The first Kentucky Derby I covered was in 2002 for Sports Illustrated, replacing the great Bill Nack, the type of writer you never want to follow onto a beat. However, there was no line outside the editor’s office, and I had been writing about racing on and off since the late 1970s because my early jobs were near Saratoga and my intermediate stop was in New York, where newspapers also cared about racing until the last decade or so. That Derby was won by War Emblem, a small-boned speedball who