Michael Matz

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It was shortly after 7 a.m. Sunday, barely 12 hours after a Kentucky Derby that had been 6 months in the planning went very wrong in less than a second. Michael Matz was walking a horse named Welcome Dance around the Barn 42 shedrow, passing a sedate Union Rags, peering out from his stall. As he rounded the corner, Matz called back over his shoulder: "We did everything we wanted except the last 2 minutes and that was the part we couldn't help. " In horse racing, you can be prepared, organized and make rational decisions.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - It was shortly after 7 a.m. Sunday, barely 12 hours after a Kentucky Derby that had been six months in the planning went very wrong in less than a second. Michael Matz was walking a horse named Welcome Dance around the Barn 42 shedrow, passing a sedate Union Rags, peering out from his stall. As he rounded the corner, Matz called back over his shoulder: "We did everything we wanted except the last two minutes, and that was the part we couldn't help. " In horse racing, you can be prepared, organized, and make rational decisions.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Last May, jockey Mario Gutierrez was the leading rider at Hastings Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Kentucky Derby a faraway event that he watched on television in the jockey's room. He migrated to Southern California this winter, going from horse racing's minors to the majors, hoping to get better mounts. Prominent owner J. Paul Reddam noticed the 25-year-old from Mexico and told his trainer Doug O'Neill to give the virtual unknown a chance. "He just really looked good in the irons to me," Reddam said.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - As the sun first popped over the trees at Churchill Downs on Friday, Union Rags galloped for the last time before Saturday's 138th Kentucky Derby. "I think he's in good form right now," trainer Michael Matz said a little later in the morning outside Barn 42, the same spot where Matz once stabled the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro. Of his latest Derby horse, the 9-2 second choice in the morning line, owned by Phyllis Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Matz said, "I think he's ready to run. . . . We've been a little bit harder on him since the Florida Derby, getting him peaked a little bit more.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Kentucky Derby post-position draw has become like waiting to console the victim of an accident that everybody knows is sure to come. You don't want the No. 1 post because that horse has to take a slight right turn just to get on the course and then has every chance of getting squeezed by the chain reaction that can be caused by 19 other horses fighting for position in the first 500 yards. The 1 post was still unclaimed when Union Rags got No. 4 Wednesday afternoon at Churchill Downs.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Jamie Wyeth stood off to the side of the grassy plot outside Barn 42, hard by Longfield Avenue, silently sketching the crowd watching the colt his wife owns taking a bath. If one scene could describe the Kentucky Derby experience, that would be it. "It's amazing interest," Wyeth said. "It sure is a distance from my studio and my world. " The Wyeths had just been trackside at Churchill Downs on Wednesday morning watching Union Rags take one of his final morning gallops before Saturday's Kentucky Derby.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - They've experienced the greatest sensation their profession has to offer - their horse romping away from the field in the homestretch of the Kentucky Derby. They've suffered an all-time low, that same horse, Barbaro, breaking down two weeks later in the Preakness Stakes, his career over in an instant. Those two moments never leave them. One big lesson trainer Michael Matz and his assistant Peter Brette took away from that disappointment in 2006: Don't get too high, as their 3-year-old colt Union Rags prepares for Saturday's 138th Kentucky Derby.

Inquirer columnist Bob Ford has won the David F. Woods Memorial Award for the best Preakness story or column for the previous year. The winner is chosen by representatives of Pimlico Race Course, the site of the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown. Ford examined the relationship between Fair Hill Training Center-based trainers Graham Motion, who won last year's Kentucky Derby with long-shot Animal Kingdom, and Michael Matz, the trainer of 2006 Derby winner Barbaro.

BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. - Horse trainer Michael Matz woke up Sunday about 4 a.m. and, as he always does, looked at his phone. He's got an app on the phone attached to a camera outside the stall of his big horse, Union Rags. "He was just laying down in the stall, laying there with his head on the side, just really resting," Matz said later Sunday morning. "When he's like that, he really takes care of himself well. " On Saturday, Union Rags had finished third as the 2-5 favorite in the Florida Derby.

By sunset on Saturday, the Union Rags story will include another important chapter. If this colt, trained by Michael Matz of Barbaro fame and owned by Chadds Ford's Phyllis Wyeth, wins the $1 million Florida Derby impressively, Union Rags won't just be the Kentucky Derby favorite - he already has that claim - but the buzz will grow that maybe this is the year for a Triple Crown horse. It might seem unfair, even crazy, to put that kind of label on a 3-year-old, given the difficulties of the Triple Crown path, but it's a common early-spring fever, and Union Rags picks up believers with every stride, including during workouts.