LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – If Larry Demeritte is searching for positive signs ahead of his first Kentucky Derby as a trainer, that is where his horse is assigned.

The longtime West Saratoga competitor resides in Barn 42 at Churchill Downs, the same location that housed Seattle Slew before he won the 1977 Derby and captured the Triple Crown. This was the first Derby during which Demeritte took part.

He is now the second black trainer since 1951 to saddle a horse in the one hundred and fiftieth Derby on Saturday. The second, Hank Allen, finished sixth in 1989 with the Northern Wolf team.

Black coaches dominated the Derby’s early years, winning seven of the first 17 between 1875 and 1891.

“We are so grateful to be here and enjoy every minute of it,” Demeritte said.

For the 74-year-old from the Bahamas, all the pieces has mattered since he was diagnosed with cancer in 1996 and underwent chemotherapy. His father was a coach in the islands, and Dermeritte still has the accent of his native country, where he was a number one coach for 2 years.

“My motto is: ‘I do not buy low cost horses. I purchase good horses cheaply,” he said with a smile.

Purchased for $11,000, West Saratoga is the pride of the 11-horse Demeritte stable at The Thoroughbred Center in nearby Lexington. The stallion earned $460,140.

“He’s getting better with every start,” he said. “I’ve been around a lot of good horses and this horse is really up there with a lot of them.”

The costliest horse in the 20-horse Derby is second-choice morning horse Sierra Leone, purchased for $2.3 million.

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This is owner Harry Veruchi’s first derby.

“I bought my first horse in 1982, and two weeks later he won at Centennial Race Track in Littleton, Colorado,” Veruchi said. “I believed: This is straightforward. Now, being here, who would have thought of it? I do not know anyone who has run in the Kentucky Derby, and even anyone who has won a graded stakes.

West Saratoga is known as after the street in Littleton where Veruchi grew up. It is positioned six blocks from the Centennial track, which closed in 1983.

The just one of their group with any Derby experience is jockey Jesus Castanon. In 2011 aboard Shackleford he finished fourth. They set the pace and led at the eighth pole, only to be overtaken by the eventual winner Animal Kingdom.

“I thought I was going to win it,” Castanon said. “I was going crazy in my mind.”

Demeritte has led horses in the Derby in recent times.

“I’ve been practicing,” he said, his smile revealing the gap in his front teeth. “I used to pray to get to the Derby. I feel blessed with this horse.”

Demeritte looks to the sky on Saturday, when the forecast calls for a 43% likelihood of rain. The gray stallion never ran on a wet track, but his father did.

Exaggerator finished second in the 2016 Derby and went on to win the Preakness and Haskell. Both races took place on uneven tracks.

“It’s really amazing how we managed to get this position on this horse,” Demeritte said. “I hope people see our history and take an interest in the sport because this horse proves that anyone with a dream can get on the Derby stage.”

“Love” singer Keyshia Cole is fed up with the drama surrounding her and rapper Hunxho, especially now that her ex-boyfriend, NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown, has entered the image.

If anyone needs to catch up, Cole has reportedly been dating 24-year-old rapper Hunxho for the past few weeks. The “Your Friends” rapper was previously linked to Memphis rapper Gloss Up, but Cole says she could have been Hunxho’s “sneaky link.”

Many people questioned whether the 42-year-old and Hunxho’s relationship was real, including Lil Scrappy, who suggested they were gimmick. And now it looks like Gloss Up is not taking them so seriously after she posted steamy photos of herself and Hunxho within the kitchen.

The photos are from her recent music video for the one “Come Here” featuring Hunxho and show the 2 of them holding one another, although Hunxho is holding her butt with his hands.

“You know how it is in real life,” he wrote Shine because the caption for her deleted post. “4L StinkaLink (heart-hands emoji).”

Many thought the caption was mocking since it suggested that Gloss Up had a romantic relationship with Hunxho. Cole apparently thought so too and responded on his Instagram stories. She allegedly deactivated her account after the video was deleted, but reactivated it after Gloss Up wrote a scathing caption.

“He is the “trick link.” When you’ve gotten a person you would like to marry, it is a terrible job.” he wrote Cabbage. “But I wish you all the best with your project, honey, I was really rooting for this movie to come out.”

“The way people want to see another person unhappy and miserable is forever crazy to me,” she added. “But I know how it is in Hollywood. But I know this Hollywood shit doesn’t make sense. I’m not surprised. But I only wish you love, prosperity, health and happiness for ALL.”

Gloss Up and Cole each have two children. But Gloss often talks about having more children and getting married to her boyfriend, whom she has yet to reveal on Instagram Live.

Things got complicated when Cole’s ex, Antonio Brown, shared his opinion on social media. The former Pittsburgh Steelers receiver wrote, “Keyshia Cole Come (purple devil emoji, heart and hand emoji).”

The exes were dating in 2022, but things took a turn when the NFL star told Cole via Instagram Live that he didn’t want her. The duo collaborated on her single “Don’t Leave,” and when the song was featured as a single from Brown’s debut album Paradigm, many assumed the 35-year-old had used Cole to launch his music career.

Phew! Antonio Brown shared some words with Keyshia Cole and his “haters.” Thinks? (📸: @GettyImages) pic.twitter.com/rEjCtIdrgR

— TheShadeRoom (@TheShadeRoom) May 17, 2022

“Yes, I stumbled a lot, I see it now. I’m 12 years old. Like this kind of disrespect for what,” Cole wrote on her Instagram Story in May 2022. “Nothing is worth this kind of disrespect, especially if you don’t deserve it. I had so much love, respect and admiration for you. I guess it wasn’t mutual either.

The Shade Room captured all the drama then and now, sharing Brown’s post with its Instagram followers on May 3.

The “Let It Go” singer responded in the comments that she was fed up with the mess during her performance at the “Lovers & Friends Festival,” which will take place on May 4 in Las Vegas.

“Oh my god… it was a fucking crappy day!!!! Damn, this is Hollywood shit.” he replied 42 years old. “I wish I had a damn song or album to sell. Tomorrow I will perform for lovers and friends.

Wanting to clear her name, Gloss dropped it she was from Hunxcho “yesterday” on May 2 in a video recorded from her Instagram Live by The Jasmine Brand. He claims he never mentioned he was dating Cole.

It’s unclear whether the “Trust & Believe” singer and Hunxho are still romantically involved with each other, but they don’t seem to be worried about it. Amid the drama, he divided himself screenshot taken from his and Cole’s FaceTime call.

“I literally hate y’all erase me y’all f***ing memory bank man why post this when you already know I hate posting with no eyelashes or anything,” she replied in the comments. “I’ll take off on your six-foot-two… when I see you.”

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That” verse by which he dissed fellow rappers Drake and J. Cole. In this text, I related Lamar’s desire to be the best, regardless of who it upsets, to Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant’s desire to be higher than his peers. Since then, Drake has released two diss records of his own:Push-ups“And”Taylor created freestyle” prompting Lamar to respond. So on Tuesday at 8:24 a.m. West Coast time, in an apparent tribute to Bryant, Lamar tweeted a link to a full-fledged, six-minute onslaught of insults aimed directly at Drake’s neck. Song, “Euphoria” and its sequel, “6:16 in Los Angeles”, which dropped early Friday morning, is now official: two of the best MCs of their class engage in a musical tug-of-war to see who will win. However, at the moment they’re holding their Big Jokers close to the vest in an attempt to control the narrative of winning the battle. With the release of “Euphoria,” we all know Lamar is prepared for a full-on, no-holds-barred smoking session and intends to cut deep. The battle has officially begun.

“Euphoria” is Aubrey Graham’s chaotic surgical dissection. It’s each funny – Kendrick talks about how much he likes Drake singing and desires him to keep doing it, which is funny – and venomous. Lamar consists of insult after insult. Some of them are as direct as possible: “.” Other insults take more time to decipher, corresponding to when Kendrick says, “”he isn’t talking about an engine, he actually means a machine that helps people drop pounds, alluding to rumors of cosmetic procedures Drake has undergone lately.

The challenge of defaming someone as culturally ubiquitous as Drake is that we have heard all of it before. He is certainly one of the most memed rappers in history. He has already managed to survive allegations from Pusha T that he’s an absent father and Meek Mill that he uses ghostwriters. Most recently Rick Ross Drake disgusted repeatedly calling him a “white boy” and clowning his private jet. So capturing a singular insult has all the time been a challenge. But Lamar takes all the low-hanging fruit and adds something to each of them.

For example, as an alternative of calling Drake a “white boy,” Lamar insinuates that Drake uses black culture – specifically black American culture – as a fancy dress to gain fame. “” he asks Drake regarding the song. When Lamar says his opponent doesn’t like women, it is not an attack on Drake’s sexuality. It’s about his history of insults and feuds with women. Beneath the surface of all of it are veiled threats that he’s willing to speak about Drake’s history of interactions with underage girls, which is questionable at best. Like the double meaning of the word “pacify” in the poem “.” Lasting over six minutes, “Euphoria” is overloaded with senses and lyrically dense.

Its follow-up, “6:16 in Los Angeles,” posted on Instagram, is a calmer and kinder open-heart surgery. The song is one more warning to Drake that he has disloyal friends in his circle, and Lamar has dirt on the Toronto rapper that he isn’t afraid to scoop up and unleash on the world. And he did all of it based on quite a lot of measures that may take several days to analyze.

On each songs, Lamar dips out and in of pockets and styles, using multi-syllable internal rhymes and metaphors to create a song that’s as arresting because it is multi-layered.

Honestly, these are songs that Drake has never been able to create.

This is just not a slight against Drake, who’s a terrific rapper in his own right and may make great music without the lyrical flexing that Lamar does. There are few artists in the world who can put words together like Lamar.

Drake definitely tried. After “Like That” dropped, inside 21 days Torontonians responded “Push-ups” but as an alternative of the knockout punch some were hoping for, it was light work. Drake had to answer Lamar, but he didn’t want to play his entire hand. So he decided to drop a second-grade insult about Lamar’s shoe size and height, which was fair and amusing enough, before talking about Lamar, who owes half of his publishing credits to his former label, Top Dawg Records. Drake followed this up with “Taylor created freestyle” which used AI versions of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg to discredit Lamar. The song was mostly a troll, a social media play intended to lure Lamar into responding. It appeared like Drake was simply testing out what had been required of him so far: he had to respond to Kendrick indirectly, especially after he embarrassed himself by withdrawing from the Pusha T feud without eventually returning. However, the consequence of his battle with Lamar will all the time rely on how aggressively the Compton, California MC approaches the battle and the way Drake could have to respond.

For now, there’s a battle occurring there, with the two megastars tweaking their narratives to persuade fans how they need to select the winner.

“Push Ups” takes place on Drake’s home turf, where he raps about publishing deals, topping the charts, and who has the most power in the industry. Wanting to keep the fight there is smart because his chart numbers are untouchable. So when Rick Ross claims he has more cash than Drake, it feels hole and unbelievable. Lamar knows this and doesn’t care about fighting for charts and money (“,” he raps on “Euphoria”). He said the same thing in “Like That” when he said “”, referring to the undeniable fact that artistic respect was more necessary to him than record sales.

My artistic preferences lean towards Lamar’s version of this beef. I do not care about rappers’ record deals or who has the most hits. I care about who will perform the most masterful takedown of their opponents. And these breakdowns have to be set to music. Drake won’t win with memes and jokes on social media. His destruction of Meek Mill was complete thanks to two great diss songs and a clever understanding of the Internet. These social media gadgets won’t cut it on this battle. This is about music. And now it’s Drake’s turn to show that he could make music that makes rap’s lyrical demigod bleed.

Even if Drake fails, he’ll try, showing him the best motivation to prove his doubters fallacious. So at the very least we’re getting recent music from two of rap’s biggest stars who’re determined to give it their all. When the dust settles, their careers will probably be superb. They will each be secure.

It’s us, the fans, who will profit from the same style of competition that rap is built on. For now we wait. because it is going to only recuperate.