PARIS, Kentucky — You’d expect Eric Buckley to have a fairly blunt reaction to his family’s fortunes changing overnight. But it’s the words he uses to react to the news that tells you everything about his character.
“Am I disappointed that my horse may or may not run the Derby and [that] the Derby is not even running when it’s supposed to be? Yes,” he says from the barn on his family farm. “But is my child healthy? Is my wife healthy? Are my parents alive? You know, those are what matter, and I have to look at the whole picture.”
It’s just hours after Eric and his wife Elizabeth Buckley have found out that the vaunted Kentucky Derby, the “most exciting two minutes in sports” and the jewel of horse racing’s Triple Crown, has been postponed, at least until Sept. 5.
The horse that their dam bred, Ete Indien, was one of three thoroughbreds favored for the Derby. The horse now faces an uncertain future if his peak will have ebbed before the new September Derby date.
“Trainers spend the Derby prep season getting their horses to peak,” explains Elizabeth Buckley. “It’s just like in basketball when your team peaks for the NCAA tournament. Same thing. So, we have this horse training and racing peaking for the Derby [in May], and now, it’s going to be the whole summer, and how do you lay off a horse that’s ready to run?”
Elizabeth Buckley says the significance of owning the dam of a top Derby contender was a game changer for her, her husband, and their partner Rob Tillyer. “If we ever decide to sell the dam, she’ll be worth quite a lot of money.”
“For small-town, small-time, hard-boot farmers, that’s a big deal,” she says. “Rob and Eric aren’t fat cats with oil and gas money, sitting there playing for fun. They’re both hands-on farmers that put the little money we have into this, and then we end up with these results,” she says, her voice trailing off in emotion.
The story of the nation right now is not about how many fortunes have changed in the era of the coronavirus pandemic; it is how individuals have weathered those economic and emotional changes.
It was 1945 when the internationally renowned race was last postponed — and under very different circumstances. Celebrations of Germany’s surrender in World War II delayed the Kentucky Derby by a month.
The region will take a big economic hit. The annual event at Churchill Downs draws more than 150,000 spectators. The race has an estimated economic benefit on Louisville and the surrounding area of roughly $400 million. It’s unclear how much the postponement will cost.
If the race goes on as planned in September, all is not lost, economically, for the area. But, if the foal of a horse your mare bred was likely to be one of the favorites to win the Derby, chances are your fortunes are now on shaky ground.
“It’s a huge deal to breed a horse that’s going to run in the Derby. That’s what you wait your whole career for. Your whole career is for something like that,” Elizabeth Buckley said.
Now, like everyone in this country, Elizabeth and Eric Buckley face uncertainty.
“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” Eric Buckley said. “It’s uncharted water. They’ve never shut down all the racetracks in this country ever. So, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”
Paris, Kentucky, claims to be the “Thoroughbred Capital of the World.” Its Main Street is a delightful thoroughfare of charming historically preserved buildings. Everything surrounding the city core is some of the most beautiful, sprawling horse farms in the country, known worldwide for its thriving equine industry.
Less than two weeks ago, Ete Indien galloped up the Kentucky Derby futures board with an 8 1/2-length victory at the Fountain of Youth Stakes, a thoroughbred horse race run annually at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach in Florida.
It was a victory that almost surely earned him a slot at the Churchill Downs gate in May. A month before that, he was clocking eyebrow-raising speeds at the Holy Bull Stakes.
“We bred Ete Indien with our partner Rob Tiller,” Elizabeth Buckley said. “We decided who to breed the horse to, took care of the horse until she had the foal. And you never know when we have these foals — are they going to be great, or are they going to be terrible?”
“This one happened to be a star,” Eric Buckley said of Ete Indien.
Eric is the farm manager at his family’s thoroughbred farm here in Paris. “It’s a 300-acre family farm that was started by my grandparents in 1946. So, I’m a third-generation.”
The making of a star doesn’t end when it is bred, and running a thoroughbred farm isn’t a job you can do on an app or from your computer. Even blood, sweat, and tears fall short in describing the difficulty in doing what the Buckleys do.
“I’m on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I probably work 10-, 12-, 14-hour days depending on the time of the year. And I’m not alone. It’s virtually everybody that works on a farm is in the same boat. It’s like raising kids,” he explains. He adds:
The level of care doesn’t change once there is a new owner and a trainer. A trainer’s work is seven days a week, and the business is very labor-intensive. Thoroughbreds, unlike a lot of other breeds, are very fragile. They find a way to get hurt. A lot of stars have to line up just right for this. Only 20 or so horses go into the starting gate at the Kentucky Derby every year out of a full crop of 23,000.
“For a small farmer such as myself,” Eric Buckley says, “there’s a program put in place for when you’re a breeder of a horse that wins a greatest stakes race. You get what’s called a breeder’s incentive award. And that helps pay the bills.”
“It’s just, for a small breeder, it’s very helpful. But, you know, it’s like everything else. You’ve got to take this in the grand scheme of things,” he says.
Elizabeth Buckley is holding T-shirts with “Ete Indien” emblazoned across the front, a gift from friends who saw him run in Florida last month. They were delivered moments before they heard the news about the Kentucky Derby’s postponement.
“So, I think Eric and I are looking at this like, ‘Hey, great, we finally [had a] once-in-a-lifetime chance to have a Derby horse, but we’re going to survive.’ We’re more worried about the companies that aren’t going to survive and their employees,” she said of her small town’s uncertain fortunes.
“From my perspective, life marches on. The horses can’t take care of themselves, so I’m out here every day just like I was before this thing happened,” Eric Buckley says.
“You know, all you can do is hope that none of your employees or family get sick with this thing,” he says. “And, as far as the attitude here locally, I think everybody — this … small-town America, people try to look out for each other. I haven’t seen or heard of anybody doing anything ignorant or foolish.”
