Junior Alvarado, the jockey who rode Sovereignty to victory at the 2025 Kentucky Derby, was fined $62,000 on Friday after the Horse Integrity and Safety Authority ruled he had whipped his horse too many times.
The HISA found Alvarado to have struck Sovereignty eight times over the course of the two-minute race at Churchill Downs, two above the six-strike limit. The organization also suspended him for two Kentucky racing days on May 29 and 30. You can see the paperwork here.
Per Bloodhorse, the penalty for going 1-3 strikes above the limit is typically either $250 or 10% of the jockey’s portion of the purse. Alvarado’s cut of the Derby purse was $310,000, but his $31,000 fine was then doubled because this was his second fine in 180 days.
The fine was expected, as Alvarado told Bloodhorse. He didn’t sound too remorseful:
“I wasn’t galloping by 10 [lengths]. When the extra whip happened, I was right next to the favorite and I needed to do what I needed to do at the time,” Alvarado said. “After [watching a replay], I saw I went over, but I had no time to think about that [in the moment]. I just wanted to win the biggest race in America.”
The Kentucky Derby win was Alvarado’s first in six starts. He and Sovereignty began the race deep in the pack, but surged from the outside in the second half and beat out favorite Journalism in a two-horse finish.
Kentucky’s six-whip limit was instituted in 2020, in response to the wave of scrutiny inspired by the spate of horse deaths at the Santa Anita race track in 2019. Churchill Downs was known as one of the deadliest tracks in America at the time, with a rate of 2.73 deaths per 1,000 starts in 2018 that was second highest among 25 tracks with public reports. From 2016-18, its death rate was 50% higher than the national average.
For reference of the conditions before the whip limit, Triple Crown winner American Pharoah was estimated to have been whipped 29 to 33 times in the 2015 Kentucky Derby.
Despite the win in the first leg of the Triple Crown, Sovereignty’s trainer, Bill Mott, opted against running him in the Preakness Stakes next weekend, making the horse the second Derby champion in four years to be held out from the notoriously short two-week turnaround time.
The decision ensures there will be no Triple Crown winner for a seventh straight year. In fact, no horse has even won two of the races in a single year since Justify took all three in 2018.
