Aristides and the First Run for the Roses: The 1875 Kentucky Derby
On May 17, 1875, fifteen horses contested the first Kentucky Derby at a new Louisville racetrack, and a colt named Aristides won it in front of 10,000 fans.
Before the mint juleps and the blanket of roses, the Kentucky Derby was just a new racetrack, fifteen young horses, and a crowd that had never seen anything like it. On May 17, 1875, the first Kentucky Derby was run on a Louisville track that would soon be known around the world as Churchill Downs.
The man behind it was Colonel Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. — the grandson of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition. On a European trip in 1872, Clark had attended England's Epsom Derby and France's Grand Prix de Paris, and he came home determined to bring that kind of spectacle to America. He organized the Louisville Jockey Club, raised the money, and built a track on eighty acres leased from his uncles, John and Henry Churchill.
The inaugural race was contested over a mile and a half — the same distance as the Epsom Derby — by fifteen three-year-olds, before an estimated 10,000 spectators. Betting worked by auction pools, with fans bidding for the right to bet on a horse. The winner was Aristides, a chestnut colt ridden by an 18-year-old Black jockey named Oliver Lewis and trained by Ansel Williamson, also Black. Lewis had reportedly been instructed to use Aristides to set a fast pace for the stable's more fancied colt, Chesapeake — but Chesapeake broke poorly and never contended. When Lewis got the signal to ride for the win, he seized it: Aristides held off the challengers and crossed the wire two lengths clear in 2 minutes 37.75 seconds, a world record for the distance at the time. The winning team took home $2,850.
The result reflected who really ran American racing in that era. Thirteen of the fifteen jockeys in the first Derby were African-American, and Black horsemen — riders, trainers, grooms — dominated the sport for decades after emancipation, winning fifteen of the first twenty-eight Kentucky Derbies. Lewis himself was about eighteen on race day, a husband and father whose name would be remembered for one perfect afternoon; later that year he rode Aristides to second place in the Belmont Stakes.
The race kept its place on the calendar, and the rest of the legend arrived piece by piece. The distance was shortened to a mile and a quarter in 1896, the year the race found its modern shape. The track's name — taken from the Churchills who had leased the land — became Churchill Downs, and the winner's garland of roses gave the race its nickname, the Run for the Roses. Today it is the longest continuously run horse race in the United States and the first leg of the Triple Crown, watched by more than 150,000 people in person and millions more on television.
It all began on May 17, 1875, with fifteen horses, a new grandstand, and a teenager named Oliver Lewis holding off the field — the first name in the winner's book of the most famous two minutes in sports.
Photo: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
