Maddux Sports Blog

This is a bittersweet day in my mind. It’s a Triple Crown race, and I love those – that’s the sweet part. The bitterness comes from the fact that the Triple Crown is over for another year at about 6:30 tonight. That means that racing fades back into obscurity, and many of the great three year olds that I have grown to know and, for the most part, really like won’t be heard of much anymore. It happens every year, but I still never get used to this feeling. Before I get all sad and start crying, though, let’s take a look at how I see this race breaking down:

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The Belmont Stakes got a lot less interesting from the public perspective on Friday with the news that Rachel Alexandra will not be running in the race. Though I was beginning to hold out hope because the decision was taking longer than expected, this is pretty much exactly what I was expecting since about 12 seconds before the Belmont ended. Though the filly ran one heck of a race and deserves all of the credit in the world for what she accomplished, she was losing ground to the Derby champion, Mine That Bird, awfully quickly, and it was just a matter of moments before she would have been caught and passed. The Belmont is significantly longer than the Preakness (5/16 of a mile), and is further than any horse in the race is ever likely to be asked to run again in their lives. She clearly didn’t like the track at Pimlico on Preakness day, but the fact is that there are more reasons to believe that she could have been beaten in the Belmont than there were to think that she could have won the race. That’s not to say that she couldn’t win – she certainly could – just that there was a much greater chance that she could lose the Belmont than there was that she would lose the Preakness.

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