Cherie DeVaux Just Became the First Woman to Train a Kentucky Derby Winner With a 23-1 Colt That Started Last

The 152nd Kentucky Derby just rewrote a sentence that had been sitting on the same page since 1875. On May 2, 2026, Cherie DeVaux became the first woman to train the winner of the Run for the Roses, and her horse Golden Tempo did it from dead last in an 18-horse field at 23-1 odds. The numbers are almost too neat to be real, but the replay confirms it.

Two firsts in one race. A trainer ceiling that had survived 152 editions. A pace strategy that should not work in modern Derby trips. A horse that broke slowly, sat at the back, threaded through traffic, and caught the favorite Renegade by a neck. Final time 2:02.27, jockey Jose Ortiz on the throttle, Churchill Downs vibrating like a struck bell.

The trainer who refused the trailblazer label

DeVaux is 44. She was a pre-med student at SUNY-Albany before a summer job at a stable redirected the entire plan. She worked under Chuck Simon, then under Chad Brown, one of the most respected names in thoroughbred racing. She got her training license in 2018. Her first win came in 2019, on her 29th career start. Coming into Derby weekend she had already racked up 21 wins for the year and more than 300 victories overall.

Asked on TODAY whether she sees herself as a trailblazer, DeVaux gave the kind of answer that lands without trying. “I consider myself a horse trainer, and I just happen to be a female.” It is not a soundbite designed for a press kit. It is a sentence from someone who has been in the barn at 4 a.m. for nearly a decade and is mildly annoyed that anyone is still surprised.

The previous high-water mark for a woman in this race belonged to Shelley Riley, who finished second with Casual Lies in 1992. That gap, second place to first, is 34 years long. DeVaux is also only the second woman to train the winner of any Triple Crown race, after Jena Antonucci took the 2023 Belmont Stakes with Arcangelo. Two names. Two races. Total.

A 23-1 horse that started in 18th place

Golden Tempo is owned by Phipps Stable (Daisy Phipps Pulito) and St. Elias Stable (Vincent Viola). The colt went off at 23-1 in a field where the smart money was glued to Renegade. He broke flat, sat last out of 18 down the backstretch, and looked like a horse running a different race entirely. Then the field bunched, the rail clogged, and Ortiz angled him wide. The closing kick was the kind of run you screenshot.

By the eighth pole he was sixth. By the sixteenth pole he was second. He passed Renegade in the final 30 yards and won by a neck. The crowd at Churchill Downs needed about four seconds of stadium silence to process what they had just watched, then went incandescent. NBC pulled record audience numbers for the broadcast, with Variety reporting the Derby delivered the largest viewership in years across NBC and Peacock combined.

The structural lesson here is the one Pudgy Cat keeps writing about in different forms: the unfashionable position is often the actual one. We covered something similar when Zach Galifianakis dropped a low-anxiety gardening show on Netflix while every other studio was chasing prestige horror. The market wanted the loud thing. The win came from the quiet thing. Cats have known this since approximately 7500 BC. They are professionals at sitting in the back of the room and being correct anyway.

What changes the morning after

Horse racing has been losing audience for two decades. The Derby is the one race normal people still watch, and the fact that it just produced a record-breaking broadcast on a story about a 44-year-old woman who used to study medicine is not a coincidence. The sport has been waiting for a narrative bigger than handicapping. It just got one.

DeVaux now goes to the Preakness Stakes on May 16, then potentially the Belmont on June 6. A Triple Crown attempt with a 23-1 colt and the first female Derby-winning trainer is the kind of arc that drags casual viewers into the sport for an entire month. NBC is going to get a second and possibly a third bite at this audience, and you can already hear the production decks being rewritten in real time.

The wider read is uglier and more interesting. Industries that have ceilings older than electricity tend to crack quietly. There is no policy change, no protest, no new rule. Someone who is just very good at their job shows up, refuses to perform the historic-moment script, and the ceiling falls down on its own. We saw a softer version of this dynamic in the Gen Z pout and stare arriving in Fortune 500 boardrooms, where a generational refusal to fake corporate enthusiasm is reshaping how meetings actually run. Different room, same physics.

The Pudgy Cat read

If you bet $2 to win on Golden Tempo, you collected around $48 and a story for life. If you bet on Renegade you got the experience of being right on paper and wrong on the actual day. There is a Pudgy Cat thesis in there that we will not stop pulling on, which is that the official-looking option and the correct option are not always the same option, and the gap between the two is where most of the interesting outcomes live. We poked at the same idea covering the Italian bank that holds 500,000 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano as loan collateral, which sounds like satire and is a real institution generating real returns.

Other thing worth saying. DeVaux has been at this for 17 years. She did not arrive on a comet. She built a barn, won 300 races nobody at home heard about, and trained one specific colt to do one specific thing on one specific Saturday. The headline is the moment. The actual work is the decade nobody photographed. Worth remembering when the next viral feel-good story shows up and somebody calls it overnight.

Golden Tempo is back at Churchill Downs cooling out. DeVaux is on a press tour she clearly does not love. Renegade ran a great race and lost to a horse that was 23-1 because the racing form does not measure the trainer who has been quietly correct since 2018. The Preakness is in 11 days. We will be watching with snacks.