06/11/2026
BELIEVE🐎
Perhaps Golden Tempo and his team are exactly what this moment calls for.
He arrived on that first Saturday in May as an afterthought — one of twenty horses, easy to overlook, easy to forget. But neither he nor jockey José Ortiz had any interest in being forgotten. Together they unleashed something extraordinary in that final stretch, sweeping past rival after rival until nothing stood between them and a blanket of roses.
Up in the stands, trainer Cherie DeVaux was beside herself — shouting, celebrating, every inch the passionate believer she has always been. She made history that afternoon as the second woman to send out a Triple Crown winner, and the first to do so at Churchill Downs.
Down in the barn, José Hernandez — Golden Tempo's Guatemalan-born groom — could not hold back his tears. A quiet, devoted man, it is Hernandez whose patient hands and open heart have shaped something rare in this horse: the deep-seated confidence that comes from being truly cared for, day after day, without fanfare and without fail.
DeVaux then did something that caught many by surprise. She looked at the Preakness calendar, looked at her horse, and said no. Two weeks was not enough. She would aim instead for the Belmont. Some questioned her. Some second-guessed her. She never blinked. When you put the horse first, the noise fades quickly.
Last Saturday at Saratoga, a summer storm rolled through and left the air heavy and the track dark. When the gate opened, Golden Tempo was the last one out. For three-quarters of a mile, he ran with hoofbeats in his ears and dirt in his face, dead last, the entire field between him and glory.
Then Ortiz made his move — wide, deliberate, giving his horse room to breathe and run. They began to climb. Around the far turn, then into the stretch, they threaded through the competition with a kind of quiet authority. In the final seventy yards, the race simply ended. Golden Tempo drew clear as though the others had stopped.
Two Triple Crown races entered. Two won.
DeVaux celebrated like she had no intention of acting her age. Hernandez wept again. And Ortiz, as he had in May, wrapped his arms around the horse that keeps proving everyone wrong. When asked about the dramatic, all-the-way-back victory, he offered the simplest possible explanation: "He does what I ask him to do."
Five words. And in them, an entire story — the trust built by DeVaux's training, the bond cultivated by Hernandez's care, the communication forged between rider and horse over countless mornings.
This is a team without ego. A team that measures success only by what is best for the animal at the center of it all. And that animal repays them the only way he knows how — by digging in, by refusing to quit, by finding another gear when there shouldn't be one left.
In his stall, they say, he is as gentle as a summer evening — calm, affectionate, welcoming of every visitor. That peace is not accidental. It is the direct reflection of the world his people have built around him.
In 1973, when the country needed something to believe in, Secretariat answered the call. In 2026, perhaps Team Golden Tempo is filling that same quiet, necessary role.
The fit could not be more natural.
