Chunk of Gold trainer Ethan West is ultimate Kentucky Derby anomaly

USA Today

27-04-2025

Chunk of Gold trainer Ethan West is ultimate Kentucky Derby anomaly | Opinion
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Kentucky Derby 2025: Baffert's return, and Journalism is the horse to watch
Previewing the 151st Kentucky Derby, focusing on Journalism's chances and Bob Baffert's return.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — If you've stumbled upon the new Netflix documentary series 'Race for the Crown," which chronicles the lead-up to last year's Kentucky Derby all the way through the Triple Crown, you'd get the sense that horse racing is a sport of private jets, eccentric billionaires and corporatized trainers collecting dozens of high-priced 2-year olds hoping just one will be good enough to get in the starting gate on the first Saturday in May.
And that depiction is … not exactly wrong.
Especially these days, the reality is that oil sheikhs, massive racing partnerships and ultra-wealthy American moguls buy up so much of the top-end horse flesh and send them to such a small handful of high-profile trainers that the odds are stacked almost impossibly against someone like Ethan West.
Who is Ethan West? In more ways than one, he's the ultimate Derby anomaly – but also the kind of personality that gives the race its mystique as the greatest two minutes in sports.
Not only is West a relative unknown who races mostly at Turfway Park outside of Cincinnati and cheaper tracks in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, he's a mere 32 years old, has only had a trainer's license for seven years and is bringing a horse named Chunk of Gold to the Derby that was purchased for $2,500.
And here's the best part: He actually has a decent chance to win.
"It's a lot of hard work, even more luck," West told USA TODAY Sports after his horse drew the No. 19 post position. "It's unbelievable. I really don't have any other words to put into it."
One of the great things about the Derby is that even if Chunk of Gold were to take the roses on Saturday, he wouldn't be among the top handful of shocking winners in the 151-year history of the race.
That bar has been set impossibly high by the likes of Rich Strike coming home at 80-1 three years ago, Mine that Bird emerging from New Mexico to win at 50-1 in 2009 or Canonero II coming out of Venezuela as a laughingstock before blowing past everyone to win by daylight in 1971.
Coming off a pair of solid second-place finishes in the Louisiana Derby and Risen Star Stakes in New Orleans, the quickly-improving Chunk of Gold wouldn't be a total stunner.
But even Canonero II, who was famously sold to his Venezuelan owners as a yearling for $1,200, wasn't as humbly priced when you consider that he would have cost around $9,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars today.
When you consider the whole package – a relatively new trainer who has only won 168 career races at any level going up against multiple Hall of Famers and a $2,500 horse in the same starting gate as Derby favorite Journalism, who was purchased for $825,000 – that's where the true magic of the Kentucky Derby resides. Not in a hedge fund guy who dresses for the race track like he's headed to Studio 54 and has Ace of Spades bottles in his refrigerator to celebrate a seven-figure Thoroughbred purchase, as the Netflix show suggested by focusing on 2008 Derby-winning owner Michael Iavarone.
"People love our story," West said. "Young trainer, smaller owner. We've come a long way."
Even the way West got into horse racing is pretty unusual. Whereas a lot of the successful young trainers like Chad Brown or Brad Cox entered the sport by doing low-level work around prominent barns and learned the craft by working their way up the apprenticeship ladder, West didn't have an obvious path to a training career.
Introduced to the game by his grandparents, who owned a couple horses that ran at the Indiana tracks near where he grew up, it was actually his older brother Aaron who first pursued training as they both picked up odd jobs around the local track to make some money. Then after he graduated high school, the brothers leased a training center in Russell Springs, Kentucky, where they started a business that focused on raising and training younger horses.
"That grew, and one of us had to go back to the racetrack," West said. "That was me. I didn't have a family at the time so I did the racetrack traveling back and forth and then in 2018 I took a license out on my own and started my own (stable). It's unorthodox. Most kids have a foot into it, they have a dad in the business or a mentor they can follow under. We were just kind of winging it and now we both have our own productive businesses."
While working in Russell Springs, West of course had heard about Terry Stephens, arguably the town's most prominent resident and the owner of a steel manufacturing company that ranks among the country's biggest chain-link fence distributors.
West knew of Stephens but did not know him personally. It just so happened, though, that Stephens purchased a half-interest in the horse last year from Chris Melton, who also runs a Kentucky-based training center and had originally purchased him at a 2-year old auction for $2,500.
Originally slated to go to a trainer in Maryland, Stephens preferred that the horse run in Kentucky and his advisor recommended West based on a prior relationship. After Chunk of Gold impressively won his debut, Stephens – who owned a piece of 2021 Derby fourth-place finisher O Besos – bought out the rest of the horse for $100,000. The first time West met Stephens in person was in February before Chunk of Gold ran second in the Risen Star, putting him in contention for the Derby.
"We're so proud of the horse," West said. "He's brought us a long way. It's easy to say, 'Oh, we're going to get this horse to the Kentucky Derby, but now here we are. It's cool. I really don't know how to put it into words."
Now a father of three whose wife, Paige, is a racetrack photographer, West's life could change in significant ways over the coming weeks. Regardless of how Chunk of Gold performs on Saturday, just having this platform at the Derby will give him the kind of name recognition and credibility that could open doors into a level of horse racing that typically takes longer than seven years as a trainer to achieve.
"Whether you're training horses down there or up here, the horse still comes first," he said. "It's your responsibility to get them in the spot where they can compete whether they're a mediocre horse or a notch below or above, turf, dirt, that's our job to figure out. That's all the same. But with the media, the publicity, it's a whole new world."
And then, of course, there's the most important question: Can he win? That's what the connections for all 20 horses have to figure out this week, but West thinks Chunk of Gold has a case. Though he's won just once in four starts, he's taken forward steps in each race and shown the ability to overcome some adversity in each of his three second-place finishes. That portends well for a Derby where it's hard to avoid traffic trouble in a 20-horse field, and Chunk of Gold should be positioned somewhere in the middle of the pack early and give himself a chance coming around the final turn.
Is he good enough? Time will tell. But the mere fact that a $2,500 horse and a 32-year old trainer who's never won a Grade 1 stakes can compete for the sport's most coveted prize shows another side – and arguably a better side – of horse racing that you're not going to see on Netflix.