On Saturday, Keith Desormeaux, gave his regular exercise rider, Alex Cano, a leg up on a colt named Confidence Game and slowly walked with them to the track. It was 7:30 a.m., and the Kentucky Derby was just a week away. This would be his final work between then and the moment 150,000 semi-sober throats unleash a tone-and-a-half flat version of “My Old Kentucky Home” at the 149th Kentucky Derby on Saturday.
Confidence Game doesn’t rate anything like the 3-1 odds by which Forte is favored. After the draw for post positions on Monday, he was listed at 20-1. He is a long shot, but that means nothing in the view of Nick Zito who trained two Derby winners. As he once told me, “Don’t look at the tote board because, no matter what it says, they still have to run the race.”
Certainly, it hasn’t discouraged Desormeaux, who watched the colt do five furlongs in 59 seconds, which was the best time for distance of the morning.
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“That beautiful breeze you saw was his last preparation,” Desormeaux said. “He was relaxed, cooling out. We just need to keep him happy and limber, school him in the paddock and we’re ready.”
That was the horseman in him speaking, and he certainly has the genetic and equine authority to express itself.
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To put it in perspective, focus on a tiny dot on the map called Maurice, Louisiana — a speck just off Route 167 and home to 1,170 people. It’s Cajun country, and to make the connection, you have to go back 50 years to the time when there were more horses than cars in Bayou Country, back to a man named Harris Desormeaux.
”It was a tradition down here in the old days,” the late Harris Desormeaux, father of Keith, the trainer, and Kent, a Hall of Fame jockey, once told me. “Before we had cars, we were so involved with horses, they just naturally became our entertainment. Horses were all we had to…
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