On this Kentucky Derby weekend, we look back more than three decades ago when Bluegrass State native Steve Cauthen collected record earnings in 1977 as a 17-year-old jockey and followed it up by winning the Triple Crown the next year astride Affirmed. Cauthen became an international sensation, featured in People as well as Sports Illustrated. But he couldn’t maintain jockey weight as he continued growing and moved to England to compete for a few years, as that country’s jockeys ride at a heavier weight.

Cauthen and Affirmed triumph in 1978 at Churchill Downs:

From a 1977 SI issue in which Cauthen was crowned Sportsman of the Year: “It is not enough to marvel that at the age of 17 he has accomplished more in a year than any jockey in history. It is not enough that already there exists the mad school of thought that this little boy is the finest rider of all time. These are incredible things to ponder about someone so young, but somehow, as young as he is—and younger-looking still—the immensity of his achievement in 1977 cannot be properly understood until you stand in his high school and see the open country faces of the other children of Walton and realize that Steve Cauthen should be there among them still. He should be a senior in high school this day, hearing the bells and whiffing the smell.

And he would be…but for the coincidence of his size and his family background, but for the depth of his desire and some amazing gift of God that no one can comprehend.

Instead, almost at this very moment, several hundred miles away, when a bell rings, Steve Cauthen will burst from the starting gate at Aqueduct, bound to his horse in consummate harmony, seamless, one with the creature—a prodigy like none we have ever seen before, the leading money rider of any year, a fearless athlete, a resolute little doll-person, Sportsman of the Year, so very tiny, so very young, so very extraordinary and ageless in his grace at this one thing he does that he always calls ‘race riding.'”