Six months after winning the Kentucky Derby, Cherie DeVaux and her famous colt are different from the pair who arrived at Churchill Downs in May. One has grown into his body. The other is learning to live with her fame.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WDRB+WAVE) — Cherie DeVaux has won the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes and a place in the history books. She accomplished something no woman had ever done before.
She was better prepared for the winning than for what came afterward.
“Prior to the Derby, I couldn’t take a compliment to save my life,” she said Tuesday, “and that hasn’t changed.”
This is a problem when you win the Kentucky Derby. People notice. They want to shake your hand. They want your autograph. They want to tell you how wonderful you are.
Some of them burst into tears.
“There are people that cry when they see him,” DeVaux said of Golden Tempo. “There are people that cry when they see me.”
This is not something they cover in the horse-training manuals.
You spend years learning pedigrees, feed, shoeing, speed figures and the thousand ways a horse can find to lose a race. You get up before the sun, worry all day about animals that can’t tell you where they hurt, and go to bed hoping they’ll still be sound in the morning.
Then one of them wins the Kentucky Derby, and strangers are weeping in your presence. You can’t exactly tell them to stop.
“We’re trying to learn how to feel comfortable in that space,” she said.
Golden Tempo has no such problem. He apparently was born adjusted.
“He kind of walks around like he’s the man,” DeVaux said.
She saw it before anyone had identified him as a contender. On a cold, windy day at Fair Grounds in New Orleans, with horses milling around and the weather doing its best to make everybody miserable, Golden Tempo stood there taking it all in.
He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t impressed. He wasn’t looking for someplace to hide. DeVaux texted Monique Delp, head of racing operations for St. Elias Stable.
“I don’t know how talented he is,” she wrote, “but mentally he’s there.”
He had the attitude. The résumé would have to catch up. It did.
On the first Saturday in May, Golden Tempo came charging down the Churchill Downs stretch to win the 152nd Kentucky Derby. A few weeks later, he won the Belmont, too.
The Derby is the one race everybody knows, including people who couldn’t distinguish a furlong from a furlough. Win it and you become part of the nation’s sports consciousness. People remember the horse’s name. Sometimes they remember yours.
DeVaux had trained Grade 1 winners before, including turf standout She Feels Pretty. But the Derby introduced her to an audience that doesn’t follow racing the other 364 days of the year. Her life has changed. Her schedule hasn’t.
“Everyone asks me like when I’m going on vacation,” she said, “which horse trainers don’t.”
Which makes the decision she made two weeks after the Derby more interesting.
There was a Triple Crown at stake, and what felt like the whole sport was leaning on her to chase it. DeVaux passed on the Preakness.
“If we went to the Preakness, we would definitely have had regression,” she said. He got sick this summer, too. Had she run him back in two weeks, “the whole picture of what his career would have been would probably be quite different at this point.”
She let him grow.
It was a luxury nobody gave her. There’s no six-month layoff for winning the Kentucky Derby. The interviews start immediately. So do the invitations, the congratulations and the strangers with tears in their eyes.
The horse got time to mature. The trainer got famous overnight. She was on the Today Show by Monday morning.
DeVaux has only one regret about the whole thing.
“I didn’t take enough pictures along his journey,” she said. “But he is a completely different horse.”
It’s the kind of thing parents say. You never think to take the picture until you notice the kid doesn’t look like that anymore.
Nobody was lining up to take his picture back then, anyway. DeVaux said nobody looking at Golden Tempo as a yearling at the Keeneland sales would have picked him out as a future Derby winner. Not as an early 2-year-old, either.
He was not one of those horses who arrive looking as though Michelangelo had carved them out of marble.
“You’d have to really have a creative imagination to see that early on in his career,” she said.
She added that he has more balance now, more stretch. He won the Belmont, proving he could overcome a race noted it was “his best race as far as speed figures.”
Even when he lost, he was getting better.
Saturday, he’ll need to get better again. The $7 million Breeders’ Cup Classic includes Sovereignty, winner of the 2025 Kentucky Derby, and Forever Young, the defending Classic champion. Golden Tempo is talented, but he won’t be the most accomplished horse in the starting gate.
DeVaux doesn’t pretend otherwise.
“He’s going to have to take a big step forward,” she said.
She likes the setup, though. Plenty of early speed is entered, and Golden Tempo runs best with horses in front of him to run at. She’s seen him take big steps before.
At least the race is at Keeneland, where DeVaux trains and Golden Tempo lives. The Breeders’ Cup has brought the best horses from Europe, Japan and everywhere else to their doorstep.
“Nothing beats waking up in your own bed and coming right out to the barn,” she said.
He gets his own stall, too. They know the neighborhood.
They’ve both changed since May. Golden Tempo is bigger, stronger and still carries himself like the most important horse in the barn. DeVaux is learning what happens when other people start treating her like the most important person in the room.
But she still can’t take a compliment.
And he still doesn’t need one.