Curlin the Derby favorite, but far from a sure thing

	Curlin has three career wins to his credit, but does he have the experience to win the Derby afternoon at Churchill Downs? AP
	RELATED • GORANT: No place like Churchill Downs • VIDEO: What makes the Derby so special?

In the most predictable of scenarios, the Kentucky Derby is a vast riddle. Young athletes (horses) are being asked to run further than they have run in their brief, competitive lives and, in truth, further than most of them will ever be asked to run again. Likewise, they are facing 19 opponents for the first and almost surely the only time. They are running in front of more than 150,000 obstreperous spectators for the first and -- repeat after me -- only time.

Tell me of another sporting event in the world in which the competitors are on similarly unfamiliar footing. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Let me help, because I've thought about this.

The Super Bowl? OK, it's a vastly different environment from any other football game, but it's still a football game.

The Olympic Games? Closer. Like the Derby, the Olympic Games impose once-in-lifetime pressures on humans (like Derby trainers), but like the Super Bowl, the game is the same; a 100-meter sprint is still a 100-meter sprint and a downhill ski race is still a downhill ski race.

The U.S. Open golf tournament. Closer still. More pressurized than almost any other tournament (along with the other Majors and the Ryder Cup), and also contested on a course tricked-up to the point where the game is almost different from that which is played during the rest of the endless golf season. Almost.

(And if you want to be particular, here, the Kentucky Derby is, after all, horses running in circles, turning left, just like every other horse race. But that's where the resemblance ends).

This bizarre (and vaguely unfair, when you think about it) Derby reality is why it's impossible to predict what will transpire in the race with any confidence whatsoever, or why, when I asked an esteemed, turf-writer friend of mine the other day over lunch, who was going to win the race, he said, without hesitation: "I have no idea. None."

It's why a series of Derby trainers, when asked this week to handicap the race, have offered variations on the phrase, Well, there are about six or seven (or eight or nine) really good racehorses out there and any one of them can win the race. (Trainers made the same kinds of comments two years ago when Giacomo won the race and you can be damned sure that Giacomo wasn't one of the six or seven or eight really good racehorses they had identified.

Intriguing questions

There are always far more questions than answers about the Derby. Here are just a few of this year's:

• Is undefeated Curlin, who has won his three lifetime starts by a combined 28 lengths (and earned favorite's status for the Derby by trouncing the Arkansas Derby field by 10 1/2), a super horse or just a comet with far too little experience? In other words, is he LeBron James or Gerald Green? If you've read this far, you probably already know that no horse that did not race as a two-year-old has won the Derby since Apollo in 1882, when horses ran with leather helmets and played with little tiny fielder's gloves.

Curlin's trainer, Steve Asmussen, says, "I've had horses that were more experienced than Curlin but they didn't win the Derby because they weren't fast enough. Curlin is fast."

(Curlin reminds me of 2005's Bellamy Road, who was so brilliant in his last prep but so unprepared for the fistfight of the Derby; yet sometimes greatness overcomes all. We just don't know).