Photography by Megan Mumford

Cherie DeVaux doesn’t call Saratoga Springs her hometown. But that doesn’t preclude our community from claiming the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner as one of our own. 

DeVaux was indeed born in Saratoga, but her family moved away when she was a toddler. Even if she’s not a hometown hero strictly speaking, she does have deep ties to the area. Her family has horses on a farm just a couple of exits up the Northway from the track; she attended the University at Albany; her first job in horse racing came at Saratoga; and the late Chuck Simon, her friend and mentor, hails from the Spa City. So there was a pretty big cheering section when jockey José Ortiz piloted the DeVaux-trained Golden Tempo to another perfectly timed come-from-behind victory in the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga Race Course on June 6, making DeVaux, yes, the first female trainer to win two legs of the Triple Crown.

Now, DeVaux didn’t set out to be the first woman to do anything, and her road to Thoroughbred racing’s biggest stage wasn’t a straightaway. Her father trained harness horses; her brothers drove them. She and her sister Adrianne, who’s also now a Thoroughbred trainer, both grew up barrel racing. But a life at the racetrack was nothing that she’d ever considered. 

“Back then, I wasn’t a horse racing person,” she says. “I was a horse girl.”

When DeVaux’s family left Saratoga, they relocated to Monticello, NY, home of Monticello Raceway, before moving to Florida when she was 9. She attended Lemon Bay High School in Englewood, FL, and matriculated to Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) as a pre-med student with the goal of becoming a physical therapist.

“My formative years were spent on a beach,” she says. “Not shoveling snow.”

When her family moved back to New York, DeVaux lost her Florida residency status, and with it the in-state discount at FGCU. She enrolled at UAlbany at the same time that Chuck Simon, who’d worked for DeVaux’s father at Saratoga Raceway, began training Thoroughbreds.

While Simon was close with DeVaux’s family, she’d never met him herself. But one summer, needing a job, she started galloping horses in the morning at Saratoga’s flat track, and exercise rider Lorna Chavez, whom DeVaux calls “the mom of the racetrack,” hooked her up with Simon.

“She told me, ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ and she dropped me off at Chuck’s barn,” DeVaux recalls. “I didn’t tell him who I was until I had to give him information so he could pay me, and he asked why I never mentioned that I was Butch’s daughter. I told him that I wanted to get the job on my own merit—not because of my family connections.”

That independence is a hallmark of DeVaux’s approach to pretty much everything in life. Over her last few months in the spotlight, she’s frequently said that rather than setting goals, she strives to be the best at whatever she’s doing: Studying medicine. Exercise riding. Being an assistant trainer to Simon and later Chad Brown. Training horses.

But she might never have trained horses were it not for Simon. DeVaux has described herself as a wild child, an undisciplined partier who didn’t have any particular aspirations beyond being around horses. 

“My goal in life was to be a great exercise rider,” she said at Simon’s celebration of life in Saratoga last summer. “I quit going to school and I just wanted to party and ride horses.”

But Simon saw her talent and pushed her to grow up—to use the gift that she’d been given. DeVaux claims that he saved her life, maintaining that the party-girl lifestyle would not have ended well for her.

“What I didn’t realize then is that he saw that I needed guidance,” she said. “He challenged me, and I rose to it. It’s because of Chuck that I have the career I have.”

When DeVaux won the 2024 Breeders’ Cup Mile with More Than Looks, she paid tribute to Simon, who had passed away just weeks before, in an interview immediately after the race, as she has after her Derby and Belmont wins this year. He’s never far from her mind, and she’s working on establishing a scholarship fund in his memory at her old high school in Florida. 

“There was some relief when he passed, because I knew he wasn’t suffering anymore,” she said days before the Belmont Stakes in her office on the Oklahoma Training Track. “But I struggle so much when there are things I want to share with him. I want to talk to him about winning the Derby. No matter what you believe in, it doesn’t make you feel any better when you just want to talk to him.”

On the morning after the Belmont Stakes, DeVaux stood in the shedrow of her barn between Golden Tempo and Englishman, the horses that brought her two Grade 1 wins on Belmont Day. She brought each of them out of their stalls to stand behind the floral blankets that had been draped over them in the winner’s circle. Such appearances are common on the mornings after big races; it’s easier for trainers to meet all the media at one time than to field multiple requests all morning. 

There are multiple maxims in horse racing about the relationships between humans and horses. “They’re not pets,” goes one. “You can’t fall in love with them,” says another. The sport is, after all, a business, and a hefty measure of pragmatism is necessary; you can’t keep horses in the barn if they’re not fast, or if they don’t want to run, or if they can’t compete any longer—no matter how attached to them you get.

DeVaux runs her barn like a business; she has to, and she wants to. But anyone watching her on that Sunday saw something different from those usual morning-after media scrums. She rubbed the horses’ heads and necks; they nuzzled her, and she nuzzled them back. She dropped kisses on their noses, and she spoke gently and quietly to them. One seldom sees that level of affection from male trainers towards their equine charges.

But she doesn’t worry about being characterized as a “horse girl” or “emotional” about the animals in her care. That affection is as much a part of her training program as feed, training, and vet care.

“I’m like that with all of my horses,” she says. “Unless they’re mean, and then I still love them from a distance. We have a stable full of horses, and we give them all the same attention as we do to these two. We’re trying to do that with every horse. They don’t have to be a top horse. They can be a claiming horse, and we’re just trying to make them the best that they can be.”

DeVaux’s probably had enough with the “first woman to…” conversations and with all the media attention she’s received, especially in Saratoga. She’s eager to get back to something resembling a routine—to taking care of the 120 horses in her barns. Unfortunately, that probably won’t be as easy as she might like it to be: Not with Golden Tempo pointing to the Travers Stakes in late August. Not with TIME magazine naming her one of the 100 most influential people in sports. And not when the sport of horse racing finally has a prominent presence that the public can wholeheartedly embrace. In the dozens of interviews she’s done since winning the Kentucky Derby, DeVaux has proven to be thoughtful and candid. She speaks often about the responsibility of caring for horses when their racing careers are done, and she’s using her platform to promote and fundraise for aftercare. 

DeVaux didn’t plan to break barriers. She didn’t ask to be a role model. She just wanted to be the best at whatever she was doing—a strategy that’s worked out pretty well so far. Whether she likes it or not, DeVaux is the face of horseracing for the foreseeable future. And that’s the best thing to happen to the sport in a long, long time.