Baltimore - Two weeks after winning the Kentucky Derby, sovereignty didn't run out of that starting goal in Saturday's starting goal. However, he remains the topic of Pimlico racing course this week.
That's because owner and coach Bill Mott chose to skip Preakness and have a chance to win the Triple Crown because the turnaround time is short. This is the second time the Derby champion has not participated in four years, and overall the fifth in seven years, Prekness continues to move forward without a triple crown.
This trend has rekindled the debate about the need for change in the Triple Crown, from putting more space between the Derby, Prekness and Belmont shares to adding incentives to efforts in all three areas to completely changing the order of the game. Just like baseballs with fewer pitchers, elite horses today usually get longer between games, and this situation makes the tradition and modernization of the sport put the head on.
Now, the two-week turnaround time is like an old schedule for many in the sport, when the longer gap has become a norm, watching horses wear and perform better. Purebreds are faster to train and train.
"There are more than one problem in this issue," said Steve Asmussen, who won more games than any other coach in North America. "I like how difficult it is to do something, which makes it so special. Then it makes it easier? Will it dilute it? That's a good question. I think it will continue to debate."
The debate continued during a 37-year drought between the 1978 Triple Crown champions until Bob Bavert trained American pharaoh swept three games in 2015. Bavert's Justify did it in 2018, and the chorus of voices calling for change was quiet.
However, for various reasons, Preakness has only had two chances to win in the past seven years. The greatest attraction of long legs in the middle - the expectation of possibility - from automatic to anything.
“It’s disturbing, and it’s been disturbing for several years,” said Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey, who won three games twice and is now an NBC sports analyst. “When they’re going to flinch, it’s all triggered from my generation, and they won’t.”
Many top trainers, including Baffert, D. WayneLukas, Mark Casse and Michael McCarthy, all ran a derby horse in Preakness, or this year will be. Others, such as Mott, Chad Brown, Todd Pletcher and Brad Cox, are even less willing to take risks.
"We need them in the game," Casse said, who won Preakness in 2019 with the Will War and Sandman this year. "It's important. We want the best horses we're sporting."
When Asmussen first won the triple-champion game against Curlin in 2007 Preakness, it was after his horse was third after Street Sense and finished third at the Kentucky Derby's Hard Spun. Curlin, Street Sense and Hard Spun scored 1-2-3 in Preakness.
"We must have been running in an environment that was very different from the one we were at the time," Asmussen said. "Every horse is an individual, it's different every year, and it's just a very unique situation."