Saturday, the last leg of horse racing's Triple Crown will take place - the Belmont Stakes. It is by far the most challenging of the three races. Why? The distance, silly !! Sure the Kentucky Derby is a big mess of twenty horses, so winning is almost based on luck. The Preakness has it's tight turns, but it's only 1 1/8 miles, and the field is much smaller, so it's not uncommon for the Derby winner to win the Preakness. But the Belmont............
The Belmont is a massive 1 1/2 miles long. It makes a great horse come out, and exposes a not so great horse's weaknesses. It's no coincidence that ten horses have won the first two parts of the Triple Crown since 1978, but haven't won the Belmont..
It's also my favorite race because my Dad worked at Belmont for 34 years, and he saddled both Secretariat and Affirmed to their Belmont wins to clinch their Triple Crowns. I haven't asked him for his opinion on the big race, but I'd guess he'd pick Big Brown. I wasn't ready to pick him, especially after his hoof problem the past week, but..........
I was going to pick his main rival, undefeated Casino Royale, but that horse has had his own medical troubles the last day or two, and he may be scratched from the race. Honestly, the rest of the field are also-rans, and the Belmont is not a race that you win by a fluke. Big Brown will take the race, and pretty handily, and after 30 long years, we will have a Triple Crown winner. Congrats !!
A Post-Race note.... This is why they play, and why we haven't had a Triple Crown winner since I was 10. No one is sure what happened exactly yet, but Big Brown broke out of the gate almost at a 90 degree right turn, and was all over the track, running into horses everywhere, and riding way right all the way down the backstretch. As jocket Kent Desormeaux said, "I had no horse today"....
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1 comment:
willing to wait another year
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