Triple Crown drought still a mystery
Sport’s changing economics, attitudes have contributed to 37-year wait, experts believe
As with most debates involving sports, there are varying reasons for the absence of a Triple Crown champion racehorse over the past 37 years. It has as much to do with bank accounts as with bloodlines, yet explanations remain as elusive as the achievement itself.
Longtime horsemen and horsewomen point to the changing economics in what was long called the “Sport of Kings.” Those whose careers often are measured in two-minute increments hope the decadeslong drought will end at Saturday’s Belmont Stakes.
“The business is a lot more economically driven than it ever was,” said Cricket Goodall, executive director of the Maryland Horse Breeders Association and the Maryland Mil-
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lion. “This sounds bad, but [horses] are a product, and there’s an expectation of getting a return on the investment.”
Hard-core bettors might believe that the horses who won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness but failed in the Belmont were not in the same class as Affirmed, the last Triple Crown winner, and the 10 others who won all three races as 3-year-olds.
“I think there are multiple factors. If it was only one factor and it was that simple, people would have changed it,” said Tom Bowman, a longtime Maryland breeder and veterinarian who has followed the racing scene closely for 40 years.
The only clarity is that American Pharoah is the favorite to join that group of winners Saturday rather than be added to the list of 12 who have failed since 1978 on the 11⁄ mile track in Elmont, N.Y., after winning in Louisville, Ky., and Baltimore.
Few dispute that breeding is at the core of the long wait. Modern-day horses are bred more for speed than endurance, which Bowman and others say is a greater reflection of modern human behavior — or simply greed — than of animal science.
“People are less and less patient about everything in life; people want to do anything that will give them the quickest return. And in horses, especially if you’re breeding horses and trying to sell them to somebody else, you want to sell a product that people will view as a quick return,” Bowman said.
As a result, most breeders are trying to raise horses that “run fast, run short and run early” in their lives, Bowman said.
Bowman said the emphasis is on the sale of 2-year-olds rather than yearlings, with speed the only consideration.
“If you can go real fast, then somebody’s going to pay you a whole lot of money, thinking that in a short period of time, they can recapture their investment,” Bowman said.
Breeder Mike Pons, along with his brother, Josh, has managed the Country Life Farm in Bel Air that has been with their family since 1933. He said the culture began to change when tax laws enacted in 1986 cut down on the write-offs horse owners could make on their investments.
“Up until that point, 72 cents on the dollar you incurred could be immediately written off in that year,” Pons said. “Just the sheer expense in the four years it took just to get to a Triple Crown, you might have $75,000 to $100,000 tied up in any foal just to get to that point — maybe more depending on the stud fee and where you were raising those horses.”
Bowman said fewer breeders and trainers are plotting long-term career strategies or “campaigns” for their horses, and more are trying to make a big score in a Triple Crown race to attract an even bigger offer — such as the one Calumet Farms made in buying Mr. Z from Ahmed Zayat before the 2015 Preakness — or a quick stud fee.
With greater emphasis put on producing multiple foals with the potential to win a big race, stud fees became as vital to covering the day-to-day costs as the size of purses for the owners of the winning horses. Pons said a perfect example is the horse that sired American Pharoah.
Pioneer of the Nile seemed on the verge of winning the 2009 Kentucky Derby until 60-1 long shot Mine That Bird came roaring along the rail to win by nearly seven lengths. After finishing 11th in the 13-horse Preakness, Pioneer of the Nile retired that July with a soft-tissue injury.
Pioneer of the Nile’s second crop of foals produced the horse that held off latecharging Firing Line at Churchill Downs and blew away the field at Pimlico Race Course two weeks later. Three days after his victory in Baltimore, American Pharoah’s breeding rights were sold to Coolmore Ashford Stud in Kentucky.
Even before the tax laws changed, old-money families such as the Whitneys and Phippses had given way to a new phenomenon. It happened after Seattle Slew’s march to a Triple Crown in 1977, coming just four years after Secretariat ended what had been a quarter-century drought.
Billy Turner, who had been a relatively obscure steeplechase rider and trainer before earning national acclaim when he began training Seattle Slew at Andor Farm in Monkton in the mid-1970s, said the horse’s original owners, a couple from Washington state named Karen and Mickey Taylor, started a trend that continues to this day.
“When Slew won, he told the public that you could go out and buy the best horse in the world at the time on the market. People went out and spent a little bit of money, and they came up with a horse that did it all,” said Turner, the only living trainer of a Triple Crown winner.
Training changes
Not only did the breeding practices change, but the training regimens did, too.
“There’s less and less trainers who worked as apprentices for Hall of Fame kind of guys and learned the business from the ground up,” Bowman said. “More and more people get not concerned about building the substance of the horse for the long term rather than reaching a certain objective — hitting the quick button.”
Graham Motion, the English-born, Elkton-based trainer whose Animal Kingdom won the 2011 Kentucky Derby, said training changed largely as a result of the huge financial investment in racehorses.
Like multimillionaire athletes, the horses are a bit “pampered,” Motion said, in the same way.
“I think it’s a good comparison,” he said. “With the investments that people have made, the fact that with the advancement of science and with the system and numbers, we know a little bit more. We know what it takes for a horse to peak on any given day, and we know if he runs every two or three weeks, that’s not going to happen. Clearly, we are a lot more savvy and a lot more protective of the horses.”
Just as the athletes of today are bigger and stronger than those in the distant past, Motion said that modern technology, medicine and nutrition have helped “make a case for horses being physically more imposing.” He rejects the theory “that the horses are not as tough as they used to be.” Again, it comes back to economics. “I don’t think the breed has been diminished and you have weaker horses. I think [in past generations], they didn’t have to race them all year round to pay their bills,” Goodall said. “When people look at how much it cost to keep horses in training, it’s hard to think: ‘I am going to send the horse to South Carolina for the winter.’
“Trainers raced their horses [to get] fit as much as [they] trained them to race them. … Probably, most of it was economics, but when you look back on the older generation of trainers, they tested their horses early and they trained them hard. The horses either stood up to the training or they didn’t, and when they didn’t, they got a year off. Horses got the winter off, and they were getting healthy.”