maryland Jockey Club president and chief operating officer. “We could be looking at one for the ages.”
Mine That Bird won’t be favored. A horse does not go from 50-1 to 2-1 in one race, even if that race was a dominant Derby win.
“Personally, I’m hoping it was the mud, but he ran awesome,” said Gary Stute, trainer of Papa Clem, fourth in the Derby.
And there is also this.
“Thank God, there was nobody on the rail, because, as fast as that horse was going, it would have been a train wreck,” Stute said. “(It was) like we were standing still.”
Much was made of the fact that Woolley won only one race in 2009 before the Derby. His horses, the trainer said, were recovering from a hard autumn campaign. Even Mine That Bird could not win in 2009 — until the first Saturday in May.
It is not as if the trainer has never won any races. He was just an unknown on the national scene. He is now a known.
When he was asked to remember the biggest race he had won, he thought about it and said, “I can’t remember nothing but the Kentucky Derby.”
Woolley came to Kentucky “asking for autographs and left here signing them.” He has “heard from hundreds of people, and everybody that does not owe me money.”
The day after the Derby, Woolley was in the Churchill paddock, when he “looked up at the sign ’Kentucky Derby 2009, Mine That Bird.’ “
“I almost started crying,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
He can believe that with victory comes scrutiny. Turns out Bill Allen, the father of Mine That Bird’s co-owner, Mark Allen, was a central figure in the Alaska public corruption scandal that cost Ted Stevens his U.S. Senate seat last November. Bill Allen was the chief executive of the oil services company, Veco. Mark Allen, a Veco director, got immunity as the result of his father’s plea deal.
Veco was sold in 2007. Mark Allen got a cash windfall in the deal and started on a horse-buying spree. Last fall, Woolley looked at 100 horses trying to find something to run in the Sunland Derby. They settled on Mine That Bird for $400,000. The gelding ran fourth in the Sunland Derby. And won the Kentucky Derby by the biggest margin in 63 years.
Since the Derby win, Mark Allen has tried really hard to mess up the lovable-underdog story. First, the Veco revelations and then Sunday’s pathetic machinations attempting to keep the filly out of the Preakness.
Horse, trainer and jockeys, past and future, have behaved much better. Their work will be on display at Pimlico. This result should be unambiguous.