ABR's Derby campaign tops 150 million views, Cherie DeVaux clip goes viral

America’s Best Racing turned the 2026 Kentucky Derby into a digital freight train. From March 1 through Derby Day on May 2, the campaign piled up more than 150 million video views across Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and YouTube, nearly double last year’s 76 million and a sign that racing’s biggest week can still break through when the story is strong enough.

The biggest jolt came from one raw, unmistakable reaction: Cherie DeVaux’s response to Golden Tempo’s Derby win. That clip, built around the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner, became the campaign’s centerpiece and the piece people actually wanted to pass around. ABR said the reel reached 21.3 million Instagram accounts, produced 2.75 million interactions and 421,000 shares, and drew 98.6% of its audience from non-followers. Nearly 32 million Instagram views for a horse-racing clip is not a niche number. It is crossover traffic, the kind of reach the sport usually only gets when a major race produces a true human moment.

The result mattered because the race itself already had a built-in hook. Golden Tempo won the 152nd Kentucky Derby in 2:02.27 at 23-1, with Jose Ortiz aboard, before a crowd of more than 100,000 at Churchill Downs in Louisville. DeVaux’s victory made her the first woman to train a Derby winner and only the second female trainer to win any Triple Crown race, after Jena Antonucci’s 2023 Belmont Stakes. That combination of history, price and emotion is exactly why the clip escaped racing’s normal audience and landed on national platforms including NBC, CNN and Fox News.

ABR did not lean on one viral moment alone. It also launched Unbridled: Chasing the Kentucky Derby on April 2, a made-for-social vertical docuseries built around 60- to 90-second unscripted episodes. The project ran nearly 70 installments and generated about 16 million views across the prep season, giving the Derby a steady stream of bite-size storytelling instead of a single burst of promotion. Total engagement for the full campaign topped 10.7 million, while impressions reached 104 million.

That is the real takeaway for racing. The sport does not grow by posting race-day announcements and hoping insiders click. It grows when it wraps a historic result, a recognizable face like Cherie DeVaux, and a format built for mobile attention into one package. ABR just showed that Derby week can still be the sport’s best recruiting tool when it is covered like a live event, not a static bulletin.