If there was any doubt before that the thirty year drought between Triple Crown winners is about to end in three weeks at Belmont Park, Big Brown laid them to rest today at Pimlico Race Track.
Once again, this horse turned it up a notch as the horses came down the back stretch, just as he finished twenty opponents in the Kentucky Derby.
That makes it two straight races that this beautiful horse evoked images of Secretariat, barreling down the back stretch and Belmont Park and obliterating the assembled field.
BIG BROWN - PREAKNESS:
THE AERIAL VIEW OF HIS STRETCH RUN BLOWOUT IS AWESOME - HE JUST HAS ANOTHER GEAR THE OTHER HORSES DO NOT
Folks, these are not horses recruited from outside the glue factory that Big Blue is passing like they are standing still. These are quality, stakes winners from all over the world.
So unless there is some horse bred and trained to run the distance the Belmont offers, or there is some sort of jockey error that costs them the race, this horse seems poised to take his place alongside "Big Red" Secretariat, as one of the all-time great horses.
This horse Big Brown is a beauty, in that he is a classically beautiful thoroughbred and he is a beast to his opponents. Nobody has yet figured out how to handle him. Like the greats before him, he apears to have a remarkable will to win, to run up front and in the lead.
His jockey's only problem to date seems to be to keep from spending himself too early.
That will be an even more important skill to have come the third leg of the Triple Crown in New York.
Stay tuned, it might be thirty years before we see another Triple Crown winner after this one. Go Big Brown, bring it home.
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SECRETARIAT KENTUCKY DERBY FACTS:
On his way to a still-standing track record (1:59 2/5), he ran each quarter-mile (approximately 400 m) segment faster than the one before it.
The successive quarter-mile times were: 25 1/5, 24, 23 4/5, 23 2/5 and 23.
This means he was still accelerating as of the final quarter-mile of the race.
It would be 28 years before any other horse would run the Derby in less than 2 minutes (Monarchos in 2001).
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SECRETARIAT v. BIG BROWN - TALE OF THE TAPE
Kentucky Derby:
Year Time Purse Field
1973 Secretariat 1:59.40 $155,050 13
2008 Big Brown 2:01.82 $1,451,800 20
Preakness:
1973 Secretariat 1:54.40 $129,900 6
2008 Big Brown 1:54.72 $600,000 12
Kentucky Derby:
1973 Secretariat 2:24 $90,120 5
2008 Big Brown ???? ????? ??
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NBC did a good job with their round table discussion of some of the problems the industry faces as a result of the Eight Belles tragedy. They brought up genetics and training as issues, but really seemed to zero in on the use of "permissible medications" such as Lasix, anti-inflammatories and steroids.
To the panelists, steroids were not considered a "performance enhancer" so much as a tool to enhance recovery. Very interesting and here you have a pool of athletes, some who use and some who do not, legally by the way, since most states allow the use of steroids for race horses. It doesn't seem as if that during the 20-30 years that this pool of athletes have been using steroids, that the winning times (performance) have been declining dramatically (enhancement), if at all.
Veteran analysts Randy Moss said pointedly that you could draw a clear link to the increased use steroids and anti-inflammatories and the increased numbers of break downs on the track. Very interesting and provocative points indeed.
It was also rather humorous to see Bob "The Midget" Costas in the jockeys room conducting interviews with subjects that he literally towered over. Now he knows what Shaq feels like.
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SECRETARIAT'S IMMORTAL BELMONT RUN:
http://www.secretariat.com/legacy.htm
New York Post columnist Larry Merchant (now better known as HBO's sharp-tongued boxing analyst) clicked off his words in Broadway staccato:
"Secretariat," said Merchant, "is the kind of Big Horse that makes grown men weep, even when they are flint-hearted bettors, even when he goes off at 1-10. He is the apparently unflawed hunk of beauty and beast they search for doggedly in the racing charts every day, and never seemed to find. His supporters rhapsodize over him as though he is a four-legged Nureyev, extolling virtues of his musculature, his grace, his urine specimens." If he were to lose the Belmont, Merchant warned, "the country may turn sullen and mutinous."
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