A Man and a Horse

Sometimes in horse racing, you win something above and beyond a trophy or money that is far more enduring and valuable. For Jerry Dixon Jr., it’s taken a year to realize the most important thing he took from one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

As the groom of 2022 Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike, Dixon was a key member of the team behind the 80-1 long shot. He did all the routine things a groom does: bathing, applying leg wraps, walking the horse around the shedrow and to the racetrack for workouts.

But Rich Strike and the Derby were different. In the two weeks before the big race, when Rich Strike was stabled at Churchill Downs, he was Dixon’s sole responsibility rather than one of several horses that Dixon groomed. Dixon didn’t let the horse out of his sight. Every step Rich Strike took when not on the racetrack was with Dixon on the end of a shank.

In those two weeks, there were touching—even comical—moments and times of sheer terror for Dixon.

He and Rich Strike power-napped together after morning workouts. Whoever would lie down first signaled nap time for the other. The one constant was who woke who up first: Rich Strike would stand up, go to his feed bag or water bucket, and drop straw or water on Dixon’s head. The horse wanted Dixon’s company, and it was Dixon’s job to provide it.

The dropped straw or water to awaken Dixon, not to mention the fact that they napped together—Dixon just outside Rich Strike’s stall with his head actually in it—indicates how close they became. It happens only with good grooms such as Dixon and a willing horse.

But their relationship didn’t start that way.

•   •   •

For Dixon—32 years old, a 14-year veteran of the racetrack, and the fourth generation of Dixon horsemen—Rich Strike was his first encounter with what racetrackers call “the big horse”—the gifted runner with the potential to win important races and big purses. All Derby starters are 3-year-olds, equivalent in human terms to teenagers physically. Famed Thoroughbred trainer Charlie Whittingham once said of racehorses—particularly young ones—“They’re like strawberries. They can spoil overnight.”

They also can mature mentally and change physically, seemingly overnight, to become champions.

While physical maturity may have arrived at just the right moment for Rich Strike, anyone who has parented a teenager will tell you behavioral and physical maturity do not usually coincide. This accounted for a relationship between Dixon and Rich Strike that got off to a somewhat rocky start.

“We didn’t get along at first,” Dixon recounted. “He was very antsy and pushy. He wouldn’t stand still to let me put wraps on him. I had to take a step back and try to understand that he was still a young horse, a colt.”

As late as the two weeks before the Derby, while Rich Strike was stabled at Turfway Park in Florence, Dixon still was learning about the horse he had been around since just before Christmas. Dixon’s father, Jerry Sr., an experienced horseman, was brought in by Rich Strike’s trainer, Eric Reed, to mentor his son and, more than anything, to be a calming influence.

“I was so nervous,” the younger Dixon recalled. “ ‘Is there anything I can do to the horse that I could mess up?’ ‘Did I put the wraps on too tight?’ ” Those questions and many more coursed through his mind daily.

“My dad told me more than once, ‘Stop stressing out. Stop worrying. You know what you’re doing. Just keep believing in yourself.’

“ ‘You’ve got this.’ ”

It was a process, with moments fraught with peril, such as the time Rich Strike was inspected by a state veterinarian—standard protocol for Derby starters. When the vet asked Dixon to have the horse jog a short distance, the reaction was classic Rich Strike: He reared up on his hind legs, wanting, as Dixon euphemized, to “put his two front hooves in my pockets.”

A rearing horse can fall backward or awkwardly in another direction, causing injury. But the horse safely came down to four-point contact with Mother Earth.

Dixon’s favorite Derby memory, even over the actual race, was something out of the ordinary on the big day after Rich Strike’s morning bath, when the horse was back in his stall. “He was quiet, really quiet for most of the morning, and it was odd,” Dixon recalled. “It didn’t really seem that he knew that he was ‘in’ [a race] until after he got his bath.

“He got with Dad, and [Dad] walked him for a few rounds in the shedrow, let him settle in, and then put him back in the stall. Everything was quiet for like five seconds, and all of a sudden, he let out a sound like a roar, and he charged the webbing [a plastic barrier in a stall doorway]. I saw his chest swell.”

That moment dispelled all concerns about the horse’s unusual behavior earlier in the day and perhaps sent a message to Dixon and the Rich Strike team: “I’m ready to run; I know what today is.”

It also may have been Rich Strike saying, “I got this.”

•  •   •

Indications both tangible and portentous followed. As soon as Rich Strike walked onto the track near the backstretch, the Eminem song “Lose Yourself” came on over the loudspeakers, Dixon recalled. As he led Rich Strike around the track on the way to the paddock for saddling, he could feel and sense the horse seeming to gather strength.

The race might attest to that: The horse broke from the farthest outside gate position and trailed the 20-horse field before accelerating into the far turn. Before him, though, was what looked to be an impenetrable wall of horses.

Jockey Sonny Leon guided him into the thick of it, and then something happened akin to the Red Sea parting. Space opened on the inside rail as the horses neared the final turn and the top of the homestretch. Rich Strike quickly filled the space on the rail, finding clear running room. He may have won the race at that moment. He sped down the rail, adroitly ducking away from the rail to pass a tiring horse halfway down the stretch. He then returned to the rail and bolted past two tiring favorites to win.

Dixon is convinced the horse chose the path in and around horses as much as Leon to win the Derby. “That split second of Sonny making the right move at the right time with Rich Strike? I think that was ‘Richie,’ ” he said.

Dixon, who is deeply spiritual, believes there was another entity directing Rich Strike’s path. “It was God,” he said.

In the crush of people on the track before Rich Strike came back to the winner’s circle, Dixon was running around a mob of people in the center of the track finding no other words than: “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

He had been part of something that three previous generations of Dixons on the racetrack had not experienced. Someone in the days after the Derby found a book with photos of old horsemen that included his great-grandfather, John L. Dixon, on the backside of Churchill Downs. “I was blown away,” he said. “I got to live out the dream that I’m sure he wanted.”

Of course, his time with his father made this Derby even more special.  

“We talked, and we cried. He told me how proud of me he was. I told him how happy I was that he was there,” he said.

After the race, Dixon left Louisville for work, splitting time at Reed’s Mercury Equine Center in Lexington and Belterra Park in Cincinnati, where Reed stables some horses.

Several days after the Derby, he visited Rich Strike, who had been vanned to Mercury.

“I cried the first moment I saw him,” Dixon recalled. “He dropped his head and waited on me to walk up and rub on him.”

The “antsy, pushy” young colt who refused tethering to the back wall of his stall for grooming had mellowed. Possibly, he had harnessed youthful exuberance long enough to unleash a memorable run from last to first in Thoroughbred racing’s biggest event.

Reed opted not to run Rich Strike in the Preakness Stakes, the second jewel of the Triple Crown, and Rich Strike returned to the track in the third jewel, the Belmont Stakes, where he finished sixth. He closed out the year with a respectable fourth in the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland and a sixth-place finish in the Churchill Downs Stakes.

Rich Strike continues to run in big-money races this year rather than head to the breeding shed.

In the weeks following the Derby, Dixon left the Reed stable for a position at Belterra that would keep him close to home and to his wife and daughter. Today, he is barn foreman for trainer Matt Sims, who stables horses at Turfway Park. Dixon aspires to be a trainer.

“I’ve been to the Derby. I’ve won the Derby,” he said confidently. “There’s no doubt in my mind that, with any horse I’m taking care of, I can win any race now. It’s given me more confidence. I feel like I can always be successful. I don’t doubt myself anymore.”