It was around 9 a.m. Friday morning, the day before the 148th Kentucky Derby, that trainer Eric Reed found out that RICH STRIKE, a colt he trains for Rick Dawson’s RED TR-Racing LLC, had drawn into the Derby field. Since the Derby and Churchill Downs allow 20 horses in the field for the 1 1/4 mile ‘run for the roses’, Rick Strike had been on the outside looking in for weeks. He had just 21 Derby points and was the 21st horse on the list last week. When D. Wayne Lukas scratched Ethereal Road on Friday morning, Rich Strike drew into the Derby field.
Reed, a winner of some 1,400 races as a trainer at tracks such as Beulah Park, Mountaineer, and Turfway Park, is a lifetime horseman. His father Herbert trained for over 40 years, apprenticing under the guidance of Mack Miller. Eric Reed, a trainer since 1983 who won his first stakes race in 1986, has trained some nice stakes horses during his career.
But in 2016 the worst happened. Some two dozen horses of Reeds died in a barn fire at his training centre in Lexington. He had to start over.