LOUISVILLE, Ky. — For the third consecutive year, NBC brought its Emmy-nominated soccer studio show, “Premier League Live,” to Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Oaks and Kentucky Derby.
Host Rebecca Lowe, who also works on the Derby broadcast, said the “show is a little looser on the road,” and apparently that also applies off the air.
The Times interviewed Lowe and analysts Robbie Earle, Tim Howard and Robbie Mustoe on Friday afternoon at their set adjacent to the paddock, and their chemistry was never more apparent than when Lowe explained why she’s picking Chief Wallabee to win the Derby.
“It’s a really weird story,” she said, and she wasn’t kidding. She said she’d never shared it with her cohorts, and it was too long (and hysterical) to tell on TV, but as she narrated the tale over the next minute and a half, all four of them were doubled over with laughter.
Here’s how we all heard it:
“When I look down the list of horses, I find something that pops out from a name. I don’t look at form. And about 15 years ago I was driving home from Blackburn, which is in the middle of nowhere up north in England. I was driving home and I lived about five hours away in Devon, and it was midnight, and I was coming down the country lane.
“And I kid you not, what I thought was a kangaroo jumped across the road. When I got home, I told my husband, ‘I think I’ve seen a kangaroo,’ and he’s like, ‘It’s England.’
“Anyway, next morning I woke up, I was like, ‘I definitely did.’ I Googled it: Two wallabies had escaped from a local safari place. … So I’m going for Chief Wallabee because of that.”
As for the other three, Howard had mentioned earlier he also liked Chief Wallabee, but following Lowe’s tale, he said: “I can’t top that now, so I’m just gonna go for the 50-1 horse somewhere down there, because you never know.”
Mustoe said after studying the form of the horses last year and coming up empty, he was going with “Red No. 1” because he played for a “red” team (Middlesbrough) and the No. 1 horse wears a red saddle cloth. “I know the Derby favorite is Renegade, red No. 1. So I’m sticking with red No. 1,” he said.
Earle said he was picking The Puma because “I wore their boots back in the day.” (Unfortunately The Puma was scratched this morning.)
Lowe’s first Derby was 2019 but without the soccer show; the others had not been here until they came for work.
Howard: “It’s great. As Becc (Lowe) says, it’s amazing people-watching, all the horse racing fans or football fans, so we have an amazing time.”
Lowe: “I feel like, because Tim knows what this means in terms of America, and you always talk about Americana, as three British people, we have the Grand National, which is our equivalent, but it’s different. It’s still a bucket-list thing but it’s not as big.”
Earle: “I would say [Royal] Ascot kind of feels like … a nice comparison. This is grander, a little bit different than the Ascot thing. Ascot’s a little bit more chilled, and, you know …
Lowe interjected: “English.”
