After Animal Kingdom won this year’s Kentucky Derby with an interesting storyline keyboards were a buzz, could this be it?
The Preakness would say no, and we would have another Triple Crown buzz kill on the second race in.
I think it’s utterly American to ask, “why isn’t life like the movies?”
I ask that every year as the chance to witness a triple crown in my lifetime dwindles and another opportunity is gone to the sound of thundering hooves. Will we ever see another Triple Crown winner? I feel like that’s asking will I ever meet a unicorn.
Big horse races when the world watches only come three times a year. Every horse has a story to tell of how they got there, where they came from and what makes them different. There are no “conventional winners”. Soon, you find yourself rooting for athletes because his trainer had heart surgery, the horse was never meant to be the winner just the pacesetter and then the tables turned. The best of our human storylines mix when the plot thickens to include a once-a-year chance to win something coveted, and for the horses their chance is literally once in a lifetime.
There have been 11 Triple Crown winners in the history of American horse racing. Only four decades of people on the planet have encountered such a champion. Affirmed was the last horse to cross the finish line in 1978 a Triple Crown jewel. We are in the biggest gap ever- 33 years and counting. The 70’s alone were graced with three winners in ’73, ’77, and ’78. Twenty-five years before that the ‘40’s had four winners in ’41, ’43, ’46 and ’48.
The Longest Gaps
1919-1930 |
1948-1973 |
1978- |
According to horse-races.net, since 1900, 45 horses have won two out of the three legs (Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont). Twenty-one of those horses won the first two jewels, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, only to lose in the Belmont stakes. My favorite statistic comes from breaking that number down even more.
Eight of those horses one win away from it all came in second on their Belmont finishes. They were one spot away from dying a legend, and we were one measureable distance away from knowing what could have been.
Remember Smarty Jones- one of those storied eight horses? He was a hero and for a long time we were caught up in the type of atmosphere where these horses weren’t horses at all but opportunities at glimpsing greatness.
Many didn’t dare to breathe once the gates opened on June 5, 2004 at Belmont Park in New York. But he just wasn’t fast enough and another wanted it more.
At first I didn’t remember who beat him and that’s a real shame and testament to the legacy of horse racing. It’s not just winners who get remembered but the athlete with character, struggle, perseverance, and at last despair that get remembered too. I had to look it up and the horse Birdstone beat him at the finish. He will forever be the horse that stole a Triple Crown Winner from us, and that’s a little sad because he’s a beast of a horse.
Horseracing brings us to what I argue is the embodiment of the perfect athlete. Horses don’t know how to deny 100 percent of their ability, focus and effort towards a cause. We will never know what drives them. It’s not the jockey or the roar of the crowd.
It isn’t money, or sponsors.
They are pristine in their perfection of perseverance. I spent years competing with horses and let me tell you, those animals know when they have won and especially when they have lost.
This time of year as we watch horses race for a title they all seem to have the perfect story for what could one day be a motion picture of our generation’s Triple Crown.
In this year’s Kentucky Derby, Animal Kingdom won after deniable odds. He had a six-week layoff and the derby would be his first run on dirt, but he would go on to beat the favorites.
"There aren't many fairy tale endings, but this is one of them," said Animal Kingdom’s trainer Graham Motion after the win.
But Animal Kingdom wouldn’t even get two wins in, as Shackelford made it clear to the world that just because a nation chose a darling doesn’t mean the other 18 horses don’t have the right to take what’s theirs. Sometimes others want a fairy tale ending too.
In only a couple weeks people will be watching the Belmont Stakes, it means less now. It’s just another horse race instead of a possible history-making contest. They call the stakes and it’s 1 ½ mile track the “Test of the Champion”. We’ll have to wait at least another year till that’s a tag line for a Disney movie.
33 and counting.
However, I hope Zenyatta gets a movie deal and stat.
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