For the second year in a row, a horse has won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes after skipping the Preakness — Sovereignty last year and Golden Tempo this year.
As many observers have wondered, would these and others have run in all three races if they were contested over a longer span of time?
The most logical alternative would be to keep the Derby on the first Saturday in May, but run the Preakness over the Memorial Day weekend and the Belmont either on July 4, or over the Fourth of July weekend in years when such a weekend exists. The Preakness can thus be scheduled to avoid concurrence with the Indianapolis 500, and when July 4 falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the Belmont can be run either on July 3, 4, or 5 (when July 4 falls on a Saturday, the previous Friday, July 3, is a legal holiday — as is Monday, July 5 when July 4 falls on a Sunday, providing needed flexibility in scheduling both the Preakness and the Belmont in order to spread all three events out more evenly).
But why have we come to this?
Because of the dramatic changes in the methodology of breeding thoroughbred racehorses, with much greater emphasis on breeding for speed as opposed to stamina in recent decades. From at least 1940 through 1995, only five winners of the Derby — 1978 Triple Crown winner Affirmed, Sunday Silence, Strike the Gold, Lil E Tee, and Thunder Gulch — have had Dosage Profiles which did not include any Solid or Professional chef-de-race representation. Since then, however, 12 of the 31 Derby winners have lacked stamina-wing representation — including four with a Dosage Index of higher than 4.00: Charismatic in 1999, Giacomo in 2005, Mine That Bird in 2009, and Nyquist in 2016.
As the Dalai Lama has said, if science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.
The same thing goes for sports — including horse racing.
Remember when 9/11 happened? It caused the NFL to play the Super Bowl in February for the first time ever — and in all but one of every year since (Super Bowl XXXVII was played on January 26, 2003, the year after 9/11, presumably because the NFL could not change that date for purely logistical reasons), the Super Bowl has been played in that month. COVID gave us the NBA's "play-in," repeated ever since. The pandemic also led to there being a WHA-style "Canadian Division" in the NHL in 2020-21 — a concept that could return, but only if the league expands and creates an eighth Canadian team (Halifax? Hamilton? Quebec?) — and for the first time in its history, the Super Bowl will be played on the Presidents' Day weekend this coming season, in that Super Bowl XLI will be played on February 14, 2027 — making the following day Presidents' Day and therefore a federal holiday (one might assume that once there has already been a "Super Bowl Monday," there will always be one. As in the storied Pringle's commercial, once you pop, you can't stop!).
As for horse racing, it went full heterodox in 2020, with the Belmont not only being run first, but at a sprint-like mile and an eighth.
And it can be done with or without an 18-game regular-season schedule — which probably can't happen until 2031 because the current collective bargaining agreement between the NFL owners and the union runs through the 2030 season.
As Mr. Spock said on an episode of the original Star Trek series, change is the essential process of all existence — and while traditions should be respected, they should never get in the way of that process.
So long as the distances of the Triple Crown races are not tampered with (remember that circa-1990 car alarm?), as happened in the Belmont over the last three years (by contrast, from 1963 through 1967 the Belmont Stakes started on the far turn at Aqueduct, yet few kvetched about it).
Horse racing has an exciting future, with new tracks at both Pimlico and Belmont Park. A few more Triple Crown winners, because more Derby winners actually run in the Preakness, will make it even more exciting.
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