Culture
Kentucky Derby: Mystik Dan wins in photo finish
Mystik Dan won the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky. The winning time was 2:03.34.
He won in a photo finish over Sierra Leone and Forever Young. The Churchill Downs crowd roared as the three horses made their way down the stretch and then fell silent as no one could tell who won the race by a nose.
WOW. 😱
Mystik Dan WINS the 150th Kentucky Derby in a PHOTO FINISH! pic.twitter.com/N2jfd2TsKe
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) May 4, 2024
Mystik Dan, who entered the race with with 18-1 odds, had the lead coming around the final turn and saw his lead reduced in the final furlong, but he held on to win. Betting favorite Fierceness (3-1) ultimately finished in 15th after a strong start.
Winning the 150th Kentucky Derby on May 4 holds extra significance for Lance Gasaway, one of Mystik Dan’s owners whose father died a year ago today.
“To me, this is for him,” Gasaway said. “Dad would’ve loved it. He loved the game.”
GO DEEPER
The people and moments that made Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan
Mystik Dan is trained by Kenneth McPeek and ridden by Brian Hernandez. Both trainer and jockey also won Friday’s Kentucky Oaks with Thorpedo Anna. McPeek is the first trainer to win both the Kentucky Oaks and the Kentucky Derby on the same weekend since Ben Jones accomplished the feat in 1952. Entering Friday, neither McPeak nor Hernandez had ever won a Kentucky Oaks or Kentucky Derby.
“My horse was just cruising along so comfortably, it never felt like we were going that quickly,” Hernandez said. “I was just smiling the whole time. It’s an amazing feeling when you have the horse under you and you know they’re gonna go forward and forward and forward.”
A $2 win bet on Mystik Dan pays $39.22. A $2 exacta bet on Mystik Dan and Sierra Leone pays $258.56.
Full results with final betting odds set before race
- Mystik Dan (18-1)
- Sierra Leone (9-2)
- Forever Young (6-1)
- Catching Freedom (8-1)
- T O Password (48-1)
- Resilience (32-1)
- Stronghold (35-1)
- Honor Marie (15-1)
- Endlessly (48-1)
- Dornoch (22-1)
- Track Phantom (40-1)
- West Saratoga (22-1)
- Domestic Product (27-1)
- Epic Ride (47-1)
- Fierceness (3-1)
- Society Man (46-1)
- Just Steel (21-1)
- Grand Mo the First (47-1)
- Catalytic (34-1)
- Just a Touch (11-1)
Required reading
(Photo: Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
new video loaded: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
transcript
transcript
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
David Szalay became the first British Hungarian to win the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh.”
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“I think fiction can take risks. I think it’s one of the things that it can do. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do to the same extent.” “I think all six of the books in the short list really, you know, not — it’s not saying this is the headline theme, but there is that theme of reaching out, wanting a connection.”
By Shawn Paik
November 11, 2025
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
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