Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, June 08, 2008 12:10:14 AM
Big Brown comes in dead last. The triple crown series is a grueling sot. It takes a very special horse to pull all three off, capped by the mile-and-a-half equine marathon at Belmont.
I have my reservations about racing in general. European horse start racing at five, and run three or four years. Here, they get loaded with steroids, loaded up with anti-inflammation butalyn to control the growth and raced at two or three. It stands to reason that such an animal would run times that would blow European horses away. Nobody wants to give up their farm to be the token humanitarian.
It's worse now than ever. There used to be a trainer's axiom to not stud or foal with any horse with less than 25 races in their career. Now the better horses race half a dozen times and then are retired to stud. Generations of this bred a brittleness not seen before, which may well be part of what did in Eight Belles a couple of months ago.
Not that there is nothing to celebrate. The true mark of a thoroughbred is the competitive mind. When the mind is as extraordinary as the musculature, you get an athlete that comes along once every half century. Man O' War was one. Secretariat was another.
Secretariat did something in the Preakness in 1973 I have not seen a horse do before or since: every race segment had a shorter time. He accelerated the entire race!
In the Belmont, he went off as a 1-5 favorite. So many bet on him that the odds went down to 1-20, the lowest I've ever seen. Most of the people kept their tickets as souvenirs, never cashing them in. A mile into the race, it was over. The jockey, Ron Turcotte, broke a cardinal rule- he looked behind him. When you ride in a pack of horses at full gallop, the noise is deafening and it feels like you are riding an earthquake. He heard nothing, and it was so unusual that he had to look. He won by 31 lengths. Secretariat still holds the course record.
So, I'm spoiled. Big Brown didn't do a thing for me. I saw Secretariat, the only non-human to win Sports Illustrated Athlete of the Year.