Regret by M.E. Altieri
May 20, 2007
We're still all aflush with Triple Crown Fever (although there'll be no Triple Crown winner this year), so it's only fitting that this week's Historic Filly should be the first filly to win the Kentucky Derby: the inimitable Regret.
And it's not a stretch to state that, without Regret's role in racing history—the Kentucky Derby might not be the prestigious event it is today. That may seem unlikely to you before you read this ode to the great horses—but here is the tale of the tail that left all the boys in the dust.
The beautiful, graceful, lightning-fast Regret was foaled in 1912 on Brookdale Farm in New Jersey. Bred and owned by Harry Payne Whitney, she was the daughter of Broomstick (sire) and Jersey Lightning (dam). (I'm sure she got her speed from her mother: names do matter!) Trained by James G. Rowe, Sr., her career began with a resounding win in the Saratoga Special Stakes on August 8, 1914, against an all-male field. She led the entire race, and ran a near-record time.
Regret won two more races that year, the Stanford Memorial and the Hopeful Stakes. (Nowadays, it's a good bet that the two-year-old winner of the Hopeful will no doubt land in the Kentucky Derby the following May.)
Her two- and three-year-old campaigns were both against all males, and she beat them every time. Of course it was a given that she'd enter the Derby: her owner and trainer did not operate under the preconceived silliness that often pervades today, that fillies and mares aren't physiologically or emotionally fit to race against males.
So Mr. Whitney and Mr. Rowe entered their magnificent Regret in the Kentucky Derby, and—she won. The first filly to win the Derby, she set a precedent, leaving her opponents and fans alike in a state of…if you will…"shock and awe."
Prior to 1915, the Kentucky Derby did not hold the cache that it has today. Racetrack promoter, Colonel Matt Winn, later said that Regret's victory "…made the Kentucky Derby an American institution."
For her performance that year, but most notably for her Derby win, she was awarded the most prestigious honor on Thoroughbred racing, the Eclipse Award for Horse of the Year.
Regret died in 1934, after living a long, prosperous life. She never produced much as a broodmare, but she didn't have to prove anything to anyone: she will always be remembered as the First Filly to win the Kentucky Derby! She was buried on the Whiney farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1957.
So next year, when you're at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby, or watching it from home…and the sweet strains of, "My Old Kentucky Home" begin to induce tears, remember that—without a filly named Regret, and two men of faith and insight—all the pageantry, beauty and style of the Kentucky Derby might never be.
A toast, to Regret. Such an ironic name, for a horse who inspired such love, admiration and joy, and raised the bar for fillies, mares and colts, the world-over.
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