A few days before the Kentucky Derby, former Governor Brereton Jones was standing on the backstretch at Churchill Downs, talking about trainer Larry Jones’ decision to run the filly Eight Belles in the Kentucky Derby instead of the Kentucky Oaks. Brereton applauded the decision, and not just because it meant that his filly, Proud Spell, would have one fewer formidable opponent in the Oaks.

“Larry’s a great horseman,” Brereton said. “He wants to give all his horses their best opportunity to reach their potential. We entered Proud Spell in the Derby, too, just in case, and I think she would be competitive there. But she’s not as big or strong as Eight Belles, so I think Larry is doing the right thing by both horses.”

At this point he was approached by a journalist who didn’t want to talk about horses. So the first thing he said was, “I can’t believe we couldn’t even get the casino issue on the ballot in Kentucky…do you think it’s dead?”

Brereton did everything but heave a huge sigh. Earlier this year, as the driving force behind KEEP (Kentucky Equine Education Project), he suffered a disappointing blow in his drive to let Kentuckians vote on the issue of casino gambling.

He knew, better than anyone, that a lot of Kentucky horsemen were taking their stables to rival states which had used some of the revenue from casino gambling to beef up their race track purses and enhance incentive programs for breeders, putting Kentucky’s tracks at a competitive disadvantage.

But beyond that, he believed that Kentucky needed new revenue streams in order to give our citizens the education, health care, and opportunity they deserve. The polls indicated that 80 percent of all Kentuckians felt so strongly about the issue, one way or another, that they wanted to vote on it. The former Governor believed they should have that right.

At the beginning of the session, his hopes were high. But then he watched with growing dismay as the session evolved into a theater of the absurd. The ugliness and divisiveness reached the point that the casino bill never even made it to the floor of the House. It was killed by equal measures of ego, incompetence, jealousy, and greed.

Brereton was so disappointed that he promised himself that he would not discuss the issue again until after the Derby. “Let’s just concentrate on the horses,” he said. And that’s what he was doing when the casino debacle reared its ugly head on the backstretch at Churchill Downs.

“It’s so sad,” Brereton told the journalist. “Can you imagine how much money Kentucky would make this week if we had a world-class casino at Churchill Downs with the best entertainers in the world performing? All the international high rollers are here. They don’t have anything to do at night except go to parties. With casinos, they’d be giving us millions that we could use to build schools.”

He smiled and grabbed the visitor’s arm.

“I swore I wasn’t going to talk about this,” he said, “and now here we are. It’s so sad. Can we change the subject? Let’s talk about the horses.”

On a Friday that had turned rainy and gloomy by post time for the Oaks, Proud Spell came splashing down the stretch at Churchill to give Brereton and his wife, Libby, the biggest win of their 36 years as Kentucky breeders. The casino heartaches were momentarily forgotten, replaced by the special euphoria that comes with winning a big horse race.

Only 24 hours later, Larry Jones momentarily seemed a genius when Eight Belles, the filly he trains for owner Rick Porter, crossed the Derby finish line second to the amazing Big Brown. But a quarter of a mile past the finish, the unthinkable happened. As jockey Gabriel Saez was pulling her up, Eight Belles took a bad step and broke both forelegs in a freak accident that left veterinarians no choice but to immediately put her to death by lethal injection.

The shock numbed the crowd and detracted attention from one of the most remarkable performances in the Derby’s 134-year history. Breaking from the No. 20 post position on the far outside, Big Brown ran like a seasoned veteran instead of a colt who had only three career starts, all victories, to his credit.

Superbly ridden by Kent Desormeaux, he easily got a position just behind the leaders, dropped from fourth to sixth while gathering himself on the backstretch, and then uncorked a run to glory that vindicated trainer Rick Dutrow Jr.’s outrageous confidence in him and convinced the skeptics that here, indeed, might be racing’s first Triple Crown winner in 30 years.

He was, in a word, brilliant.

The Derby Day crowd of 157,770, second largest in history, bet $26,181,260 on the Derby Day card. Nobody knows how much was bet at the riverboat on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, but it’s a fact that, unlike the racetrack revenue, none of the casino revenue will be used to help Kentucky’s racing industry, its educational system, or its health-care industry.

That’s simply unacceptable. It’s an embarrassment. So sooner or later, you can bet that Brereton Jones will get back into the fight. And when he does, he can only hope that Kentucky gets casino gambling before he sees a colt by Big Brown, out of Proud Spell, make it to the Kentucky Derby.