The temperatures hit the mid eighties, the banks of the Ohio river shimmer in the sun and the traffic which inches its way towards Churchill Downs does so with a sleepy resignation. This is ritual. Kentucky Derby Day. Nothing to be impatient about.

The day will find its own vibrancy in its own sweet time. By late afternoon the beer, the heat, the mint juleps and the thumpety thump of thoroughbred hooves on dirt track turns will have induced a judgment day sort of excitement.

The Kentucky Derby is a horse race at the centre of a romanesque orgy of consumption and excess. The day is long and wild. The gates open when the mists are still on the Kentucky grasses and the showpiece event, the race for the roses, doesn't take place till teatime.

It's a long time to fret and worry on Saturday while the rest of the world was getting soused and placing wilder and wilder bets at the busy windows. Some serious horse people were very anxious.

The Derby is a graveyard for favourites. Punters line up and bet sensible and end up looking like the sort of suckers who would have paid money to buy London Bridge. It's 21 years since a favourite took the jackpot. Nobody quite knows why this is so. The race is a mile and a quarter from start to finish and in theory the best horse should win most times.

There is a certain craziness in the Louisville air, though. The famous twin spires preside over the most extraordinary mix of mayhem and sport imaginable.

So for the $4 million Fusao Sekiguchi paid for Fusaichi Pegasus when he suffered an attack of love at first sight in 1998, he must have had some second thoughts and some sleepless nights. He bought the horse with the specific intent of winning the 126th Derby with it. Yet he knows that two minutes of madness like the Derby can bring more bad luck than a gypsy's curse.

The major question mark today is a behavioural tick which some diagnosed as a problem and others have seen as an asset. The horse is a little wild, a little unpredictable. On Thursday he reared up and threw his rider. At the Wood Memorial race he was all over the place before they could get him into the gate.

Character is destiny, though, and at Churchill Downs on Saturday he looked like an athlete whose moment had arrived. His handlers had spoken fondly of this quality in the horse beforehand, an imperiousness which reminds one of Carl Lewis in his pomp perhaps.

Jockey Kent Desormeaux looking to win his second derby in three years had no worries as he steered the favourite into the box.

There were other interesting sideshows to watch once the favourite settled down to his task. Marlon St Julien (a name to conjure with if you are daytime soap opera producer) was becoming the first black jockey to compete in the Derby since 1921.

In a country where the black athlete has earned predominance in almost every sport the snow-blinding whiteness of horseracing is an odd, vaguely inexplicable thing.

Back in the early days of the Derby black jockeys dominated the scene. Thirteen of the 15 starters in the first Derby were black and 15 of the first 28 winners were black jockeys.

These men were legends. Isaac Murphy won three Kentucky Derbys, including the first pair of back to back races. He won 44 per cent of all the races he competed in before dying of pneumonia in his mid thirties. Lonnie Clayton won a Derby on Azrahen he was just 15 in 1892, Three years later another 15-year-old James "Soup" Perkins (yeah he liked soup) won on Halma.

Eventually, though, the black presence petered out, white resentment grew keener and blacks moved northward away from traditional horse-breeding country. Still 79 years ago when Henry King loped home tenth on an 81 to 1 shot he could hardly have imagined that it would be the new millennium before another black rider raced for the roses.

Today, Marlon is on Curule a little fancied nag who got the call to race late in the day when another horse pulled out. Marlon St Julien has spent the week answering questions about what it's like to be a black jockey, as if African-American were anatomically different.

Yeah it's an old style world down here. Jenine Sahidi made the cover of USA Today this week, such a novelty is she. A woman trainer with a realistic chance of winning a Derby. Well boys, maybe there is life on Mars.

Jenine is used to bad attitudes. Every time she takes a step forward (she's the first woman to have won a Breeders' Cup race, the first to have won a million dollar event) some redneck with a beaten docket in his hand starts whispering that Jenine Sahadi is a front for somebody, her husband, her old boyfriend, her vet, her owner, her Daddy, somebody with the proper chromosomes for being around horses.

Take last month in the Santa Anita Derby, Bob Baffert a rival trainer, publicly asked if Sahidi really trained her own horses.

Sahidi got up and walked out. Then next day she won the race and the $1 million that went with it.

So the hacks queue up and ask girlie questions. Why doesn't she like seeing horses whipped, what will she be wearing, what does her husband think.

The beauty is that Sahadi not only knows what she's doing but she has a way with words which keeps the boys at bay.

"Training horses isn't rocket science. I'm sorry. You feed them. You take care of them. You make sure they are sound. You run them at the right time in the right spot. If they are good horses and you've done your job you'll win. That's all there is."

While half the crowd is distracted by the business of getting women to flash their breasts the Derby flashes past. Sadly, The Deputy struggles all the way. Maybe it was Ms America stopping by to pose for a picture with the horse. Maybe it's the fact that Jenine puts a little red wine into her horses feed. Anyway, lovelorn and tipsy, The Deputy is still out there running and the big break-through will have to wait for another year.

The race, though, lives up to expectation. The crowd is still for a couple of minutes as the flashing silks thunder past. The greatest two minutes in sport? Maybe.

For much of the journey it looked as if there would be a sentimental favourite as winner. Hal's Hope, trained by an 88-year-old and ridden by a 48-year-old led the field through the half mile mark.

This is a day for excellence, though, and with a third of the journey left Fusaichi Pegasus moves out from the pack stretches his legs and hits the front. He wins by a length and a half but gives the impression that he was merely being charitable to lesser athletes.

"My only concern was that I might have gotten pushed back, but he just reeled them in very, very easy," Desormeaux says later.

And that's how it looked to everyone. Fusaichi Pegasus looked to be toiling for a lot of the trip but when he found his gear he made the rest of the field look like dray-horses. He streaked it, winning in 2:01, the fourth fastest Derby win ever.

The win earned a $1 million pot for Fusao Sekiguchi, plus a bonus of $250,000 for doing the double of the Wood Memorial and the Kentucky Derby in the same year.

Eyes turn quickly towards the Triple Crown of American racing, the first leg of which was Kentucky and the second leg of which comes in the Preakness in two weeks' time. If Fusaichi Pegasus can take the Preakness and take the Belmont Stakes later in the summer Visa, the credit card people, are dangling a $5 million bonus.

Whatever happens, they won't sweat like they did through the long drum-rolling build up to Saturday's race. Kentucky is special and unique and this morning they can look at their $4 million worth of flying horse and reflect that if he could make it there, he can probably make it anywhere.