Do you want another Triple Crown winner?
 

I think for most people this would be a resounding yes, but I think there may be some reasons why people would not.

So would you want another Triple Crown winner?

I would...although it may be very likely we won't see the horse race again after the Carnations are taken off his back.

I think the sport has one chance to get back in the spotlight and it will be when a horse wins the Triple Crown. At that point two things could happen. The TC winner will retire and all the media attention and potential new fans will be lost. Or the TC winner stays in training and goes on to become one of the all time greats and draws tons of new fans to the sport. So I absolutely do not want to see a horse win the Triple Crown if they are going to ruin that one chance for the sport and just retire afterwards. However, if there were a gelding or a colt with the right connections that actually raced through their 3yo and 4yo season it would be absolutely fantastic for the sport. As big a fan as I am of Afleet Alex and as badly as I wanted to see Smarty win the TC I am glad both of them only won 2 out of 3 since neither ran after the Belmont and would have wasted racing's one big chance.

would like to see tc winner but i believe you also need close exciting racing
to draw in new fans. also you have to promote the sport on every kind of media there is. and these racinos also need to do a better job. it seems that
each side just thinks about itself.

I think it would be good and bad. The bad part is that as soon as the horse wins the Belmont, he would go straight to the shed. Why risk running in the Travers and then versus older horses in the BC. Plus you would have the 3 year old and probably Horse of the Year locked up already. The good would be for all the attention the sport would get. Hopefully some new fans, and for us younger guys a chance to see a TC winner. Those of us in our 30's probably don't remember Slew and Affirmed ( I know I don't). I know the first derby I remember was 81 and Pleasant Colony. So it would be cool for me to see a TC winner.

I want back to back triple crown winners! So after the first one goes to stud after the Belmont, MAYBE the winner the following year won't have to follow that path and continue racing.

Hmmm...
 

I do think it would be great for the sport, especially this year after Barbaro's unfortunate demise that overwhelmingly caught the public's attention.
I think a major problem is that the public has nothing to look forward to after the TC is over in June, most just after the Derby. They don't even know horses run past 3YO nor do the have reason to care. How about setting up TC races for 4YO or older, Run them during the summer after the 3YO crown is over that eventually ends with the BC Classic as it is now. I believe it could work, it just needs lots of Marketing/Sponsors/$$$ and the willingness to give it try. The public likes to see athletes they recognize and can follow, if they can somehow keep these athletes on the track and not in the sheds, it would open this game up for everyone.

the longer there is without one, the more dramatic the belmont becomes if there is a horse with a shot at it.
i actually don't think having a tc winner would help the sport that much.
i go horse by horse. recently, i wanted Silver Charm, Real Quiet, and Smarty Jones to win it....but i was rooting against Charismatic, War Emblem, and Funny Cide.

I only want one with a horse that is deserving. Not there are likely to be fluke Triple Crown winners, but had Funny Cide won, looking back--how would you feel about him being a Triple Crown winner? Smarty was the goods. Shame he didn't do it.

The other thing is I want the TC winner to race as a 4 yr old. Yes, it's unlikely but it would be great for the sport.

Is there really a difference between a TC winner and 2 out of 3? The fact of the matter is that as long as they are worth more money in the breeding shed than racing, a great horse gets retired right when the risk of racing becomes higher than the reward of the breeder's shed. A TC winner would be good for the sport, particularly after the tragedy of Barbaro

Well, we could all hope for a gelding to win the Triple Crown. :)

Excellent Point Nicole.

Unless it's a gelding, I think a TC winner would retire.

Maybe there will be an end to the cycle of insane spending on the top horses.

Perhaps the sheikhs get bored with it all and decide to own all of the art ever painted by the masters.

I think this is very far from being true. A TC will not be the only chance for the sport to get back into the spotlight. Any good rivalries or good horses that continue on will do that. Alysheba/Ferdinand. Sunday Silence/Easy Goer. Cigar. Smarty Jones. Afleet Alex. Giacomo. Bernardini. These horses have all put the sport in the spotlight. The problem is that since Cigar, all of the horses that have had a real chance to move the game further into the mainstream have left the sport as soon as they've gotten into the spotlight. And while most of those horses were made famous by their exploits in the TC, none of them were TC winners. I don't think we need a TC winner. Having said that, a TC winner would bring a huge spotlight to the sport.

I don't agree that one of two things would happen either. It's very likely that a TC winner would retire soon afterwards. That much I agree with. But your other scenario, that he would go on and become one of the greats is being extremely hopeful. Some of the horses that have come close to winning it over the past two decades were not great horses and winning the TC wouldn't have made them great. Real Quiet, Charismatic, Funny Cide, War Emblem. Not great horses. Good horses that were the best at the right time but far from great horses. Continuing on with them would have seen them lose races to basically unknown horses (to most fans and the media at least) and I don't think that would be a good thing. It's sort of like when people keep saying they are glad that a horse like Jazil or Giacomo is still running. I can't see how it's good for the game at all when the horses that earn the most name recognition because of the races they won, go on to be nothing horses. I think they not only tarnish their names but tarnish the reputations of the races they won. People want to see the best win the best races. They want to see the best teams win the biggest games. Upsets are fine and a part of sports but when fluke winners keep popping up, people start to think skill has nothing to do with it and it's all luck. I don't think that's a good thing for the sport.

Personally, I don't want another TC winner. I think that horse will likely be put on some kind of all-time great pedastal even if it's not deserved. I mean think about this fact.......Real Quiet was less than the distance across your monitor screen from going down as an immortal, better known than Spectacular Bid. It will be a great accomplishment if one does it but I'm afraid it will be overblown.

A triple crown run is imo pointless. Fresh horses just ambush the Derby winner in the Preakness and Belmont anyway. The triple crown races need to be rescheduled so the Derby winner actually has a chance to win a triple crown. That means at least 4 weeks between the Derby and Preakness. Until that happens it is cruel to have horses run in all 3 events because 2 weeks between the Derby and Preakness should be a thing of the past.

I said what I have to say here:

http://www.phalarisproject.com/oped060501.html

I wrote this last year and it may well disappear from my website when I finally get time to update it this year. But my opinion has not, and will not, change.

It's not about the scheduling. It's only remotely about the gender. It's all about the way we don't properly prepare horses for a task that good horses can do, and have done. We need to question the practices that have consistently failed to produce real stars, not try to change the game to manufacture stars.

Casual fans come out in droves for the Triple Crown races. So if there was a Triple Crown winner, that can only help the sport. Why? Because maybe the interest in the sport will stay past June, instead of tailing off until the Breeder's Cup. That fanfare would be blocked if said Triple Crown winner was immediately whisked away to the Breeding Shed after the Belmont.

But seriously you guys, most of my friends have no interest in horse racing. And when I was getting all amp'd up for the Breeder's Cup last year. I'd talk to them about Bernardini, Invasor, Lava Man, Perfect Drift, etc etc... and I'd just get blank looks from them. I BELIEVE THIS IS A TREND FOR ANYONE WHO'S DEEMED A CASUAL FAN. Everyone cares about the TC races, and nothing else after. They might play the Breeder's Cup, but just like when they're playing the Derby, when they look at the Racing Form or Racing Guide, those are the first time they've heard any of those names.

Say Nobiz takes care of business all the way up to the Derby, and is the favorite. I guarantee 8 out of every 10 people that bet the Derby will have no idea who he is until they see his name in the racing guide on Derby Day.

At the risk of appearing to be a major fawner, that's a truly wonderful piece of writing! Why would you ever take it down from your website?!

--Dunbar

btw, I, too, was a big-time Sunday Silence fan. I spent much of his 4-year-old summer daydreaming about the upcoming showdown with Easy Goer and Criminal Type at Arlington. I don't remember which of them dropped out first with injury, but I do remember how incredibly disappointed I was.

From what most have said a TC winner would bring more and newer fans to the sport but IMO it would have more to do with the human connections rather than the horse. People seem to love to have their heart strings pulled and Barbaro was a prime example. The colt was never more popular with new fans than when he was hurt and attempting to make his gallant recovery.

A sheik horse would not have the back story as a horse coming from lower level connections. Give me an owner that cries and expresses emotion with every win coupled with a simple speaking trainer both with more humble backgrounds than being monarchs and we'll have a horse new fans will love. Mrs. Gentry and Carl Nafzger winning the Derby with Unbridled comes to mind.

I'd like to see a TC winner but even more so I'd like to see two horses stand out as they fihgt each other through the TC races as we have seen in the past I think that would do more for the sport and may propel them to fight against each other through the remainder of the season.

Spyder from SC

I think that is very true. A big part of the Smarty Party was John Servis and his family..he was like everyone else...just with a really fast horse. :)

I think this is one of the problems. Feel-good coverage of human connections has largely superceded stories about the actual horses in popular media coverage of the classics. I suspect that this has to do with a variety of factors: humans are naturally interested in the human element of the story, especially since in the 21st century horses are not a part of most people's day-to-day lives; the horses themselves rarely have particularly good stories at this point in their careers anymore; and there's the idea - not entirely ill-founded - that to hook non-racing people into watching these races, they need human-interest stories to make potential new fans care about the outcome of the race.

However, there's an inherent problem with trying to center the sport on human connections. Aside from the jockeys, they are not participants in the main event. They also do not have a constant presence. Consider, for example, NASCAR. I don't care much and know less about stock car racing, but for a while, I had a favorite I followed casually and I would look each week to see how "my" car did. That's the key. During the season, Dale Jarrett and #88 did something I could follow on a regular basis. That does not happen in horse racing anymore. It's not uncommon for many weeks, even months, to go by - during the active season - between occasions when a horse walks into a starting gate.

But trying to hook people on connections is not a whole lot more successful. What about Mrs. Genter? The 1990 Derby was a great moment in televised racing. And then, two weeks later, the inconsistent Unbridled lost the Preakness to a horse who had soundly beaten him in the Blue Grass. And then he lost the Belmont quite badly. When the Triple Crown is the beginning and end of horse racing coverage in the popular media, there's the end of the story.

There's little season-to-season continuity in trying to hang everything on connections, either - especially if you want to champion "little guy" connections. By definition, such people probably never before had a horse of national importance and it's relatively improbable that they will again next year, and the year after, and the year after that (and if they did, they would no longer be an underdog, but someone to root against). So all those people who got attached to the nice little old lady/the Sackatoga team/the underdog-du-jour will tune in next year for another parade of barely raced horses with marginal credentials on their own merits and a new collection of human interest stories.

I'm not saying that good human interest stories are bad and should be ignored. I'm just saying that it probably hasn't been healthy for the sport of horse racing to further encourage the idea that the horses themselves are here today-forgotten tomorrow, with a shelf life of five weeks or less, by centering coverage on the people, rather than the horses.

I felt this needed to be said as a follow-up.

The sport of horse racing is stuck in nasty catch-22. Coverage in popular media (newspapers, general sports magazines, etc) is down significantly from what it once was to the point where it is all but nonexistent. I'm not saying this as a general longing for the good ol' days - I say this as someone who, long ago, learned about this sport while creating a gargantuan scrapbook of articles cut out of general newspapers. I wasn't able to subscribe to the likes of the Blood-Horse and Thoroughbred Record (as it was named in those days) until I was 16, years after I started my scrapbook. I would not have been able to create that scrapbook as a horse-crazy little kid today, because the material isn't there.

Newspapers and television are not obligated to carry coverage of anything, let alone coverage of a "sport" which is generally regarded, circa 2007, as one with limited mass appeal which mainly exists as a gambling vehicle. I have no doubt that legitimate readership/viewer surveys done by general media show horse racing as a marginal market. In short, if there aren't enough people who care, they're not going to waste the space/time covering our sport - but without coverage of horse racing in the general media, how are we going to attract new fans?

I don't have a clever answer.

But I have a suspicion that we're not going to get lasting new fans because of human interest stories about "little guy" connections who lucked into the horse of a lifetime and all-consuming obsession about the Triple Crown as if racing barely exists any other day of the year. That might hook a newbie into watching the Derby, but there needs to be a compelling reason to tune in for the Belmont even if the Derby winner lost the Preakness, or to look to see how so-and-so horse is doing now that it's July or August, or to tune in next year, even if last year's publicized "little guy" is back at Nowhere Downs with nothing but a couple of claimers.

I don't have anything against small, "feel-good" connections, but I am convinced that it is difficult for a newcomer to form a sustained attachment to the sport in the absence of any continuity and familiarity of the participants.

I want a Triple Crown winner, but I want him to be a genuine star. I rooted against Funny Cide, Charismatic, and War Emblem. Silver Charm would have been fine, as would Afleet Alex, but the one I really wanted recently was Smarty Jones. He was on the verge of absolute superstardom. The Alex crew was going to bring him back as a 4yo, so someone willing to do that would be even better.