Triple Crown Races Left Trail of Highs and Lows

ELMONT, N.Y. — As the trainer LeRoy Jolley said many years ago, “This isn’t a game for anybody wearing short pants.”

Here was Bob Baffert, less than 24 hours before his first Belmont Stakes, taking in his first Broadway show, listening to a Gershwin review upstairs at Sardi’s, then roaming the storied 44th Street haunt in search of the newly hung caricature of Dave Johnson, the premier race caller. Baffert said he was having the time of his life.

The next night, the beer for Baffert had gone flat and stale. The best horse of his training life, the durable Cavonnier, had not reached the finish line of the grueling Belmont. At least Cavonnier’s fate was not as grim as that of Prairie Bayou, another Belmont favorite, who failed to finish in 1993. Cavonnier broke down and will enjoy a long life, though probably never to race again; Prairie Bayou broke down and was destroyed.

This is the amalgam that was this year’s Triple Crown series: For every upper, there was a downer, and a bittersweet taste lingers at the end of the trail.

Sure, Grindstone nipped Cavonnier at the wire in one of the most rip-roaring Derby finishes, but then the game lost the hero from Churchill Downs a few days later because of a chipped knee. Sure, Pat Day one-upped the Triple Crown nonpareil, trainer Wayne Lukas, by winning the Preakness with Louis Quatorze after being fired off one of Lukas’ horses, but the race suffered because it didn’t have Grindstone or Unbridled’s Song, the best 3-year-old before he bore the brunt of The Gang That Couldn’t Train Straight. And sure, there’s something to be said for the persistence of Editor’s Note, who was labeled America’s Loser before he won Saturday’s Belmont, but it would have been better if Cavonnier hadn’t hobbled off.

Because of the usual high attrition--Blow Out, the seventh-place finisher in the Derby, left the series only to break down in his next race and be euthanized--there will be the knee-jerk outcry about the Triple Crown being an atrocity, an endurance test that no horse should be subjected to.

Even Wayne Lukas has suggested that the distances of the races should be shortened, and the time between them lengthened. It’s not going to happen, and shouldn’t, really. No apologies are needed merely because a horse hasn’t swept the Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978, or because only 10 other horses have won all three races. It’s not supposed to be easy. The higher the mountain, the louder the accolades for the climbers that get there.

Lukas, of course, wins so many of these races--seven of the last eight with five different horses--because he believes in volume. Bob Baffert will have to be creative to produce another Cavonnier; Lukas merely goes to William T. Young’s assembly line when Union City takes a bad step and is put down (the 1993 Preakness). Minutes after winning Saturday’s Belmont, Lukas and Young, the owner of Grindstone and Editor’s Note, were talking about how well their 2-year-olds were doing this season at Churchill Downs. Two days before the Belmont, Lukas said: “We’re going to be awfully deep the next two years.”

Then he was asked how many 2-year-olds he has got this year.

“Enough,” he said.