The fastest two minutes in sports led to the slowest almost 20 minutes of video review Saturday, but that created an unprecedented outcome. For the first time ever, the horse that looked like the winner of the race was disqualified following an objection, an inquiry and a video review. That was favorite Maximum Security, who crossed the line first but was later disqualified for interfering with another horse after an objection and a lengthy review.
That meant that second-place finisher Country House was moved up to first; that horse entered as a 65-to-1 long shot, becoming the second longest shot to win in Derby history (behind only Donerail at 91-to-1 in 1913). But before that disqualification was issued, CBS called the race for Maximum Security across both CBS News and CBS Sports. And that led to Google also declaring Maximum Security the winner, with CBS coming up at the top of their algorithm. A Google search result at 7:25 p.m. Eastern (after the decision was handed down) for “Kentucky Derby results” is screencapped below, with the CBS Sports result in question screencapped above (complete with their embedded CBS Sports HQ feed getting it right while their headline and URL were still wrong):
As of 7:40 p.m. Eastern, Google and CBS had both fixed their results. And they probably weren’t the only sites that made errors, as it wasn’t immediately apparent that the finish was being challenged. But it’s still interesting to see how this played out, and how a good part of the internet was briefly wrong.
