All Cherie DeVaux wanted to do was win the Kentucky Derby. Making history? She’s just glad that part is over

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

(CNN) — Back before they had a name, before a generation crowned such things as “vision boards” and started talking about “manifesting” their dreams, Cherie DeVaux wrote down her goals and pinned the notes to her bedroom walls.

Sports, grades, life – whatever it was that the self-described Type A personality was seeking that year, she’d jot it down.

DeVaux got so invested in setting her standards that her mother, Janet, worried she might be aiming a little too high. “Don’t you think that’s a little lofty?” Janet once said to her daughter.

“And then as I pulled down one by one, I was like, ‘OK, mom. Tell me what else I can’t do,’” DeVaux said.

As DeVaux recounts the story to CNN Sports on a Zoom call, she stops herself mid-sentence and her eyes pop wide. “Wait,” she says. “You just reminded me.” DeVaux reaches down beneath her seat and grabs a black folder. From it, she slides out a piece of paper and flips it over to the camera, displaying it with all the pride a kindergartner might bring to show and tell.

“My first vision board ever,” she says, explaining how on January 1, she accessed a Canva account to create the nouveau version of her childhood goal list.

In the top left corner of her board sits the very first item on Cherie DeVaux’s 2026 to-do list: A picture of the garland of roses that hangs around the winner of the Kentucky Derby.

Four months and one day later, long after the sun set and the crowds had dispersed from the 152nd running of the Kentucky Derby, DeVaux and her family giddily tromped across the mud of the Churchill Downs track to the backside. Each carried with them a single rose, taken from the blanket only just removed from Golden Tempo, the Derby-winning horse trained by DeVaux.

“I made that vision board before the LeComte,” DeVaux says of the first stakes race Golden Tempo won to put him on the trail to the Derby. “Do I believe in that stuff? I do now.”

Breaking the barn ceiling

It has been a blissfully bleary-eyed week for DeVaux, the spot on her schedule usually reserved for afternoon naps now filled with interviews and appearances. Pat McAfee, Dan Patrick, CNN and the Today Show are just a few of the outlets that have featured DeVaux and her story. The Yankees invited the New York native to throw out the first pitch.

There is always a whirlwind that follows winning the Derby but hers is an especially busy vortex thanks largely to the tagline that has permanently attached itself to DeVaux’s name: “The first female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby.”

It is her hard-earned and rightful place in history. The Kentucky Derby is the longest-running continuous sporting event in the United States. It has survived two World Wars, Prohibition, pouring rain, searing heat, and even a global pandemic. Though three fillies have crossed the finish line first, no female jockey or trainer had won it until DeVaux busted through the barn ceiling, taking down the old-boy network made of flannel, denim, seersucker and cigars.

Yet the addendum makes DeVaux a little weary. Not in the bone-tired sense but in the exhausted sense.

“I’m just glad I don’t have to answer that question anymore,” she quipped post-race when asked about being the first female trainer to win the Derby.

When DeVaux created her vision board back in January, nowhere on it did she mention a woman winning the Derby. She just wanted to win the race.

“I always wanted to focus on my career,” she says. “And using my gender as part of that conversation never really crossed my mind.”

It is not that she is unaware of the significance of her accomplishment. DeVaux has a stepdaughter and knows full well what it means for a young girl in any profession to have an actual person to emulate.

She just does not want to be put in a separate pile, given platitudes or recognition because she is a woman. She wants actual equality, with all of its benefits and its warts. To be measured on merit, ranked by whatever system is used to judge the man, and considered for how she trains her horses, not given a pat on the head because she’s the lone trainer who can also wear a ponytail.

To be clear, it takes a certain intestinal fortitude to survive in what is traditionally a man’s world, regardless of profession. There is a fine line between not taking anyone’s crap and figuring out what is truly offensive. Even for those who are accepted, there is no hiding. You can’t help but stand out in a very masculine crowd.

The track is especially hard, a hard job for anyone with its transient lifestyle, but especially tricky for women. It is dirty and gruff, often a refuge for people who have more of a way with horses than they do with people.

Women aren’t infrequent visitors, as there is plenty of work as a groom or exercise rider. Some jockey. Plenty open their purses as owners. But bosses? In the 152 runnings of the Kentucky Derby, 2,053 horses have made it to the starting gates. Only 18 women have saddled an entrant.

The family business

Borne into what she calls a Brady Bunch mixed-by-marriage family of 10 kids, DeVaux figured out early how to throw some sharp elbows if a situation required it.

Her father, Butch, trained standardbreds and was a harness driver. The kids all milled about the barns, first in Saratoga Springs, New York, and later in Florida, with varying degrees of interest. (Big brother, Jimmy, has more than 5,000 wins as a harness racing driver/trainer; Kenny trains horses at Monticello in New York, as did brother, Adrian, before passing away from cancer; baby sister, Adrianne, is a thoroughbred trainer like DeVaux)

It never occurred to anyone in her family that DeVaux couldn’t train horses – not so much in a feminist way; more like a laissez-faire figure it out way.

“They didn’t push us in any direction,” Adrianne told CNN Sports. “It was more like we’ll support you no matter what you want to do. And if it doesn’t work, come home and we’ll figure it out.”

DeVaux was a hard-wired island unto herself, the type A misfit in a family of type Bs. “Overachiever” is the term Adrianne uses to describe her sister. Had to excel at barrel racing, bodybuilding, softball and school. She vividly remembers being entirely disgusted that she didn’t ace biology while her perplexed mother couldn’t understand her disappointment.

“She said, ‘Well, we never pushed you for that. We would have been fine with a C,’” DeVaux says. “I was like, ‘What?’”

After financial realities met academic exhaustion, DeVaux pivoted away from a planned career in physical therapy (It was a means to an end, anyway, as DeVaux figured the salary would let her be around horses). She returned to New York, working first as an exercise rider and later as an assistant trainer to Chuck Simon, a 20-year veteran in the industry.

Old school with a gift for storytelling, Simon was not one to soft-pedal his mentees. In 2004, when she was all of 23, Simon sent DeVaux to Turfway solo to manage some of his horses, figuring that as a rider/trainer she could do it all.

After working for Simon for six years, she moved to Chad Brown’s barn, becoming his right hand before branching out on her own in 2018.

‘I’m also kind of a b***h when people try to push me around’

DeVaux brought her childhood search for perfection with her to her barn. She runs a tight ship. It’s not entirely “my way or the highway,” but there’s not much of a shoulder.

Adrianne worked for years as DeVaux’s assistant and learned early on that her family connection afforded her no special treatment. Adrianne, 16 years younger than DeVaux, is a traditional Type-B DeVaux, the sort who always knows where everything is in her office, even if nothing actually has a place. DeVaux is the sort who pulls a prepared vision board neatly out of a folder, has an organized snack cabinet in her office, as well as a coffee station.

At Keeneland, where DeVaux stables her horses, Adrianne was banished from her sister’s main office, relegated to the secondary barn where she could make her own mess.

The two admit now – Adrianne with a chuckle and DeVaux through tears – that their sisterly relationship suffered for a while, as DeVaux tried to square peg her sister.

“I put the pressure of taking a maternal role on as she grew up and that’s not what she asked for,” DeVaux says, her mascara smudging as the tears she said would come start to fall. “I’ve wanted to shield her from things or help her along the way, but I’ve had to learn how to step away unless she asks for it.”

But all of it – her quest for perfection, the failure and her upbringing on the backside – helped forge in DeVaux a woman who comes to her non-traditional career nearly tailor-made to handle it. She is not a woman who wishes to be defined by a gender, but she’s also not going to be stepped on because of it.

“I’m going to say this crudely because I don’t know how else to say it but I’m also kind of a b***h when people try to push me around,” she said. “I do not take fondly to people being disrespectful, anyone – man or woman. Anyone trying to cross boundaries, and I hold them accountable.”

“I’ve had people say to me, I just wish I could be like you. I just wish I could just like, you know, say what’s on my mind. And I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know why that’s the case.’ It doesn’t occur to me that I can’t. I’m not disrespectful. I’m not going out of my way to hurt people’s feelings, but I take up as much space as I want, and I’m going to be as loud as I want, and if you don’t like that, then, I’m sorry.”

The horse – and goat – whisperer

The hard lesson crashed in like an anvil: Horses aren’t nearly as easy to manage as biology exams.

DeVaux did not win a race in her first 11 months as a trainer, and it’s not like she was running a lot of horses. She’d put all her efforts into maybe one or two entrants, only to have them finish fifth, or seventh or 10th. She thought about quitting but her husband, bloodstock agent David Ingordo, convinced her to give herself three years. Reluctantly, she agreed.

On March 29, 2019, Stylishly crossed first at Gulfstream Park to give DeVaux her first win. By year’s end, she’d saddle nine more winners, and in 2021 finished third in the 2021 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile for Fillies to crack the top 100 in earnings.

Beginning in 2023, DeVaux trained her best horse pre-Golden Tempo. In 2022, Gretchen and Roy Jackson bought a filly for $240,000. The owners are among the most respected in the business, having endured one of horse racing’s most heartbreaking stories.

In 2006, their horse Barbaro won the Kentucky Derby but broke down two weeks later at the Preakness. After fighting valiantly to ward off injury, the horse was euthanized in 2007, his courageous battle forever remembered at Churchill Downs, where his statue stands outside of Gate 1.

Their filly, She Feels Pretty, won her maiden race by a neck but DeVaux noticed immediately that she exhibited what’s called cribbing – biting on an object or gulping air. It’s a sure sign of anxiety. DeVaux also realized that She Feels Pretty relaxed whenever DeVaux’s Jack Russells cavorted around the barn and liked to nuzzle whatever cat might find its way into her stall.

So, she conducted her own very unofficial study. DeVaux’s stepdaughter, Reagan, had a guinea pig and DeVaux brought it to the barn.

“The stress just melted off of her,” DeVaux says of her horse. “And I knew it. I had to get a goat. I really hate goats.”

In came Mickey. “He’s a butthead,” DeVaux says of the animal that, when he wasn’t soothing his sidekick, happily donned a helmet and played basher with exercise riders. “He is everything that is wrong with goats.”

Mickey became something of a social media influencer as he traveled the country with She Feels Pretty. It helped that he did his job well. In her 13 career starts, She Feels Pretty never failed to place outside the money, capturing victories at seven different racetracks and earning three Grade 1 stakes wins. In 2025, she earned Eclipse horse of the year honors for a female turf horse and only retired this year due to injury.

The horse’s success helped stoke DeVaux’s reputation as an up-and-comer and when people pointed to a female trainer who might break the barrier, plenty nodded at DeVaux. Her “horses command respect wherever they race,” the Harrisburg Patriot News wrote of her in 2025.

On the first Saturday of May, Roy Jackson watched from his suburban Philadelphia home as Golden Tempo won the Kentucky Derby. He heard the hoopla about DeVaux’s history-making victory and chuckled to himself.

“It was,” he said, “a little over the top. I know she doesn’t care for all of that.”

Asked if it mattered to him that she was a woman, the 89-year-old laughed out loud.

“No. Not at all,” he said. “The horse doesn’t know if she’s a man or a woman, does he?”

“This is exactly what I saw happening”

On the Thursday before the Derby, DeVaux wrestled with insomnia. She found herself caught somewhere between a dream and a little manifesting, imagining how the race might play out in Golden Tempo’s favor. Like She Feels Pretty needed Mickey, Golden Tempo had his own needs – his was time.

“A work in progress,” is how DeVaux describes the horse. Her jockey was a little blunter: Jose Ortiz called him “lazy.”

DeVaux meticulously strategizes each of her horses’ (she has 86 in her care) race plans, putting together their individualized puzzles based on their strengths and weaknesses. She believed Golden Tempo lacked maturity and would fare better with more race exposure.

As she plotted a path to the Derby, she intentionally picked the Louisiana Derby for his lead-in race. She thought the fact that it was a little longer (1 3/16 miles compared to the 1 ⅛ at Santa Anita and Florida) would suit his closer style and liked that there was a six-week gap before Kentucky, convinced he’d improve with more time to train.

Sure enough, Golden Tempo started to blossom in mid to late April and by that Thursday morning, she could actually see a scenario where her horse could win. By race day, DeVaux felt strongly enough about it that she went to visit partial owner Daisy Phipps Pulito in her box. Not one for bold predictions, DeVaux nonetheless told Phipps, “I think the horse can win.”

“She told me later, I almost made her throw up,” she added.

There is a sort of helplessness that comes with being a trainer on race day. Once the jockey is in the saddle, there is absolutely nothing to be done. No timeout to call. No play to draw up. An especially difficult reality for a woman like DeVaux, who prefers order.

“People were like, ‘Why weren’t you standing with your husband?” she says. “And I was like, ‘Well, I’m superstitious and being superstitious means controlling what I can control and part of that is where and how I watch the race.’”

The video of DeVaux watching the race, of her going from despondent to hopeful to overcome, has gone viral. She has watched both it and the race itself plenty of times in the last week. Part of her is still stunned that it happened and wishes there was a way to rewind the clock so she could feel that day all over again.

“There should be like a candle,” she says, “something that you can just experience it all over again.”

Yet part of her is not stunned.

“This is weird, but as I was falling asleep on Thursday, this is exactly what I saw happening,” she says. “The stretch run, that’s exactly how I imagined it playing out.”

As if she had a vision.

Or even a vision board.

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