Good Preakness Stakes Contenders Need a True Winning Spirit
The Preakness Stakes is the second leg in the prestigious and elusive Triple Crown. In this twenty-first century of thoroughbred racing, trainers don’t like to race their horses without 4-5 weeks rest time in between starts. The Triple Crown is the one area of racing today where trainers will make an exception to that rule. Why? It’s quite simple, really: the Triple Crown is a great lure to owners, trainers, and jockeys alike because it is the hardest achievement in all of horse racing, and the surest way to achieve immortality. The current number of years without a Triple Crown winner stands at thirty-four, the longest drought in the history of the sport thus far. Many are saying that there will never be another Triple Crown winner. This is ironic because entering the 1973 season, there had been a twenty-five year drought, and many were saying the same thing. Little did they know that 1973 started a run of three Triple Crown sweeps in only six years!
Most trainers of Kentucky Derby entrants will not race them in the Preakness Stakes unless their horse wins the Kentucky Derby. The reason for this is that the Triple Crown races are spaced over a period of only 5 weeks. The Kentucky Derby, run at ten furlongs, is always run on the first Saturday in May, the Preakness Stakes, run at nine-and-a-half furlongs, two Saturdays after the Kentucky Derby, and then the grueling Belmont Stakes, run at twelve furlongs, three Saturdays after the Preakness.
If their horse does not win the Kentucky Derby, trainers see little reason to run their horses with such little recovery time in the Preakness because there is no Triple Crown on the line, and as such, no real reason to run, even though the Preakness Stakes does offer the largest purse of the three races in the Triple Crown series, there are many other races run in the United States that are more lucrative. So, we’ll just have to wait and see whether Union Rags, Hansen, or Creative Causeway all end up in the starting gate at Pimlico two weeks after the Derby. It sure would be great for thoroughbred racing if they did.
Picking a strong contender for the Preakness Stakes is a tough proposition for any handicapper because of the situation with the Kentucky Derby. In today’s day and age, it’s particularly tough because of the synthetic racing surfaces in California, which is more like turf than like a natural dirt racing surface. So when a good western thoroughbred, like a Santa Anita Derby winner comes east, it’s tough to tell whether or not that kind of success will translate into victory on the natural dirt surface at Churchill Downs or Pimlico, the site of the Preakness Stakes.
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