By DOUGLAS BURNS and PAUL RUTHERFORD

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — On NBC’s coverage of the Run for the Roses you see high-hatting swells in the between-the-spires seats, the celebrities with mint julep drinks.

The cocktail-and-croquet set is intriguing, to be sure.

This is a big money event in a big money nation.

Thousands are spent on prime seats. Bettors wagered $115 million on the Kentucky Derby this year. The animals involved can be worth more than most people will make in a lifetime.

Big money.

You see the influence miles from The Downs in “corporate America’s Battle of Britain” with blimps and airplanes towing ad banners competing for coveted space above the track.

But there is another side to the Kentucky Derby: the backside.

Across the track from Millionaires Row and a sea of drunken humanity in the mostly mosh-pitted infield at Churchill Downs (combined official attendance Saturday was 157,770, the second-highest ever) is where the stables and the too-often invisible people of the track — the ones who make the horses go round and round — are located.

It’s actually like a little town, complete with a restaurant (where from the right table you feel like horses are going to careen off the track onto your fries).

Horse grooms, some living above the barns in which they work, rise in the early morning hours to tend to the horses. They clean the powerful animals thoroughly and prepare them for races. It’s not glamorous work.

On Derby day, many of the grooms and assistant trainers and hot-walkers and barn foremen and exercise riders and others involved in the day-to-day aspects of horse-racing gather on the backside with their families for the races. Some are dead serious at work, but this is the Derby and not every barn has a horse in the big race so the backside is a bizarre mix: part Game 7 locker-room seriousness and part carnival.

The ownership class on the backside step out of their Mercedes or Hummers with mixed drinks and navigate their way to Derby horse processions — the tradition of walking horses from the backside to the paddock on the front side.

Only feet away, one can see track workers climb down from the “apartments” above the horse stalls, and head to the Backside Rec Center, a squat of a building in which people screaming for $2 exacta bets (getting the first- and second-place finishers in order) are thinking about paying for a six-pack of beer or some diapers or McDonald’s, not bragging rights with their friends over a swanky dinner in this very restaurant-friendly, border-state city on the Ohio River.

It’s hard to write anything about the Kentucky Derby after the tragic death of the filly Eight Belles, the second-place finisher. But horse racing captures your heart. The animals do, with their grace and power, their courage and, yes, their fragility. As Larry Jones, Eight Belles’ trainer, said Saturday, “Our horses give us their lives every day.” He’s right, they do, both figuratively and literally.

The people in the industry, often a collection of characters that fiction writers would be hard-pressed to create, gain your love just as fully. And, none do this more so than the immigrants, most often from Mexico and Guatemala, who come to this country to do the kind of hard physical labor most people shun (and not necessarily without reason).

You can’t work in the racing industry unless you work hard, very hard, sometimes 16 hours a day and often every day of the week. Stable workers usually have to be in their barns by 4:30 a.m. and, at least every other day, they have to come back to feed horses in the late afternoon. Often they have to spend hours on horse trailers with their charges, going to a race away from the home stable, arriving early and watching their animals before preparing them for the day’s competition.

Backside workers tend to be immensely loyal to their families, both their relatives here in the States and at home. Every payday at Wagner’s Pharmacy across from Churchill Downs, you’ll see grooms and hot walkers standing in line to wire money back home to the family in Mexico or Guatemala. One groom who’s a good friend of mine, one of a family of 14 children from Mexico City, wires his entire paycheck, minus money for his food, back to his mom and dad every week. He also sends the money he gets from his second job delivering hay, oats and barley for the horses.

The Kentucky Derby tends to be a bacchanalian carnival every year, seeming like a multi-day drinking contest for out-of-towners who revel in the festivities and the race.

There’s revelry for the stable hands as well, but it tends to be a more family-oriented gathering of people than what you’ll find in either the infield at Churchill or under its storied Twin Spires. After finishing the day’s work, people at the barn get cleaned up, gather their children, and come up close to the track on Churchill Downs’ Backside, the area of the facility where the barns are. There are not a lot of seats and almost none of the eating and drinking amenities you get elsewhere on the track.
So people bring their own — beef, chicken, sausages, the best guacamole on the planet, refreshments — it’s all there, much of it cooked on grills the grooms and hot walkers haul from their rooms back at the barn.

And, of course, there’s some beer, a smattering of tequila. An observer would be surprised, though, how little Backside parties, with coworkers who seem really more like an extended family, resemble the frat-house inebriation levels that occur everywhere else at the track.

That’s not to say people don’t over-imbibe around the barns. Sure, some do, but these gatherings are more of a subdued celebration — of the day, the animals, and the people who make the horse industry possible in America.

Workers on the Backside want to share the day with the friends, relatives and most especially their children — the laughs and the humor are more the fuel for these festivities, rather than distilled spirits. After all, 4:30 the next morning is awfully early.

At just after 6 p.m., the so-very-different worlds here at Churchill Downs have a common focus. Nearly 160,000 people, ears perked, eyes trained, from the perch of royalty on the front side (the queen was here last year) or atop a dirt-stained cooler on the Backside, want to know the same things: Who broke well? Who is making a move?
We stood along the fence on the backside. We heard “My Old Kentucky Home,” and the roar of the crowd as the horses hit the gate, followed by the raucous cheering as the race started.

Through the years, along with learning to read a racing form, we’ve picked up the ear for “start of the race” cheering as compared to “in the gate” crowd noise.
After seeing the horses thunder past on the Backside, we sprinted to a nearby outdoor screen to confirm that Big Brown dominated the field and soon learned the tragedy of a brave and beautiful filly we watched make her way from the stable to the track only an hour earlier.

As always, when this race is over, when we can see an end to the first Saturday in May, we are reminded of John Steinbeck’s description after seeing Needles win the race in 1956:

“This Kentucky Derby, whatever it is — a race, an emotion, a turbulence, an explosion — is one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things I have ever experienced. And I suspect that, as with other wonders, the people one by one have taken from it exactly as much good or evil as they brought to it. What an experience. I am glad I have seen and felt it at last.”


(Editor’s Note: Douglas Burns is a columnist and writer for Iowa Independent.com and the Carroll (Iowa) Daily Times Herald. His longtime friend from college days at Northwestern University, Paul Rutherford, is an assistant county attorney in Louisville, who is also on the staff of the 2007 Derby-winning Churchill Downs barn run by trainers Carl Nafzger and Ian Wilkes.)