LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Riding shotgun in the front seat of a GMC pickup, Bill Mott leaned in to listen to the AM radio announcer bring the excitement of the Kentucky Derby to Fort Pierce, S.D., the place Mott called home. It was 1967, and the 14-year-old Mott listened rapt as Proud Clarion ran down Barb’s Delight to win the Derby that year.
Hooked on the sport, Mott convinced his veterinarian father, Tom, to pay $320 and buy him a racehorse to train. Father and son cleared a pasture at his dad’s clinic and turned it into a training track. Mott won his first race before he graduated from high school.
The Kentucky Derby is about a lot of things. It’s about hard work, done in the early-morning hours when no one is looking. It’s about perseverance, playing the long game in a career in which the early days of earning a reputation usually mean lousy horses and equally lousy results. It is certainly about a healthy dose of good fortune. And maybe more than anything else, it’s also about the audacity to dream.
Mott had the first two seared into his bones. He came by his work ethic naturally and genetically.
“He’s the most down-to-earth person I’ve ever met,” his son, Riley, said. “I try to emulate him every day professionally and personally. He’s just a great human. His parents raised him right.”
Matt persevered through plenty of obscurity along the way. In 1976, Mott had six starts, one win and a whopping $3,000 in winnings. Some might say he found the third, the good fortune, in 2019 when his horse, Country House, crossed the finish second but won the Kentucky Derby after Maximum Security was disqualified.
But it’s the last, the dreaming that got Mott, a relatively clear-eyed realist not prone to emotions, sighing a big sigh on a rainy first Saturday of May. As the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby played on a loop on a TV screen just to his left with his horse, Sovereignty, enjoying a near-perfect ride from jockey Junior Alvarado, Mott thought back to the kid listening on the AM radio. He tried to squeeze his 72-year-old self back into those teenage shoes and imagine what that boy would have to say about Bill Mott, Kentucky Derby winner.
“I mean, I never even dreamed I would ever be here,” Mott said. “I never imagined being at Churchill Downs. … It was just a dream that was even too far away for me. And to be sitting up here, I mean thinking back at that, whether it was 1967 or what it was, it’s like going to outer space.”
Technically, Mott has taken the alien ride before. The record book will show he is now a two-time Derby winner, including that first complicated victory with Country House. But even for Mott, that’s been a tricky thing to reconcile. This week, as he prepped Sovereignty, Mott was asked how he responds when asked if he won the Kentucky Derby.
“I say, ‘Damn right I did,’” he replied.
Yet he’s also called the victory “bittersweet” and admitted that he wanted to know what it felt like to celebrate the victory with a horse crossing the finish line first, as opposed to that 2019 win, when he waited an interminable 23 minutes for stewards to DQ Maximum Security.
Just how deeply that whole thing stuck with him seemed evident minutes after Sovereignty’s legitimate victory. Standing atop the mud-soaked track after the rainy race, NBC Sports reporter Kenny Rice asked Mott about that previous “22-minute wait.”
“It was 23,” Mott quipped.
Mott made no bones about his excitement over Sovereignty all week. Mott’s barn sits at the top of a road that also includes Bob Baffert’s Barn 33 and Michael McCarthy’s Barn 35. Fair to say that the other two, with Baffert back from a three-year Churchill Downs ban, and McCarthy, housing the favorite Journalism, got a few more eyeballs. Yet on a Sunday morning, a happy Mott greeted a small group of reporters and declared himself “having a good day,” a smile spreading across his face. Horse trainers are notoriously pessimists, too aware of both how thin their margin of error is, and how often that margin somehow gets crossed.
Yet Mott seemed unreasonably content all week. Asked if he felt like the horse might give him his best chance at a Derby win, Mott didn’t pause.
“I think so,” he said. “He’s proven he can run over the track. He has to prove he can go a mile and a quarter, but he indicates, with his running style, that there’s a good chance that can happen. He’s just coming into race order. He’s proven himself.”
Mott also had to feel like those other parts of racing success were coming into line. Heaven knows Mott put in the work and paid his dues, but he and Sovereignty also enjoyed a little bit of good luck. Two years ago, Mott and Alvarado partnered on Cody’s Wish, the 2023 Horse of the Year, and this year, the Venezuelan jockey steered Sovereignty through his early wins. The jockey understood the horse, respected his motor and thought that perhaps he would be the ride that would deliver him to a win in the only American race he could watch growing up in Venezuela.
But in March, prime real estate for the Derby run-up, one of Alvarado’s mounts at a race in Gulfstream suffered a heart attack. Thrown from his ride, Alvarado fractured his shoulder blade and had to watch while Manny Franco rode Sovereignty to a runner-up finish in the Derby qualifying Florida Derby.
Plenty of times, a trainer sticks with the hot hand, and Alvarado, 0-for-5 in Derby tries, worried his chance was ruined. Instead, Mott called him while he recovered in the hospital, told him to worry only about getting better and Sovereignty would be his when he returned.
Perhaps the horse would have won anyway, but it helped that he had a jockey who knew him. Sovereignty stood 16th in the 20-field race at the first turn, and momentarily dropped to 17th halfway. Alvarado never blinked.
“When he hit the three pole, right behind Journalism, and I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to move to next to him right at that point,” Alvarado said. “And I’m like just waiting. ‘I knew I got them, so let me just wait a little bit more.’ And then right when we’re turning for him, I know we’re in the clear.”
Mott could see what his jockey was doing, but what do you do when you see your dream come true? Like so many big dreams, his didn’t explode overnight. It was a slow burn. So much has happened since that ride in the GMC. Mott took up residence in Barn 38 on the backside of Churchill in 1980, not only stepping a toe in the commonwealth he never could envision himself visiting, but claiming a piece of real estate in the most famous track there, if not the world. By 1984, he won 54 races in the spring meet, a Churchill record at the time.
He had a family and got them into racing. Riley won his own race Friday, a victory that gave his father nearly as much joy as his own Derby win, and somehow got used to racing in the big races that seemed so out of reach.
Yet when it all happened, when Sovereignty not only won the Derby but did what Country House could not — he crossed first — Mott stood in stupefied silence with his family for a split second, trying to take it all in. Even as he made his way into the infield to celebrate, he seemed dazed.
Midway through his interview with Rice, Mott looked up as the crowd cheered, turning to see Sovereignty ride by and Alvarado pump his fist. He smiled and shook his head. While everyone gathered to celebrate for the post-race trophy presentation, Mott stood off to the side and gazed above the people, the hats, the rain gear and the roses to watch the race again on the replay and when, in the post-race press conference Alvarado and owner Michael Banahan fielded questions, Mott’s eyes drifted off again and again to watch his horse win.
“I never get enough of it, you know,” he said.
It’s not often you get a ride to outer space, after all.
(Top photo: Jeff Moreland / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
