Fierceness is Todd Pletcher’s lone Derby hope this year. Yeah, it’s stressful.

LOUISVILLE — While riding in a golf cart Thursday morning toward another phalanx of Kentucky Derby TV interviews, Todd Pletcher committed an obvious act of inner strength. He told of feeling pressure. He sounded like a human being.

It long since went established in American culture that sports figures of Pletcher’s stature, particularly male ones, refrain from acknowledging or confessing the existence of pressure. But as people learn ever so slowly about the value of getting things out of the head and into the air, the 56-year-old trainer rolled along and fielded a question about the difference between having one Derby horse instead of his more common two or three or four or five.