Shortly after Big Brown brought the house down at Pimlico on Saturday a one-work email from a friend arrived. It said: Wow!
It was most assuredly a performance rich in the wow factor and Big Brown is three weeks and 12 furlongs from the immortality that accompanies a Triple Crown. He is also three week and 12 furlong from retirement.
Is this the three-year-old star racing has awaited for three decades? A blinding blip on the radar?
Secretariat raced until the end of the season in which he won the Triple Crown.
Seattle Slew, at this point the only horse to win the Triple Crown while undefeated, and Affirmed raced at age four.
All three ran added to their legends – and were occasionally defeated -- after having won the Triple Crown.
Undefeated Triple Crown winner looks good in a stallion advertisement. No one has ever been able to make that claim or, probably, demand the price that will eventually be set in exchange for Big Brown’s favors.
Under normal circumstances, it would be easy to regard a horse this talented, unbeaten, untested and unthreatened after having won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness as the next potentially great thoroughbred.
But it is unlikely – next to certain -- that Big Brown will race once more, win or lose in the Belmont Stakes. This time, it is not about what is good for the game, but what the game has given the small group of investors in the IEAH Stable. In an era marked by the premature retirement of the sport’s most promising young horses in deference to lucrative breeding deals – and IEAH finalized terms with Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky before the Preakness – Big Brown’s career, however brilliant, will end without his having run in the Travers, without having faced older horses in the important fall races and without his having run in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. There is no chance that he will see him head-to-head with Curlin, the four-year-old defending Horse of the Year. Spared these tests, Big Brown will be denied to establish himself as a great horse. Still, anyone else, offered what is believed to be about $50 million with IEAH retaining an interest, would take the money, leaving the rest of the interested world to speculate about what may have been.
If he wins the Triple Crown, Big Brown will also be the first product of Winstrol, the anabolic of choice in Major League Baseball and racing, to be immortalized. Unlike Berry Bonds, whose steroid-age records will be viewed in skeptical context by those whose votes will determine his admission to the Hall of Fame, there will be no eventual jury of voters to cast judement on Big Brown. Winning the Triple Crown, the most rarely won title in sport, is an achievement unto itself.
The widespread abuse of anabolic steroids is no secret in racing and is, in fact, fully embraced on-the-record by Big Brown’s trainer, Rick Dutrow, whose history of medication-related suspensions is prodigious. This begs the question: Does a steroid-enhanced horse – and there is no doubt that steroids are performance enhancing substances – merit a place beside the 11 horse who own the Triple Crown sans steroids?
Food for thought during the next three weeks.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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5 comments:
Paul:
You stole the words right out of my mouth! After thirty years of near-misses, this Long Islander would like nothing more than to scream and holler for a true New York horse to win the Crown.
Yet, as you aptly note, victory will be bittersweet. I do not wish to expend any energy, emotional and otherwise, rooting for the end of Brownie's career. He will have raced only six times, to wit, the same number of races that Big Red ran AFTER he ran the greatest race we'll ever see ( despite what G. Stevens, J. Bailey, et al think).
If Brown wins, we'll be deprived of the real race of this decade between him and Curlin. Slew and Affrimed met twice in that great year of 1978, with both races more than living up to their hype. And then in 79, we witnessed another race of the "decade" between Bid and Affirmed ( No, Buddy!-the Bid was not as good as Slew or Affirmed, let alone Big Red).
Please Paul give us some guidance-what do we root for?; Six races do not make a great horse. Big Red, Slew and Affirmed should not have to share their "House" with such an interloper.
I hear what u r saying but didn't Big Brown's current trainer get him after he was already grown & a 3 yr old?
Dutrow is villain and as such will somehow manage to blow it.
Look at the Derby, we simultaneously witness the death of innocence with the filly while the evil lords of Dutrow exalt in victory. So Biblical.
Now the young, clean invader from the east running without roids or whatever else dickie has, will come to NY and slay the mighty giant on his so called home field. I mean Casino Drive is red, does he remind you of anybody? Maybe somebody who represents all that was once good in racing? Oh it will happen Paul, It will happen.
It's already written. Casino Drive will win.
I truly hope that Big Brown loses the Belmont; he is not the horse to carry the title triple crown winner. His connections represent all that is wrong with the 'sport' of thoroughbred racing. Every time I watch one of his races, all I can think is that the horse's performances are a product of a lack-luster crop of 3 year olds and steroids. Why cloud the triple crown title with all that baggage?
Go Casino Drive!
From Sunny Jim in New Jersey
Today's post articulates so well what is wrong with the sport of racing today, and demonstrates once again why I say that your blog is the best around. It is a spell-check or two short of perfection.
Oh, and one more thing: Those free picks are on a loooonnnnng cold streak and maybe sometime you could give us a 'full disclosure' as to their origin.
Cheers.
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