Churchill Downs paddock 050324

Fans look over the new $200 million paddock at Churchill Downs in Louisville on Kentucky Oaks Day, Friday, May 3, 2024.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — On the 1986 album “Lifes Rich Pageant,” REM sings of “our pre-assembled dream” in their great punk-roots song “Just a Touch.”

Churchill Downs seems like a pre-assembled dream.

That is, until you’re the woman who approached me through a swirling crowd of people on Thursday afternoon, while I was leaning against a wall posting a tweet outside the new $200 million paddock (my press credential hanging on a lanyard offers the illusion that I work here).

Yes, the paddock alone cost a fifth of a billion dollars to build.

“Can you tell me where I can watch the racing?”

It looks like an absurd question on paper, but it’s a measure of how big the Kentucky Derby and Churchill Downs have become.

They crammed 150,335 people into this joint last year, and you can expect a similar number on Saturday, whether the biggest name and face in the sport is here or not.

What remains of the pre-assembled dream is an event that will be run for the 150th time and the iconic twin spires on top of the clubhouse, while excess and extravagance have grown all around them, enough so that it can be a little disorienting for a newcomer to perform the simple act of watching the horses run.

The paddock reminds you of the Roman Colosseum, in miniature, except that nobody is throwing loaves of bread to appease the masses.

Not when some of them are paying $15,000 for a two-day Kentucky Oaks-Derby ticket to the Paddock Club. No, that’s going to take Woodford Reserve, not bread, and keep it coming.

The logistical challenge of just getting people onto the grounds speaks to how massive this event is.

If you’ve been to the Travers at Saratoga Race Course, perhaps you’ve paid 40 bucks to park on somebody’s lawn, then you just walk across the street to the track.

That seems insanely quaint compared to how they people-move during Derby Week.

Everybody — fans, track employees, press — waits in line to load onto a parade of buses from the Kentucky Exposition Center, a sprawling event space with 1.3 million in indoor square-footage alone.

There’s a ferris wheel. And a rollercoaster.

My friend Gene Kershner from the Buffalo News and I got on the wrong bus coming back from Churchill Downs on Thursday and had to walk around all the buildings to get to his car.

It took 18 minutes. I timed it. Fortunately, the temperature had dropped to 87 degrees by then.

The KEC is the site of the Kentucky State Fair and has hosted six NCAA men’s basketball Final Fours.

For Derby Week, it’s just a bus stop.

On the bus to the track on Thursday, I sat next to a guy who works as a runner in the Jockey Club, one of the many exclusive, high-end premium club rooms at Churchill. He makes sure the glasses and flatware are polished and well-stocked, and because the knives and forks have a special gold-plated finish, you don’t use the same cloth for those that you use for the bourbon tumblers and champagne flutes.

In no other sport is there such a vast spectrum of racing experiences, from the mundane at one end to spectacle at the other.

On Monday, I stopped on my way west to visit Finger Lakes Racetrack, where a few hundred people — it was opening day — amounted to a nice crowd in Farmington, New York. That made it even more of an eye-opener when I saw the new Churchill paddock for the first time three days later.

Yes, there’s a huge disparity between Joseph L. Bruno Stadium and Yankee Stadium, but nobody playing for the Tri-City ValleyCats can insert himself into the Yankees lineup by hitting a home run at the Joe and then paying an entry fee.

Everything is supersized at Churchill Downs and the Derby except for Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert these days. He continues to be banished by Churchill Downs Inc. for … well, I’m not even sure anymore.

The details have been well-documented: the Baffert-trained Medina Spirit won the 2021 Derby, Baffert’s record-breaking seventh victory in the Run for the Roses; the horse subsequently tested positive for too much of a regulated drug in his system; after two-plus years of legal fighting during which Baffert was barred from entering horses at any track owned by CDI, Medina Spirit’s disqualification was upheld in court.

CDI extended Baffert’s initial two-year ban to 2024, and it appears to be open-ended until he, I guess, bends the knee to the corporation and admits wrongdoing. Or something.

Point is, the Derby marches on as if the two-time Triple Crown winner doesn’t even exist.

Belmont Park is in the midst of its own mega-facelift, courtesy of a $455 million loan from New York State to the New York Racing Association to rebuild the home of the Belmont Stakes.

So as everyone knows by now, the Belmont Stakes will be held at Saratoga for the first time ever in June, and racing fans in the Capital Region will see the spectacle that is Saratoga amplified to unseen levels.

Who knows, maybe you’ll pay $50 or $100 to park on somebody’s lawn this time, but you’ll still know your way across Nelson Avenue.

Gesticulating with my hand and babbling about how to skirt the $200 million saddling ring on Thursday, then past the paddock bar and the Derby merchandise store through the mob, I tried to describe to the lost woman how to find one of the tunnels that could take her out to the apron in front of the grandstand, just a few feet away from the horses and Churchill’s dirt main track.

I hope she made it.

JUST A TOUCH

For what it’s worth, my Derby superfecta comes pre-assembled: Just a Touch, Sierra Leone, Fierceness and Stronghold.

A son of 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify, who has proven to be a very successful sire through his initial crops of progeny, Just a Touch is coming off a second to Sierra Leone in the Blue Grass in which Just a Touch gamely dug in but couldn’t quite hold off Sierra Leone’s late charge.

Just a Touch is lightly raced, but appears to have tremendous potential, and hasn’t run a bad one yet. He’s a horse on the rise.

I don’t think you can leave Sierra Leone or Fierceness out of the superfecta because they’re just that good, and I’m hoping Stronghold gets overlooked in the betting as the only West Coast-based horse in the field of 20. He’s been holding his own against the Baffert Brigade out there.

You have your dreams; I have mine.

Contact Mike MacAdam at mikemac@dailygazette.com. Follow on X @Mike_MacAdam.