Louisville Unearthed: The last time the Kentucky Derby was postponed

In most of our lifetimes, the Kentucky Derby has run on schedule without a hitch on the first Saturday of May year after year, preceded by weeks of buildup that amounts to a city-wide celebration.

This year, the first Saturday in May will simply be a Saturday. The weeks preceding will likely involve a lot of Netflix and working remotely. It all seems so unprecedented – but it’s not.

"For the second time in the 145-year history of the Kentucky Derby, the first time being at the end of World War II, we will move the date of the Derby," Churchill Downs CEO Bill Carstanjen told ESPN this week as he announced that the Derby would be run Sept. 5 instead.

The last time something like this happened? It was 1945, and it happened just as the second World War was coming to a close. The federal government had suspended all horse racing nationwide for the first half of the year – money wagered could be money for war bonds, after all – but the war ended in May after Germany finally surrendered on the 8th of that month.

The 75th Derby was then rescheduled for June 9. The popular race was won by Hoop Jr., with American Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame jockey Eddie Arcaro aboard. The horse, trained by Fred W. Hooper, ran the race in a time of 2:07 flat, winning by six lengths on a rainy Louisville day with a finishing time that wouldn’t even get him into the top 10 in a modern Derby.

One detail often lost to history was that a few folks hungry for racing (and, no doubt, wagering) organized another contest to be run the first Saturday in May in lieu of the Kentucky Derby – a full card of turtle races. Yep, turtle races.

Held in the Jefferson County Armory (later known as Louisville Gardens), some 6,500 people attended and the crowd bet nearly $12,000 across eight races. Each race was run on 20 feet of track, and the well-attended event lasted right up to midnight.

The last race on the card, the Turtle Derby, as it were, brought in a whopping $1,729, with a turtle named Broken Spring winning it all with a blazing time of 1:20.3. Perhaps the most entertaining contest, however, was race No. 4, according to news reports. A turtle named Journeyman Printer won that one while clocking a time of 4:59.1, and it was reported that seven different turtles held the lead in the “sprint” at one point, many of them eventually turning around and going back the way they came.

The turtle races became an annual event for a while, but fizzled out in the early 1950s.

Perhaps that first turtle derby was an inspiration for the Ken-Ducky Derby, in which Kentucky Derby Festival officials dump more than 40,000 rubber ducks into the Ohio River. We’ll probably never know.

Every Friday, Louisville Unearthed will bring you an unusual fact, historical nugget, place, person, etc., that you may not know about our city.

Not quite the most exciting two minutes in sports. (Photo by Bernd Loos/Flickr)