Kentucky Derby 2015: Analyzing Outside Contenders in Run for the Roses
With just less than a week to go until the 2015 Kentucky Derby, more and more attention continues to be paid to the top contenders like Dortmund, Carpe Diem and American Pharoah. But what about the horses a little lower down the pecking order?
Countless favorites have crashed and burned in the past at Churchill Downs before, and this year will be no different.
Yes, the better horses have shorter odds for a reason, but nothing is guaranteed in any race, especially one as big as the Kentucky Derby. Any number of things can go wrong on the track that the jockey and trainer can't possibly see coming.
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In the interest of fairness, below you'll find three horses who are among the biggest underdogs in this year's Run for the Roses but deserve some mention.
Itsaknockout (40-1)
One reason to immediately be skeptical of Itsaknockout is his name. Middleground in 1950 was the last horse to win with a name that was a bunch of words scrunched together to form an imaginary super word.
Could there be a bigger red flag?
In all seriousness, Itsaknockout is 3-for-4 in competitive races, but only one of those wins came in a graded stakes race. Additionally, the colt earned the victory after the original winner, Upstart, was disqualified. Maybe Itsaknockout would have gone on to win had he not been impeded by Upstart, but we'll never know for sure.
Between that and a fourth-place finish in the Florida Derby, Itsaknockout has some major question marks heading into the Kentucky Derby.
Maybe Itsaknockout can do something special Saturday, but the chances seem remote.
El Kabeir (33-1)
What piques your interest about El Kabeir is that he isn't the kind of horse who only knows one way to run. He can stick with the front of the pack just as well as he can sit back until the last half-mile or so and surge to the wire.
That could come in handy if El Kabeir gets an unfavorable draw or starts a little slowly out of the gate.
Another reason to believe in El Kabeir is jockey Calvin Borel. He's a three-time Kentucky Derby winner, and as J.J. Hysell noted, he and El Kabeir enjoyed success together at the Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes back in November:
Of course, Borel's luck hasn't been so great lately at Churchill Downs when it comes to the Derby, but he has at least tasted victory before. He and El Kabeir shouldn't be dismissed offhandedly.
Mr. Z (40-1)
As a "Mr. Z" myself, I must admit that I'll be pulling for this colt when the Derby begins.
Mr. Z has had some close calls, but he's never been able to pick up any sort of noteworthy win on the road to the Kentucky Derby. He had third-place finishes in the Los Alamitos Futurity and the Arkansas Derby and a second-place finish in the Breeders' Futurity, and that's largely the extent of his success on the track.
If you missed Mr. Z from the Arkansas Derby, he was one of the horses who got smoked by American Pharoah.
In terms of what to like about Mr. Z, he has rarely been completely out of a race. Only three times out of 11 stakes events has he finished outside of the top three.
That's an impressive consistency. Maybe everything goes right for the three-year-old, and he goes from front-runner to victor.
With that said, Mr. Z has a ton of races under his belt already, so you wonder how much he has left in the tank for the Kentucky Derby.
"That's one of the real negatives for the points system to me is, they force everybody to run when they probably wouldn't from a trainer and owner standpoint," trainer D. Wayne Lukas said, per Jonathan Lintner of The Courier-Journal.
Still, if you really want to bet on a major underdog in this year's Derby, Mr. Z might be your guy.
Note: Kentucky Derby Odds are courtesy of Odds Shark.
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