Local connections to 151st Kentucky Derby

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – This year is the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby, and two horses have local connections to the South Central Kentucky area: Tiztastic & Sandman.

Tiztastic is owned by Ron Winchell, who is the owner of The Mint Gaming Hall and Kentucky Downs. Winchell said he’s feeling confident about his horse’s abilities after winning the Louisiana Derby.

“Coming from Kentucky Downs after he won those two races, our goal was to get here… and a lot of times, your goals don’t work out,” Winchell said. “We’re happy it worked out… and he’s been improving the last couple of weeks. Louisiana Derby, he started to improve, and we feel like he’s improving this week. So we’re coming into it feeling pretty good.”

While Tiztastic sits at 20:1 odds, Sandman who is 6:1 is the third favorite to win the Run for the Roses, with West Point Thoroughbreds – the company owning him – being operated by a Bowling Green native who has lived here with her husband for the past 10 years.

“He graduated dental school at UK and then we moved down here and he has since become a partner at Bluegrass Oral Health… and then my parents, who started West Point Thoroughbreds in 1991… once we had kids in 2019, they purchased a house down here and spend about six months out of the year in Bowling Green,” said Erin Birkenhauer, the COO of West Point Thoroughbreds.

While the two may be competing against each other in the Derby, they both agree on one thing: the horse racing scene in South Central Kentucky is alive and well.

“It’s just really neat with Epicenter a couple of years ago… and then our connection with Sandman, it’s really cool,” Birkenhauer said. “A lot of people in Bowling Green actually went to the preschool derby at my kid’s school this morning just to see all the people… it’s not just Lexington and Louisville where people are horse crazy and really paying attention to the Derby. So just seeing all of the people that have gathered behind Sandman is really neat.”

“It’s really a product of us improving the racing there every year, and we’ve been doing that for five years. So seeing the three horses and what’s coming from Kentucky Downs to the Kentucky Derby is just an example of how the product just gets improved. We get better quality horses… and so it’s really nice to see it actually come to fruition,” Winchell says.

You can catch the Kentucky Derby on NBC 40 on Saturday.