Special Has Lost Its Luster : Horse racing: Pimlico’s showcase race for older horses draws a field of only six--and they are mediocre.

Racing fans who study the field for today’s Pimlico Special will ponder two questions.

One is the universal racetrack puzzler: Who is going to win? That’s a tough one, but As Indicated might have a slim edge over Devil His Due.

The other question is even more complex: Why didn’t this Grade I event, with its $600,000 purse, attract a better field? Only six horses were entered Thursday, and two of them are noncontenders. Devil His Due, the favorite, has won one race in his last eight starts. Valley Crossing is winless since July. As Indicated is in sharp form, but he has never won a Grade I stakes.

The Pimlico Special, which had an illustrious history decades ago, was revived in 1988 and conceived as a showcase for the nation’s best older horses--the ones who become stars in the Triple Crown series and then are often forgotten by the media and the public.

The race was an immediate success. In its first running, Bet Twice defeated Alysheba in a rematch of their memorable battles in the 3-year-old classics. In 1991, Farma Way set a track record to beat the previous year’s Preakness winner, Summer Squall. In 1992, Strike The Gold pulled a dramatic upset by recapturing the form that had carried him to a Kentucky Derby victory.

So where are the big-name stars this year? Lenny Hale, Pimlico’s director of racing, can tick off a a number of horses who might have run but for injuries or other setbacks, but the Special’s weak field is in fact a reflection of some deep, industry-wide problems rather than an aberration.

The Special has been hurt, in part, by the demise of the American Championship Racing Series, which had given some continuity and structure to stakes competition for older runners.

Top horses would crisscross the country, from the Gulfstream Park Handicap to the Oaklawn Handicap to the Pimlico Special because the one with the best overall record in the ACRS earned a big financial bonus.

But the ACRS died at the end of last season because there were so many disagreements among the participating tracks. Santa Anita dealt a severe blow to the series by pulling out because it didn’t want California’s star horses to leave home and compete in other parts of the country, such as Maryland. “I’d love to see an ACRS back again,” Hale said, “but getting people in racing to agree is a hard thing to do.”

The greatest problem faced by the Pimlico Special--as well as other stakes for older horses--lies with the animals themselves. The quality of racehorses has suffered a serious decline in recent years, probably because foreign buyers dominated the U.S. yearling sales in the 1980s and took the best-bred stock to Europe.

This weakness has been obvious in the Triple Crown races of the 1990s; last year’s classic winners were a dismal group. There are no bright stars for the Pimlico Special to attract.

And if racehorses of the 1990s aren’t as talented, they aren’t as durable, either. This observation is not based on any romanticization of the past; an abundance of statistics support it. In 1960, horses came into the Kentucky Derby after making an average of 21 starts apiece. By the 1990s, they had fewer than nine starts apiece before the Derby.

There are a lot of possible explanations for this phenomenon--the abuse of medication and a breeding industry that hasn’t paid too much attention to soundness--but whatever the reason, horses can’t and don’t run nearly as often as they used to. Too many tracks with too many rich races are trying to attract a dwindling number of top-class horses, and that’s why six-horse stakes races have become so common.

It is because of the obvious low quality of recent thoroughbred crops that those in the sport have invested so much hope in the 3-year-old class of ’94. Holy Bull, Brocco, Go For Gin, Blumin Affair, Smilin Singin Sam and others make this look like the strongest equine generation in many years.

Objective measurement, such as speed figures, confirm this opinion. It is highly unusual for 3-year-olds, at this early stage of their careers, to be running as well as good older horses. But all of the aforementioned colts have already earned bigger figures than Devil His Due this year.

The 3-year-olds have generated excitement not only because they make the Triple Crown series so interesting, but also because these are the horses who will populate America’s principal stakes races in the coming years.

If horses such as Holy Bull And Go for Gin fulfill their potential and stay in action as 4-year-olds, the Pimlico Special again will have the chance to offer the kind of races for which it was created.