Owner of Kentucky Derby winner: ‘I feel like the luckiest man alive’
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2022 Kentucky Derby coverage
Click below to view more content from the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com covering the 148th Kentucky Derby on May 7 at Churchill Downs in Louisville.
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Safe to say, Rick Dawson was in a daze.
“What planet is this?” said the owner of Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike in the postrace press conference on Saturday. “This is unbelievable. I asked my trainer if this was real and he assured me it was real.”
More like unreal. Rich Strike, at odds of 80-1, became the second-longest shot in Kentucky Derby history to win the roses as he finished three-quarters of a length in front of favorite Epicenter at Churchill Downs for Dawson’s Red-TR Racing.
The son of Keen Ice was an “also-eligible” that gained entrance into the 20-horse field on Friday when Ethereal Road scratched out of the race before the 9 a.m. deadline.
“I feel like the luckiest man alive,” Dawson said.
Semi-retired from the energy business, Dawson is an Oklahoma native who just last year hired the 57-year-old Eric Reed as his trainer. After Rich Strike broke his maiden with a 17 1/4-length win at Churchill Downs on Sept. 17, Reed claimed the colt for $30,000 from Calumet Farm for Dawson.
After a troubled third-place finish at Keeneland last October, Reed took the colt to New Orleans, then back to Kentucky, where he ran third, fourth and third in three stakes races at Turfway Park in northern Kentucky.
“Eric brought this horse along in a fashion that spaced out races,” Dawson said. “We passed on some races that didn’t really fit what we wanted to do. We literally — last fall we got together and he told me he thought we had something. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up too high.’ Eric easily undersells and overperforms. And that’s kind of the way he does about life.
“I said, ‘Do you think we got a Derby horse?’ He goes, ‘Maybe.’ I said, well, let’s get the calendar out, find the first Saturday in May and back up from there.”
Dawson said a friend from Owensboro took him to Keeneland for the first time, then Churchill Downs.
“I had been to some smaller tracks around the country, but not the bigger tracks,” he said. “Very impressive, and just loved them all. Churchill was just massive. And, of course, we’re here on a Wednesday and it’s 25,000 people, and it felt like it was empty. The word was, yeah, but Derby day, it doesn’t look like this. And, obviously, it doesn’t.”
Dawson said he currently owns five horses, with just two in training. One of those is coming off rehab for an injury. He recently bred a filly to Keen Ice, who stands at Calumet Farm.
“I didn’t get into this to win the Kentucky Derby, although I’m not giving the trophy back,” he said to laughter. “I got in it because I loved it, and it was interesting. It was fun. I was at a point in my life where I had the time and the energy, wanted to go to the farm, wanted to go — and I learned the business.
“And Eric was so great about teaching me. If I asked him a stupid question, he didn’t say, ‘That’s a stupid question.’ He would just — he would give me a great answer and truthfully, and I would learn from that. And that’s how we built what we built.”
In fact, Dawson asked Reed if they had even won an allowance race before winning the Kentucky Derby.
“We had one,” said the trainer.
Now Dawson has won something much, much bigger than an allowance race.
“As far as my career in horse racing,” he said, “I think it just started.”
This story was originally published May 7, 2022 at 9:48 PM.
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