A Mobridge native trained the horse that won the 2025 Kentucky Derby.
It was the second Kentucky Derby victory for Bill Mott, 71, who started training horses when he was 15 and won the South Dakota Futurity before he graduated from high school.
His horse Sovereignty edged the favorite Journalism on Saturday, May 3 on a muddy track at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.
It all started at Park Jefferson in North Sioux City.
Bill Mott, trainer of Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignity, started training thoroughbreds at age 15 with his family and won the South Dakota Futurity at Park Jefferson with Kosmic Tour before he was out of high school. He was born in 1953 in Mobridge, S.D., and the family also lived in Sioux Falls.
When he was 14 years old, sitting in the front seat of his GMC pickup truck, listening to the radio call of Bobby Ussery ride Proud Clarion to a 30-to-1 upset in the Kentucky Derby.
It would be a nice, tidy story if Bill Mott could tell people now that when he started training horses, he would eventually do it for men who build airplanes and rule countries and that he’d get some who could bring him into the winner’s circle of the biggest race in the world.
But that wouldn’t be true. Because from his tiny town in South Dakota, just across the Missouri River from the state capital Pierre, even bringing a horse to Churchill Downs — much less running in the Derby — would have felt much too big.
“I never even imagined that I would ever be here,” he said. “It was just a dream that was too far away. And to be up here thinking back at that, it’s like going to outer space.”
But to blast off into the atmosphere, you need a rocket ship. And on Saturday, Sovereignty turned on the afterburners in the stretch of the 151st Derby, passing race favorite Journalism and bending Mott’s time-space continuum in more than one way.
Because even though it wasn’t the first Derby win for a trainer who has been among the best in the sport for four decades, it almost felt like it.
In 2019, the Mott trainee Country House was named the Derby winner when the Kentucky racing stewards disqualified Maximum Security for drifting out at the top of the stretch and interfering with two other horses.
Mott was, of course, happy to finally be a Derby winner. They lifted the trophy, got the garland of roses and celebrated into the night. But it was, admittedly, awkward if not downright bittersweet to get there that way.
