Lucrative Derby Ticket Found

Chris Hertzog figured all was lost, that he’d let $864,253.50 slip away.

The Phoenix firefighter gave up Saturday after two hours of sifting through the trash at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, frantically searching for his winning Kentucky Derby superfecta ticket.

“I couldn’t believe I lost this once-in-a-lifetime payday,” Hertzog, 39, said in a statement released through the track Monday.

According to Turf Paradise, the mutuel clerk who sold him the ticket found it Sunday next to the machine where Hertzog had bet the previous day.

“Don’t you just love happy endings?” Hertzog said.

Hertzog bought one of seven winning $1 tickets on the superfecta, which yielded the highest payout in Derby history. Two of the other winning tickets were sold in New Jersey, one each was sold at Philadelphia Park and Suffolk Downs and two others came through clearinghouses in Maine and Nevada, Churchill Downs spokesman John Asher said.

The tickets paid off when 50-1 shot Giacomo sprang the second-biggest upset in Derby history, edging 72-1 shot Closing Argument.

Afleet Alex, one of the favorites, with odds of 4.5-1, finished third. Another longshot, 30-1 Don’t Get Mad, was fourth.

Hertzog made 100 $1 bets, 50 superfectas and 50 trifectas, all in computer-generated quick picks. When he thought he’d lost after the Derby, he left the tickets on a table and walked off.

Later, according to Turf Paradise, a track official told mutuel clerk Brenda Reagan that her machine had spit out a superfecta winner. Track owner Jack Simms told Hertzog, but when he returned to the table, the tickets were gone.

Maintenance crews gathered all the garbage bags in the clubhouse, and Hertzog and others picked through them with no luck.

The next day, Reagan noticed two tickets next to her machine, according to track officials. One of them was Hertzog’s winner.

“When I punched Chris’ tickets, there were so many that they bunched up and these two must have fallen on the side,” she said.

After taxes, Hertzog will walk away with more than $604,000.