Tom Durkin, the voice of the Kentucky Derby for the past decade, is quitting the gig at the age of 60 not because he’s retiring, or because he has some kind of contract dispute with NBC, but because the stress of calling the biggest horse race in the world finally became to much to for the veteran track announcer to bear.
Kentucky Derby Announcer Quits Due To Anxiety
Durkin developed what he calls “debilitating anxiety” over the race starting around 2005, and tried hypnosis, therapy, and even the dreaded “diet and exercise” in confronting the problem, but as he says in this NPR interview, the three months of stress leading up to the race itself began to creep into his dreams in the form of nightmares. He would be unable to get to the booth in these dreams, or his binoculars would fog up as he tried to track the horses around the rail. In the most elaborate nightmare a Norwegian Cruise Line ship sailed into the lead ahead of the field and blocked his view.
Surreal nightmares are bad enough, but when you subconscious starts selling specifically branded ad space in them you know it’s time to quit.
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