Chabad Float Wins People’s Choice Award at Kentucky Derby

More than 1.5 million tourists and locals flooded the streets of Louisville for the annual Kentucky Derby Festival. Most famous for its eponymous horse race, the two-week festival features a bevy of events, including Thunder Over Louisville, the largest fireworks show in North America, and the Pegasus float parade, the oldest of the festival’s events.

This year, the Pegasus Parade featured a float built by Chabad of Kentucky. Playing on the year’s theme, “Now That’s Entertainment,” Chabad’s entry promoted random acts of goodness and kindness under the title “Extreme Global Makeover.” After parading down Louisville’s central drag to an estimated crowd of some 270,000 spectators, the float won the People’s Choice award and ranked fifth in the judges’ vote.

Before the parade, guests viewed the float which was on display along with 100 other entries, and had the opportunity to pledge their own acts of goodness. Rabbi Chaim Litvin, one of three Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries to Kentucky, says they collected some 500 pledges.

Ross Lerner, a Louisville native, helped Litvin construct the float. The pair contacted Mac Sawyers, Ross’s business partner for a lead. Sawyer told them about a mobile home that had been sitting on his farm for the past 20 years that they were free to use. The mobile home was collected, the top demolished and the trailer converted into the base of the float.

“It amazes me that over the course of two months,” Lerner says, “two guys were able to build a float that went head-to-head with floats designed by major companies built with ten times the budget, and actually win.”