SHELBYVILLE, Ind. (Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022) – Nokiddn and Cristian Reyes didn’t mess around. They led from gate to wire to win the $35,000 Caesars Empire Derby and to give former jockey Natasha Perez her first stakes win as a trainer. The race was part of the spectacular 2022 AQHA Challenge Championships at Horseshoe Indianapolis.
Starting from post one, Nokiddn was right on the mark for the start and was on the lead in the first stride. The three-year-old sorrel gelding kept his spot atop the field of nine throughout the 400-yard dash and crossed under the wire a half length ahead of the competition in a time of :20.396. Kenoma and James Flores finished second, just a neck ahead of Freighttrain King and Daniel Torres for third.
Nokiddn was one of the longshots of the field, paying $31.60 for the win. The son of Kiddy Up bred in Texas by Mark Rigby, DVM, earned his first career win since joining the Perez Stable earlier this year in Indiana. He is owned by Rodolfo Rodriguez and Raul Contreras, and it was the first time he’d hit the board in his fourth career start after only appearing one time as a two-year-old. Although she has won several stakes races over her career in Indiana as a jockey, the win with Nokiddn marked the first trip to the winner’s circle as a stakes winning trainer for Perez, who is the daughter of Indiana’s all-time leading female Quarter Horse jockey Julie Veltman.
“It’s amazing, it’s surreal and I feel like I need to pinch myself,” said Perez. “I couldn’t do any of this without my amazing team. The first time this horse ran, he was disqualified. Then the second time we ran him, he had an incident in the paddock and was scratched. We knew we had the horse to do this, so we went back to the drawing board. We were going for the big upset tonight. I thought if he could break well, he could win. I knew from the break he was going to win tonight. All he had to do was break.”
It was the first stakes win of the year for Reyes, who has been part of the jockey colony for several years at Horseshoe Indianapolis. Like Perez, who he works for in the mornings, he had confidence in Nokiddn.
“We prepared all week and he felt good the days leading up to today,” said Reyes. “I knew he had it in him and he got in the gate and felt secure. He came out like a rocket and just stayed on top. He stayed consistent to finish well and win.”
Photos by Coady Photography
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