No matter how long you’ve followed horse racing, there haven’t been many stories like Rich Strike, the 80-to-1 Kentucky Derby winner whose connections had never come close enough to that kind of race to even realistically dream about it.
But even if you barely follow the sport, you’ve almost certainly heard about dozens of horses dying in California a few years ago, seen a catastrophic breakdown during a race or watched a Kentucky Derby and never heard from the winner again.