Regret's Derby at 100: Filly made a case for equality

From DRF.com:




“You’re the top! You’re the Tower of Babel. You’re the top! You’re the Whitney stable …” - Cole Porter

Photos tell stories. This one, in muted gray, depicts two men flanking a dark Thoroughbred with an irregular splash of white sliding down her sweat-streaked face, eye rolling wildly in an afterburn of fatigued nerves. The figure on the left gazes off into space, a shadow of a smile playing across his lips. The other stares intently at the horse, his horse, who has just accomplished what many thought impossible. Stripped of saddle and winner’s floral wreath, the filly jigs impatiently as her owner looks on, surely savoring the sweet aftermath of history made. In stylish pinstriped suit and Homburg hat, the nattily dressed fellow grips a rein tightly in his right hand, cigarette dangling from the left – but appears strangely somber. It seems Harry Payne Whitney had more on his mind 100 years ago than winning a horse race – even if it was the Kentucky Derby.

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A confluence of events leading up to May 8, 1915, made Regret’s victory that afternoon at Churchill Downs bittersweet. Barely 24 hours earlier, a Cunard ocean liner outbound from New York with 1,959 people aboard had been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat just off the southern Irish coast.

One of the 188 American names inscribed on the Lusitania’s manifest that day was Harry Payne Whitney’s brother-in-law Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who was en route to a meeting of the International Horse Breeders’ Association in London. Vanderbilt, a wealthy sportsman and philanthropist, would prove a gentleman of highest order to the final instant of his life. Within moments of a torpedo slamming the ship’s starboard bow after lunchtime on May 7, Vanderbilt, who could not swim, hastened to aid women and children onto waiting lifeboats and was witnessed calmly strapping his own life belt onto a frantic young mother, with the reassuring words: “There … this is for your smile.” Seconds later, a towering wave swept the 37-year-old millionaire off Lusitania’s B Deck into the depths of the Celtic Sea.

When the official Derby photo was snapped, Whitney knew nothing of Vanderbilt’s fate, only that he remained among the missing. It must have been hard to celebrate, but he put on a brave face.

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