TRIPLE CROWN POST-MORTEM

This picture of Secretariat now seems like it epitomizes not only his superiority over his competition, but also the amount of time that has lapsed between Triple Crown winners. In the initial disappointment over Big Brown's defeat yesterday, I fear it may also be a metaphor for how long a wait it may be before we see another one.

Maybe we were spoiled that not only Secretariat, but Affirmed and Seattle Slew, all were Triple Crown winners from the 70's. We also saw quality horses in the "hidden Triple Crown" winners. Sham finished second to Secretariat in all three legs of the Triple Crown and Alydar managed to challenge Affirmed and finish second in all three races as well. In another year, perhaps we'd also be talking about those two horses.

In hindsight, it's obviously a greater challenge to win all three legs than the number of winners from each era would have you believe. A horse has to almost win the equivalent of a sprint, a middle distance race and a distance race in five weeks. He also has to stay healthy and injury-free in order to train for the disparate courses while competitor barns can sit back and train challengers who are geared to each individual race distance. They can virtually tag-team the Triple Crown challenger, while that horse has to run, ready or not.

Imagine a track star trying to win the 100 meter dash, the 880 meters, and the mile in five weeks. Perhaps not an equivalent analogy, but it's the best I can come up with. Or a Triple Crown winner in baseball. There's a reason why we haven't seen one of those in a long time as well.

It did appear yesterday as if the grind, or maybe the injury, or getting jostled in traffic, finally caught up to Big Red. He didn't seem to want to run when his jockey asked, for whatever reason. He fought him a bit for the first time.

Unfortunately, you can't ask the horse "WTF happened?". Also, unfortunate that prior to the race you couldn't get the trainer Dutrow to STFU. Maybe I'm old school, but I got a sick feeling whenever this gas bag "guaranteed" victory. It's one thing to have confidence in your undefeated horse. It's another thing to seemingly rub your opponents face in it.

The other "Oh No!!" moment was when the ABC commentator mentioned during the post parade that Big Red seemed so cool that he hadn't even broken a sweat. It was 90+ heat combined with near 90 humidity, your gas bag trainer looked like someone turned a fire-hose on him he was sweating so much and the horse that needed to be ready to go hadn't broken a sweat? Maybe I don't know enough about getting race horses warmed up, but that seemed to be a red-flag that the horse was not ready to run.

Know I know how the old Brooklyn Dodger fans and Chicago Cubs fans feel.

"Wait 'til next year."

WILL BIG BROWN BE THIS GENERATIONS BIG RED?

We'll soon find out, in one respect he is now one step closer with the news that his most worthy challenger, Casino Drive, has been scratched.

Big Red is now in a Belmont field that seemingly has only one remaining threat to win in Dennis of Cork. When Secretariat blistered through the 1973 Belmont field, only Sham was considered worthy enough to upset the Triple Crown express.

What Secretariat did as far as winning the Triple Crown in and of itself was not so surprising, it was the way he did it. Winning the Derby over Sham, with the phenomenal performance of successfully faster quarter times and and the under 2 minute total race time, whetted people's appetite.

In the Preakness, he goes from fourth to first in the blink of an eye, while rounding a turn, an astounding feat of acceleration past his peers.

In the weeks leading up to the Belmont Stakes, Secretariat appears on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated, achieving rock star status and setting the stage for the Belmont Stakes.

With the entire horse racing world and most of the rest of the sports viewing public now engaged, Secretariat stands ready to make his immortal run to history.

Now understand that, normally the phrase "and down the stretch they come", with any number of horses thundering down the homestretch vying for victory, is about as spine-tingling, hair on the back of your neck standing, awe-inspiring phrase as we have in sports.

But literally no sports call, short of the call of Bobby Thompson's home-run to culminate the "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff", can makes me to this day stand steadfastly still--a body-trembling, jaw-dropping paralysis--filled with a combination of emotion and inspiration, quite like the following track announcers call that brings Secretariat down the back stretch and into horse racing immortality:

“Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine! Secretariat by twelve. Secretariat by fourteen lengths on the turn....Secretariat is all alone, he’s out there almost a sixteenth of a mile in front of the other horses.....He is into the stretch, he leads the field by eighteen lengths....Secretariat has opened to a twenty-two length lead. He is going to be the next Triple Crown winner! Here comes Secretariat to the wire! An unbelievable, an amazing performance! He hits the finish, twenty-five lengths!”



Secretariat gave us a chance to turn away somewhat from some of the "more important" events of the day.

We had virtually wrapped up our involvement in Vietnam and some of the emotional scars that divided our involvement in that war were still open and raw.

We had President Nixon in office and the Watergate scandal was developing as a daily distraction.

We had what would later form the so-called misery index of high unemployment, high inflation and high interest rates combined with low self esteem, low national pride and lower expectations for the future. Our leaders seemed clueless to find solutions to our nations problems.

Sound familiar? Sound like history repeating?

But for a couple of weeks at least--in a way that sports does as well as any past time in this country can do in a positive way--Secretariat provided an uplifting backdrop to temporarily escape from some of the madness going on in our lives.

And he gave us a chance to hope and dream again, when for a time it seemed like we had forgotten how to nestle into dreams without waking up to our real-life nightmare.

Well maybe today, Big Brown has his chance to be this generations "Big Red"--to do for this country's sports viewing public what Secretariat did for our generation 35 years ago--provide hope and inspiration. It's a tall order, but we really didn't expect Secretariat to do that for us.

But that's one of the reasons why they run the races and play the games...and it's one of the reasons why we watch...because you never really know in advance when you're going to witness history in the making.

Go Big Brown, rise up and make history.....

BIG BROWN - BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

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."