The 23-1 longshot Golden Tempo, trained by Cherie DeVaux, ridden by Jose Ortiz and majority-owned by the Phipps Stable, whose principal is Daisy Phipps Pulito, staged a gritty, brilliant deep-close upset by heroically overtaking Renegade, and every other horse in the race, to win the 152nd Kentucky Derby on May 2. Rounding out the trifecta and then some, the 70-1 longshot Ocelli managed to beat literally every other of the several favorites in the race to show.

Golden Tempo, a very game son of Curlin, brought an historic win for the race and for the sport itself, marking the first ever victory by a horse in the care of a female trainer since the Derby’s inception in 1875. The significance of her spot in the history books of the sport was not lost on the graceful Ms. DeVaux. Throwing credit to her athletes, she said, “I'm just so, so, so happy for Golden Tempo. Jose did a wonderful job, a masterful job at getting him there. (Golden Tempo) was so far out of it, and (Jose) has had so much faith in this horse.”

In addition to being historic, Golden Tempo’s victory was sealed with a tight, cliffhanging run. In fact, the elated Ortiz, who had just the day before won the Kentucky Oaks, beat his equally famous brother Irad, aboard Renegade, by a neck down the stretch. The brothers’ parents were in the stands.

Neither the principal horsewoman behind Golden Tempo, DeVaux, nor the principal horseman, the younger Ortiz brother in the irons, were worried that, after getting bumped by Ocelli at the break, the horse and jockey settled in last place, eighteenth out of eighteen coming out of the first turn into the backstretch. The first half-mile’s pace was fast, which is what DeVaux and Ortiz were hoping, by which is meant they well knew they were working with a deep closer who could bring a big run as the speed faded.

In fact, being a closer is a solid style under ordinary racing circumstances. But being such a deep closer as Golden Tempo is not wished for by Derby trainers because of the extreme danger (of getting boxed in) posed by the immense size of the Churchill fields. The deep closing style, or “settling” in a position far off the pace, requires many times the amount of wearing, highly tactical maneuvers than runners closer to the pace face. Exactly as Golden Tempo had to do threading his way through ten or twelve opponents before he even arrived to the blistering fight past the leaders in the last furlongs. Running dead last, Golden Tempo had to jigsaw through every single enemy on the track, a nightmarish prospect in a Kentucky Derby.

Being a deep closer in the Derby requires a further tactical gambit, namely, that the runner has to start his dance moves through the peloton in or at the very latest at the top of the backstretch, well before everybody else kicks on whatever afterburners they may have. Sensing that the field under So Happy’s fast pace was tiring up the backstretch, Ortiz began that move from dead last. Fast as the fading pace was, this was an excruciatingly slow climb — at the top of the far turn Golden Tempo still had more than half the field to plow through with the top of the stretch just around the next corner. Again, he wasn’t kicking just yet, although he was still mightily working up through the pack.

Coming out of the clubhouse turn into the stretch, Golden Tempo still had twelve horses to pass. Ortiz could feel that he had plenty of horse, flipped on the rockets and took his horse wide. He could see his older brother laboring up front on Renegade and gunned for the lead pair. Renegade’s closing pace was now fiery, but Golden Tempo inexorably gained ground.

Cherie DeVaux said after the race that Golden Tempo’s blistering rate of closure on Renegade at the three-sixteenths pole — with three hundred and thirty yards to go — triggered her first sense that her horse might actually win. It’s a hope that the better trainers routinely push as far from their minds as possible for fear of it clouding their perception of the actual physical realities of this or that race. True to that hope, however, Golden Tempo’s 17-horse charge did not abate and he smashed through the wire as the victor by a neck.

DeVaux, pictured above being mobbed by the press, later humorously admitted that she “kind of blacked out” as she, her elated family and the horse’s connections celebrated in the stands. In fact her accomplishment of becoming the only female trainer ever to win a Kentucky Derby is immense. Alongside Jena Antonucci, who won the 2023 Belmont with Arcangelo, DeVaux is the only second woman ever to win any Triple Crown race. In 151 years of the Derby, 150 years of the Preakness, and 157 years of the Belmont, or calculated differently, in 458 runnings of all three Triple Crown horse races over the last century and a half, just nineteen female trainers have entered horses. Only Antonucci and now DeVaux have won one. In sports, in 2026, there simply wasn’t a bigger, older, or more fine glass ceiling to break than that of the Derby. Cherie DeVaux did it with gracious elan.

Golden Tempo and Ortiz delivered what we can call a symphonic deep close, composed of many extremely beautiful parts and made for long hauls. That the winner took Renegade down by a neck and was motoring on out on his gallop past the line bodes well for DeVaux, Ortiz and their horse for the Belmont, should they and the Phipps and St. Elias stables decide that aiming for that would be best for their athlete. It’s more difficult to rationalize that this horse should run in two weeks’ time in the Preakness, shorter by a sixteenth of a mile than the Derby. The Derby victor needed every last inch of Churchill’s mile-and-a-quarter to put those 17 horses in front of him away. At Laurel, he’d have 110 yards, or a football field and a bit, less room to do that.

The thoroughgoing upset of literally every favorite save Renegade by the longshots Golden Tempo and Ocelli brought some rare payouts to the ice-cold players willing to back them. The $1 trifecta paid an eye-watering $11,250.78. The 23-1 victor paid a handsome $48.24 on the nose; the 5-1 still-narrow-top-favorite Renegade paid $7.14 in place; and the big surprise colt late-entry Ocelli, at 70-1, brightened the picture in show at $36.34.

Notably, the 152nd Derby couldn’t get off without one last scratch in the minutes before post time, cutting the field down to eighteen runners. Classically spooked by something in the hurly-burly of the Derby, an arguably too-game Great White decided he’d had enough of the starting rigamarole, summarily bucked off his jockey Alex Achard and actually flipped over as he waited with other horses to be loaded into the gate. Trainer John Ennis assured the press that his frisky 1370-pound athlete and his jockey were “fine.”

But Great White’s flaring freakout also delayed the race. The eventual winner Golden Tempo was about to be loaded as Great White worked through his bucking and got clean of his rider as well as his racing for the day. In the irons, a quick-thinking Jose Ortiz knew that, after acrobatics of that order, the vets and others would descend to evaluate Great White, causing the horses already loaded to be backed out of the gate. Ortiz immediately told his loader that Great White would be scratched and instructed the loader to hold off making that rather forceful, blunt move, thus sparing Golden Tempo having to undergo the load procedure twice.

Top horseman that he is, Ortiz said, “I didn’t want to be loaded and back off. I would hate that. I think the horse is ready. His mind is ready to go. When you put him in, he knows he’s going forward. As soon as you back him up, then everything changes.”

Unclear for the moment is which horses were actually backed out and laboriously reloaded, and whether this miniature pre-start maelstrom of Great White’s making planted some seeds for the extraordinary number of the favorites’ upsets strewn throughout the results.