Humorous Cide, a blue-collar horse who shocked the Derby, dies : NPR

Just one of the most storied horses in thoroughbred racing record, Amusing Cide, died this 7 days at the age of 23.

Small in stature, the feisty chestnut was an mysterious when he was entered into the Kentucky Derby in 2003. Funny Cide faced 12-1 odds — the definition of a longshot. A New York condition-bred horse experienced by no means won the huge race.

But when the gates opened on that Might early morning at Churchill Downs, Amusing Cide ran solid.

“I could not imagine my eyes,” one of his co-owners, Harold Cring, recalled in a 2007 interview with North Nation Community Radio. “Which is our horse out entrance. I stored waiting for one thing to tumble aside.”

Funny Cide held on to win. It was a existence-altering minute for the horse’s proprietors, a group of superior university pals from a small city referred to as Sacketts Harbor in northern New York who had taken up horse-racing as a pastime.

“We were being just sitting around acquiring a few cocktails as we ended up generally executing, and the plan arrived up to buy a horse,” claimed Jon Constance, the village’s previous mayor and an additional of Humorous Cide’s co-owners. “From that working day forward, our lifestyle has modified.”

The Kentucky Derby earn was also a pinnacle moment for veteran jockey Jose Santos, who retired in 2007. “I came all the way from Chile chasing a aspiration and I bought the desire, you know, and I did it with Humorous Cide,” Santos reported.

At initial, the get in Kentucky seemed like a fluke. It was widely portrayed as a feel-great story about a blue-collar horse owned by a bunch of modest-town fellas who obtained lucky.

Then two months afterwards at the Preakness Stakes, Amusing Cide received once again, dominating the discipline by just about 10 lengths.

In the finish, Funny Cide was not in a position to capture the Triple Crown. A much larger, far more pedigreed thoroughbred identified as Empire Maker gained the Belmont Stakes that calendar year.

Nonetheless, it was an epic operate. By the time Humorous Cide retired in 2007, he’d won more than $3.5 million for his entrepreneurs.

“Amusing Cide just loved to run,” Constance recalled in an job interview with NPR this week. “He liked to get out there and liked to clearly show the rest of them. He could possibly have been small but he was highly effective.”

The previous mayor of Sacketts Harbor explained several of the horse’s co-entrepreneurs who professional that impressive year with each other continue to stay in the village.

“We rarely go a 7 days devoid of likely to somebody’s home. We’re all pretty near. And by the way, I reside on Amusing Cide Push now,” Constance explained, noting that the village named a new road immediately after their well known horse.

Amusing Cide used the very last 15 a long time of his everyday living in convenience at a horse farm in Kentucky ahead of passing this 7 days of problems joined to cholic.