Last leg: Triple Crown concludes with Preakness Stakes on NBC
On Saturday, Oct. 3, the 145th Preakness Stakes airs live from the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland, and you can tune in for what will be the final leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown on NBC.
In a normal year, one that isn’t plagued by, for lack of a better term, a plague, the Triple Crown begins with the Kentucky Derby and ends with the Belmont Stakes. But a whole lot of shuffling and postponing has taken place in 2020 in the world of horse racing, as it has everywhere else. This year, it was Belmont that kicked things off back in June, and it was won by New
York-bred Tiz the Law. The Kentucky Derby became Leg 2, running at the beginning of September, and it was won by Authentic in a record-tying race by trainer Bob Baffert, who now has six Derby wins under his belt. These two winners mean that there will be no Triple
Crown winner, though Tiz the Law did come in a close second at Kentucky.
The Preakness winner in 2019 was War of Will, who was that year’s winner of the Risen Star Stakes. Oddly enough, the 2019 Kentucky Derby winner, Country Horse, was forced to withdraw due to a virus, which allowed War of Will to move in as a qualifier. Each of the top four finishers from the Derby (five if you include Maximum Security, who was actually the first to cross the finish line but was disqualified) did not compete in last year’s Preakness — something that hadn’t happened since 1951. In true racehorse naming-scheme fashion, the horse named most likely to win at the 2019 Preakness was called Improbable; unfortunately, he finished in sixth.
Crowd attendance hung in the balance for quite some time for this year’s Preakness, though official news now states that it is time to apply for refunds. On Sept. 2, it was announced that, for the safety of staff, horses and the fans themselves, there will be no crowd attendance at this year’s event. In all of the race’s history, 2020 is the first time the cheers and the roaring of fans will be missing from the Maryland event — an unfortunate, yet necessary, disappointment for the second-most attended horse race in all of North America (second only to the Kentucky Derby itself).
The Preakness is a 9.5-furlong race run over a dirt track, and the horses are handicapped by 126 pounds for males, and 121 for females. All participating thoroughbreds must be three years old to race on the historic, left-handed track.
Be sure to tune in to NBC on Saturday, Oct. 3, to catch the “Run for the Black-eyed Susans,” also known as the “Middle Jewel of the Triple Crown,” when, for the first time since first run in 1873, the Preakness Stakes moves from the middle to the end of the Triple Crown.