Trainer Cherie DeVaux on Golden Tempo’s Thrilling Last-to-First Kentucky Derby Win

Cherie DeVaux, the trainer of Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo, joined The Rich Eisen Show forty-eight hours after one of the more dramatic last-to-first wins the Derby has seen in years, and the win still hadn't fully landed.

"It's been a whirlwind," DeVaux said. A little sleep, a lot of celebrating. She went out to celebrate appropriately after the race, flew to New York, and has been on the move ever since. Asked whether the moment had sunk in, she shook her head. Not yet.

Rich pulled up her reaction shot from the race, the clip that had been making rounds across every horse racing feed for two days. DeVaux watched it back, laughed, and offered a confession. She was relieved she did not curse on camera. She is, by her own admission, a normally salty mouth, and people who know her had been surprised that the moment came out clean.

"I was so overtaken," she said. "I had all the faith in Golden Tempo. I had all the faith in Jose. But winning the Kentucky Derby is a really hard feat, and to go out there and do it on your first try was just overwhelming."

The radio audience joined the conversation midway through the segment, and Rich reset the room. Cherie DeVaux. Kentucky Derby winning trainer. Golden Tempo from last to first. He asked her to take the audience inside the moment as it was unfolding. When did she actually believe it was happening.

DeVaux walked through the run with the kind of granular detail only the person responsible for the horse can provide. She picked Golden Tempo up at about the three-sixteenths pole, the top of the stretch. He had a full head of steam. She knew he was coming. What she did not know, in that exact moment, was whether he would finish the closing kick or get clever about it.

Golden Tempo, she said, is a lightly raced colt who can get a little goofy. When he came up alongside Renegade and the horse Irad was riding, she worried about a specific scenario. Some horses, she explained, will idle when they reach a buddy. They want to hang. They want to chat. The Kentucky Derby was not the moment for Golden Tempo to turn the stretch run into a joy ride.

It wasn't until he got to the wire with his nose out in front, she said, that she could finally comprehend that he had won.

Rich pushed for more on that mental loop. Was she really, in the moment, worried that her colt was going to pull alongside Renegade and decide to keep his pal company? DeVaux clarified the framing. In the moment, she was encouraging him on, excited, watching him go. The goofy-horse worry, she said, was retrospective. What she had been thinking about during the run was a memory from earlier in the week, a horse of hers that had just missed because it pulled up alongside another horse and stopped engaging.

There is, she reminded the room, a lot going on at the Derby. Cameras. Noise. A crowd built to overwhelm anything with a heartbeat. The horses are running, but they are also responding to a sensory environment most three-year-olds will never encounter again. Golden Tempo, on his first try, kept his head down and got his nose to the wire.