Maybe it was chance,  or fate. Call it karma or destiny or happenstance. All Ohio businessman Scott Mawaka knows is that it changed his life: “As a young man, my first customer that I signed for my business, I offered to take him golfing or go out for lunch. He said, "That's not what I like. I like to handicap the ponies.’”

Off they went to Thistledown in Cleveland. Mawaka remembers seeing “a stereotypical bunch of guys with their papers and cigars. Probably 30 years ago.”

Not long after, Mawaka claimed his first horse, Fame and Gold, for $5,000 at Thistledown on October 10th, 2001. Fame and Gold won a $3,500 claimer in his third start for Mawaka and was ultimately claimed. “That got the bug in me,” Mawaka said. “Our first couple of claimers, I bought with my dad.”

Wise enough to learn from great trainers; humble enough to take a job as a hotwalker at the age of 35 to learn more and smart enough to take his Peachtree Stable to the highest level of competition is how 83-year-old John P. Fort continues to make his mark in Thoroughbred racing.

Along the way he became a talented polo player and finally got Allen Jerkens to train his horses more than 20 years after a rocky first encounter. His latest stakes winner, Tawny Port, ended a two-year losing streak, taking the two-mile Gr.2 Belmont Park Gold Cup at Saratoga June 4th in track-record time, earning a free ‘Golden Ticket’ to the Melbourne Cup, the race that stops a nation, in Australia. Miguel Clement trains Tawny Port. Fort met him when he was five-years-old at the Saratoga Dog Show. Fort and his dog Flexi were dressed up like a lion tamer and his lion: “Thirty years later, we’re winning stakes races. The river runs deep.”

“Connie and I have a problem,” Jerry Baker said. “We fall in love with our horses.”

So when their first horse together, Margie’s Minute, a $20,000 claimer they purchased in 2016, was done racing a year later, they didn’t want to lose her. So they bred her.

Good decision. Her third foal, the five-year-old gelding Vodka Vodka, finished second in the Gr.1 Santa Anita Handicap March 7th and has earned $569,750. Less than three months later, his four-year-old half-sister Om N Joy, racing just seven days after finishing seventh in a California-bred turf stakes, dominated her competition on dirt, taking the Gr.2 Santa Margarita Stakes by 3 ¾ lengths under Kent Desormeaux. She’s now over $600,000 in earnings. Not bad for a filly who lost her first eight starts before winning five straight.

Jerry, a career real estate man, said, “We’re lucky.” Connie said, “Very lucky.”

THE PUMA

OGMA Investments (led by Gustavo Delgado Jr.), High Step Racing (Randall Guy, Joe Noble, Kevin Avera, Jim Ferreira and Todd Perry) and JR Ranch (Ramiro Restrepo, Jose and Rita Aguirre)

Back in 2015, Ramiro Restrepo, then working for Fasig-Tipton as a sort of South American ambassador, met Venezuelan trainer Gustavo Delgado Sr. at Keeneland. He said, "Let's start working with each other. I'll own an interest in some of the horses, and you bring people to come in and be partners," Restrepo said. "Then, I owned pieces of some of those horses."

With their home-bred Chief Wallabee stepping into the pre-Kentucky Derby spotlight, Mike and Katherine "K.K." Ball are in unfamiliar territory. "We're not used to this much hype," Katherine said.

Mike and Katherine Ball have spent decades racing and breeding Thoroughbreds in Kentucky without getting as much of a whiff of the Kentucky Derby. Both spent more than a decade training their horses.

"As long as we've been in the business, it's our first Derby," Katherine said. "We are enjoying every minute of it."