Donna Brothers called her final Kentucky Derby on Saturday, ending a run that began when NBC took over the race in 2001 and turned the former jockey into one of its most recognizable voices at the track.
Brothers, who turned 60 on April 22, decided two years ago that 2025 would be her last year covering the Derby. She said she wanted to reach Kentucky Derby 151 for her 25th race at Churchill Downs, and that reaching Derby 152 at age 60 would feel like the right point to step away. NBC’s Mike Tirico called her irreplaceable and said she had defined a role in sports television.
That role was built over time. Brothers joined NBC in 2000 for Breeders’ Cup coverage and became part of its Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and broader Triple Crown coverage after NBC acquired the Derby rights the next year. NBC has carried the Preakness since 2001, and it held the Belmont Stakes from 2001 to 2005 and again from 2011 to 2022. Over the years, Brothers became the person viewers saw leaning into the chaos at the rail, ready with the first question when a race had just delivered a winner.
Her career before television helps explain why the interviews worked. Brothers retired from being a jockey in 1998 after winning 1,130 races over an 11-year career, and she never lost the feel for what a rider was carrying into the winner’s circle. She said she wanted to capture what was in a rider’s heart rather than what would come to mind 10 minutes later, and the interviews she remembers most were the ones that came with emotion still fresh. Among them was Calvin Borel’s 2007 Derby win aboard Street Sense, which she said remains one of her favorite interviews because Borel was so emotional after the race.
She also was near the second turn in 2008 when Eight Belles went down after finishing second in the Kentucky Derby. The filly broke both front ankles and was euthanized on the track, a moment that underscored the risk and fragility that sit beneath the pageantry of Derby day. Brothers’ place in NBC’s coverage has always been tied to that same balance — celebration when a horse and rider have just made history, and hard reality when the sport turns sharply the other way.
Brothers was there for some of the sport’s biggest modern moments. She was the first to interview Victor Espinoza aboard American Pharaoh after the 2015 Triple Crown win, and three years later she was the first to interview Mike Smith on Justify after another Triple Crown sweep. She described those conversations as the ones that stand out most, because they were heartfelt and happened at the exact moment the scale of the achievement was still sinking in.
Tirico said she created something that would outlast her own run. Somebody will follow her, he said, but nobody will replace her. For Brothers, the final walk away from the Derby was not abrupt. It was decided long before this weekend, after a career that moved from the saddle to the microphone and then to the center of NBC’s horse racing coverage for more than two decades.
