If you need to witness “The Most Exciting Two Minutes In Sports,” the rapacious Ticketmaster “Verified Resale” offers tickets for a seat at next week’s Kentucky 
Derby starting at $348 and topping out well under $3,000. General admission, no seats, just access to the infield area where you can watch the race on giant-screen TV are only $75 up to day of the event. Relaxing and sipping a mint julep is difficult there. The Derby’s web site provides guidance to women for what to wear and whether to choose the dress or the hat first. (Sartorial advice for men is one short paragraph.)
Gene Carter has been part of the Kentucky Derby, as a groom and exercise rider, for most of his ninety years. He has conditioned hundreds of horses, but had wanted to be a jockey. He has only been in one race in his lifetime, in a nearby county. He won. His family watched from outside the track; black people were not allowed into the grandstand.
In the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, thirteen of the fifteen jockeys were black. Prior to the Civil War, slaves typically cared for and rode the horses. Post war, freedman dominated the sport. Black jockeys won fifteen of the first eighteen Derbies. Jim Crow laws soon took care of that. As late as 1961, two-time winner Jimmy Winkfield, who was born in 1882, was not allowed into Louisville’s iconic Brown Hotel.
Gene Carter: “I wanted to race horses. I wanted to ride so bad, but things had passed and segregation had taken over.”
