SPORT
Big Horses: A Triple Crown Report
/ Robyn Weisman
07.06.07
Is the Triple Crown still big, or did the horses get small?
This year I was getting my hair cut. Last year I missed it as well. The Kentucky Derby tends to sneak up on me because I know little about the horses until after this race is won. Then I glom onto the winner sometimes through the Preakness Stakes, occasionally through the Belmont Stakes in the hopes that the winner of the Kentucky Derby will win the Triple Crown the way Seattle Slew and Affirmed did when I was a kid.
Now that I’ve lived a few more decades, I see that the 1970s was an anomaly in post-World War II American Thoroughbred horse racing. During that decade there were three Triple Crown winners. Secretariat ended a 25-year drought by winning it in 1973. Seattle Slew won it in 1977 and then Affirmed in 1978. Spectacular Bid should have won it in 1979, but on the morning of the Belmont it was discovered (the passive tense suggesting both foul play and an unsolved crime) that the young stallion, who had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness handily, had a safety pin lodged in his hoof that eventually had to be drilled out, and came in third. Even so, Spectacular Bid was listed #10 in Blood-Horse magazine’s top 100 racehorses of the 20th century, two ahead of Affirmed (Secretariat was #2, behind Man O’War).
Moreover, the racehorses of the 1970s shared these seeming superstar personalities with their human athletic counterparts. Secretariat had at least one genuine biography that I read when I was 10. In 1975 Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure ran a match race with “Queen of the Fillies” and Triple Tiara (the filly triple crown) winner Ruffian (whose bio I also read at about the same time). It was supposed to be the thoroughbred version of the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs battle of the sexes, except in this case there wasn’t a 25-year age difference between contestants. Ruffian was winning by half a length when her leg snapped in two places—and then she ran another 50 yards. After an unsuccessful surgery, she was euthanized, adding a sort of Love Story melancholia (well, in that the female dies, but doesn't it always have to be that way? Strong females, be they equid or primate, always die by the last reel, a topic I will now drop) to the saga.
This year I was getting my hair cut. Last year I missed it as well. The Kentucky Derby tends to sneak up on me because I know little about the horses until after this race is won. Then I glom onto the winner sometimes through the Preakness Stakes, occasionally through the Belmont Stakes in the hopes that the winner of the Kentucky Derby will win the Triple Crown the way Seattle Slew and Affirmed did when I was a kid.
Now that I’ve lived a few more decades, I see that the 1970s was an anomaly in post-World War II American Thoroughbred horse racing. During that decade there were three Triple Crown winners. Secretariat ended a 25-year drought by winning it in 1973. Seattle Slew won it in 1977 and then Affirmed in 1978. Spectacular Bid should have won it in 1979, but on the morning of the Belmont it was discovered (the passive tense suggesting both foul play and an unsolved crime) that the young stallion, who had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness handily, had a safety pin lodged in his hoof that eventually had to be drilled out, and came in third. Even so, Spectacular Bid was listed #10 in Blood-Horse magazine’s top 100 racehorses of the 20th century, two ahead of Affirmed (Secretariat was #2, behind Man O’War).
Moreover, the racehorses of the 1970s shared these seeming superstar personalities with their human athletic counterparts. Secretariat had at least one genuine biography that I read when I was 10. In 1975 Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure ran a match race with “Queen of the Fillies” and Triple Tiara (the filly triple crown) winner Ruffian (whose bio I also read at about the same time). It was supposed to be the thoroughbred version of the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs battle of the sexes, except in this case there wasn’t a 25-year age difference between contestants. Ruffian was winning by half a length when her leg snapped in two places—and then she ran another 50 yards. After an unsuccessful surgery, she was euthanized, adding a sort of Love Story melancholia (well, in that the female dies, but doesn't it always have to be that way? Strong females, be they equid or primate, always die by the last reel, a topic I will now drop) to the saga.