America at Large/George Kimball: Shortly after noon on Monday, less than 48 hours after he had ridden Smarty Jones to victory in the 130th Kentucky Derby, Stewart Elliott was back in the irons again at Philadelphia Park.

It is a tribute to the jockey's expertise that his mount, named The Fat Man, managed fourth in the $4,000 claiming race.

A day earlier Smarty Jones' trainer, John Servis, had stood in the rain outside a barn in Louisville and reflected on what Saturday's success might mean for his rider's future.

"If there's a dark side to this whole story, it's that Stew might not be in Philadelphia Park any more, and I'm going to have to look for somebody else to ride all my other horses," said the trainer. "Now that people have seen just how good he is, I'm sure his phone is going to be ringing off the hook."

On Saturday afternoon the 39-year-old Elliott had earned a personal payday 24 times larger than any purse he had made in 23 years of racing, but when Monday dawned he reported for work in Philadelphia as usual.

"Hey," he shrugged. "I'd made a commitment. I had obligations."

That Smarty Jones outran 17 other three-year-olds to win American racing's oldest and most coveted prize wasn't a total surprise - at least not to the punters who had bet him down to a 4 to 1 favourite at Churchill Downs - but it did cap a remarkable success story.

Servis has saddled the horse for each of the seven wins in his thus-far-unbeaten career only because Smarty's original trainer, Bobby Camac, had been murdered. Smarty himself incurred near-fatal injuries when he attempted a jailbreak the first time he was schooled in a starting gate. And Elliott had similarly been left for dead when he abandoned a seemingly moribund riding career in Boston two decades ago.

Camac and his wife were shot to death by Wade Russell, Mrs Camac's son by a previous marriage, in a dispute over money in December of 2001. Owners Roy and Patricia Chapman were so disillusioned they sold off most of their horses. The few they did keep, including Smarty Jones, were entrusted to Servis, the trainer who had been closest to Camac.

Six months later, as he stood there staring down at Smarty Jones's motionless form, Servis found himself rehearsing ways to explain to the Chapmans that his exercise boy had just killed their horse.

"I was not anxious to make that call, I know that," he recalled a few days before the Derby.

"All of a sudden he reared up without warning," Pete Van Trump, the exercise rider, recalled last week. "He went straight up in the air and slammed his head up against the iron bar on the top of the gate. He went down like he'd been shot, and collapsed in a heap."

Remember the scene in Blazing Saddles where Alex Karras knocks out a horse with one punch? By all accounts, Smarty Jones versus the starting gate in Philadelphia looked a lot like that.

"My God," Servis remembered his reaction once he raced over from the barn, "this horse has gone and killed himself."

"He was out cold for more than a minute," recalled Van Trump. "We had to help him get to his feet just so I could back him out of the stall."

Blood was pouring from the horse's nose. The side of his face was swollen beyond recognition.

Smarty Jones was diagnosed with a fractured skull, a broken orbit bone, and several other broken facial bones. Had he been a boxer he might have been suspended for life, but he spent the summer recuperating and was back on the track by November, won his first race that month and two weeks later won the Pennsylvania Nursery Stakes by 15 lengths.

In January, Smarty won the Count Fleet at Aqueduct by five lengths, and then shipped to Oaklawn Park, where he won three more races.

Two decades ago Elliott's future wasn't much brighter than Smarty's that day last summer. He'd walked into his mother's barn at Suffolk Downs and announced, "I quit." He travelled aimlessly about the country for a time, but eventually wound up back in Boston.

"I just galloped horses," said Elliott. "That's all I know, you know. I was young. I'd done this since I was a kid of 16. I'd quit school because I wanted to be a jockey. When I started fighting my weight I was battling it. I knew I wanted to be a jockey, but it got to the point where I was miserable every day because I couldn't control it. Once I started getting older my body wanted to grow, and I struggled with it.

"I didn't want that. I didn't want the fight, but what do I do? I don't know nothing else. This is it for me. I'd given up education and everything to do this. Then, after taking some time off, I guess I just dedicated myself more. I knew I wanted it back. I tried to work harder and discipline myself. It seems to have worked out."

As Philadelphia Park's leading rider over the past three years, Elliott was a natural for the mount once Smarty Jones recovered from his training accident, but as Smarty outgrew his surroundings and moved around the country in search of big-stakes races, there was speculation he might have outgrown his jockey as well.

There was increasing pressure on Servis to replace Elliott with a more experienced "name" rider, but the trainer stuck to his guns.

"You don't get 3,000 wins making a lot of mistakes," the trainer pointed out before the Derby.

Between his end of the $5-million bonus Smarty won for winning two races at Oaklawn and the Kentucky Derby, along with his piece of the winner's share, the jockey made $595,480 in a single afternoon.

"I'm just grateful to Mr and Mrs Chapman and John Servis for sticking with me and giving me this chance," said Elliott after the race. "I mean, they could have rode anybody in the world, but they gave me a chance to prove myself."