LOUISVILLE — As an orange sunset streaked the bottom of a cloudless sky at the end of a perfect and perfectly surreal Kentucky Derby Saturday, Sylvester Watkins waited for Bob Baffert.
The thoroughbred trainer had just won his record-tying sixth Derby with Authentic, maybe the fifth-best 3-year-old in Baffert’s loaded barn in the spring. Baffert went through hell between the first Saturday in May — when the Derby always is held in non-pandemic times — and its rescheduled running on the first Saturday in September. He ran the gamut of racing melodrama: big wins, brutal defeats, devastating injuries and a drug suspension.