Chuck CulpepperMultiple AuthorsMay 3, 2026, 12:00 AM ET
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Something screwy happened lately with the vital signs of an 88-year-old man. He had just spent four months in hospital rooms and rehab floors in quiet agony and ostensible decline. All of a sudden, the blood pressure monitor, so huffy for so long as Bob Weihe’s pressure kept nosediving enough to thwart rehab efforts (and pretty much all else), chimed in with a fresh reading. It declared an impossible, impeccable 120/80.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Bob Weihe says. “I was out of it completely. Once I knew what was going on, I thought, well, now I can convince myself that I could get better. I convinced myself [in February] that I could go to the Derby. They said I had to eat to go to the Derby. So I tried to eat, and I couldn’t. None of the food tasted good. It all tasted horrible.” He thought, “I don’t know what will work.”
Come Saturday morning, Barbara says, “At first he was a little groggy and then when he really woke up, I asked him if he is ready to go to the Derby and he said, ‘Yeah!'” — as if Barbara didn’t even have to ask.
The biggest race churns the guts like always, and the board wound up at 19-1-22, the very numbers Bob had chosen because of the three jockeys (if not in the same order). On those recommendations in trifecta boxes, a family member has won around $56,000, the advice-seeking cop maybe $112,000.
She aims to take his blood pressure at one point, but the monitor has gone on the fritz, whereupon the guy who has been to 80 consecutive Kentucky Derbys says it didn’t matter. In that labored voice he says, “I’m still alive,” and, somewhere in there around that heart and that determination, maybe as alive as he had ever been.
What follows sends the family into a state of happy disbelief. The streak lives again. Hospice arrives and dresses Bob, including his new hat with the ribbon reading “Derby Bob’s 80th.” There comes a van in mid-afternoon but also — whoa — a police escort. The streak lives again. CBS arrives. A Churchill Downs ambassador, Gregg Cobb, arrives. Becky, grandchildren, significant others and great-grandchildren give a send-off. Bob who, like almost all Derby regulars, seldom picks a winner, gives his choices to a cop who sought counsel: 1-19-22. The van platform raises him aboard in the wheelchair. The streak lives again. At around 4:15 p.m., with almost all of the 150,000 attendees long since inside Churchill Downs, a convoy commences with two trooper cars in front, the tan van, a CBS car and one last trooper car. The van carries Bob, Barbara, Mark, Scott and eternal family friend Bill Tharp from across the street in childhood, a retired physical therapist who could help with any emergency. The short ride proves long on exhilaration. Bob marvels. “He said he couldn’t believe he got a police escort,” Mark says. Tharp says he noticed Bob, never a cryer, crying.
A fence opens and the group enters, with Tharp steering Bob as the streak lives again. An elevator ride leads to a swell clubhouse overlooking the stretch. The Derby card has reached its 10th race (with the Derby coming 12th), and as Bob watches the stretch run of that, his head pivots to follow the ending and he looks not completely unlike a kid in 1947 crawling through knees and ankles. He sips some water. He looks at a program Barbara put in front of him. “It feels wonderful,” he says at one point.
They take Bob back to meet the Churchill Downs president. They take him to betting window (for that 1-19-22). The sky has gotten plenty blue with harmless clouds. The planes, mostly UPS, took off from nearby. People drink. “He is smiling a lot,” Scott says, “He’s very alert, very alert. He knows where he’s at and he’s glad he’s here . . . He was determined, so we were determined. He was a bigger believer than we were.” He goes off the oxygen all through the hours, with Tharp keeping it nearby just in case while checking Bob’s oxygen saturation level, which come in at a robust 98.
By May 1, Bob spoke in the strained voice he struggles to summon, in the hospital bed that sits on one side of the family room in the house in which he grew up, the house he and Barbara have shared since 1975 (on his second turn in it), a house maybe six miles from Churchill Downs. It’s a house a few doors down from where daughter Becky lives, and it’s where Bob and Barbara and sons Mark and Scott watched the Kentucky Oaks on Derby eve, Bob’s eyes intent on the screen during a postrace interview with winning jockey Jose Ortiz. It’s a house rich in scrapbooks and memorabilia gathered by a man so ardent to collect autographs from Derby — winning jockeys and trainers on Derby programs that sometimes, on road trips, such as while Bob coached St. Francis of Assisi High football for 24 years, he and Barbara might stop and knock on a jockey’s door.
“He tried,” Barbara says. “He didn’t quite get it down.”