This Saturday, after a one-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Kentucky Derby will be held on its traditional date. Tens of thousands of rowdy fans will once again gather under the famed twin spires of Churchill Downs in Louisville to celebrate the first Saturday in May and the rough-and-tumble 1 1/4-mile race that is synonymous with it. But don’t call it “normal.” Almost normal, maybe. The country is still caught up in a deadly pandemic despite the widespread availability of vaccines. Social-distancing and masking protocols remain in place for nearly all businesses, along with caps on the number of people who can gather in one place at one time. Churchill Downs is no exception. Although the track expects a raucous crowd Friday, the day of the Kentucky Oaks, and on Derby Day, when the world will be watching a field of 20 3-year-olds circle the Churchill oval, there will be plenty of empty seats throughout the sprawling facility, which in the past two decades has been renovated extensively to maximize attendance and the amount of money flowing into Churchill’s coffers. Tables on Millionaire’s Row, which is normally packed shoulder-to-shoulder with A-, B-, and C-list celebrities and those rich enough to mingle with them, have been spaced farther apart. The capacity of the Mansion, Churchill’s most luxurious and exclusive area, has been cut roughly in half. The box seats lining the ground floor of the grandstand will be filled on a checkerboard pattern, with half empty. No general admission tickets will be sold for the frontside. The infield is being limited to roughly a third of its usual capacity. Mike Ziegler, senior vice president and general manager of Churchill Downs, said last week that “the vast majority of the tickets for the premium areas” for this year’s Derby have already been sold, with the exception of some temporary open-air seating areas on the outside of the first turn and a tiered box-seat grandstand in the infield at the sixteenth pole. Marketing tickets to the Derby this year was not difficult, Ziegler said, despite the many restrictions that will limit the ability of the crowd to mingle freely and socialize with strangers – in other words, the many restrictions that will make this year’s Derby experience something far less than the typical Derby experience. “A lot of those people come year after year, so it’s a ton of repeat business,” Ziegler said. “And there are a lot of people looking forward to this Derby just because no one could come last year. So it’s a way to enjoy the race almost the way they are used to.” All of the tickets sold on the frontside this year come with all food and drink included, delivered right to the seats, in order to limit the number of transactions that will take place and to reduce crowding in concession areas. Customers will be urged to use Churchill’s betting app to make their wagers, rather than standing in line in mutuel bays, where a fair amount of good-natured banter between strangers takes place on Derby Day. Frontside customers will be allowed to roam the facility and visit the paddock area, though Ziegler said “compliance ambassadors” will be stationed throughout the building to keep strangers from fraternizing and to remind attendees to wear masks in crowded areas when not eating or drinking. The same roaming rules for ticketed customers that are in place for a normal Derby will be in place for this year’s Derby. “It’s pretty much the way it’s always been,” Ziegler said. “You can always go down, you just can’t go up.” In the open-air, 22-acre infield, customers will be on their own for food and drink, with concessions open throughout the area. Churchill used a guideline from state health officials to determine the capacity of the infield, using the calculation that each person would be taking up 36 square feet of space – six feet in each direction. :: DRF's Kenucky Derby Headquarters: Contenders, latest news, past performances, analysis, and more So the infield will look very different this year, especially from the vantage point of the blimps and drones circling high overhead. TV viewers also will see a grandstand that is strangely unfilled, but viewers have gotten used to similar images over the past six months. Nearly every major sport has returned to a schedule looking something like the past, but very few have allowed fans to return in the same numbers as the pre-pandemic years. Ziegler said that the planning for this year’s Derby may seem like a one-off, with once-in-a-generation restrictions put in place due to a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. But he also said that the track has learned quite a bit that it plans to carry forward – especially if the coronavirus lingers for years on end due to the failure of the voluntary vaccination effort. “We always want to maintain a safe environment for our fans, and there’s a lot that’s changed in the last year, and a lot that we have learned from all this,” Ziegler said. “So we can always take what we have learned and apply it going-forward to continue to make this a safe event.”