Results tagged “Triple Crown” from The Sports Desk
What's disappointing about today's Belmont Stakes is not that Big Brown lost but that he didn't run his race. We might never know exactly why he didn't. We'll definitely never know what would have happened if he did.
Of the 11 hopefuls to come up short in the Belmont during this 30-year Triple Crown drought, Big Brown is the only one to lay an egg like this without an apparent hard-luck excuse -- something like Spectacular Bid's safety-pin mishap or War Emblem's stumbling start.
As the ABC-TV commentators speculated that the well-documented left-front-foot trouble had been worse than the trainer Rick Dutrow let on, I thought of a 1971 Sports Illustrated cover headline: "CANONERO SHOULD NOT HAVE RUN."
Continue reading Distance wasn't their problem.
Unlike 30 years ago, when Affirmed completed the last Triple Crown sweep, people talk horses with the aid of objective measuring sticks. Since 1992, the Daily Racing Form has published Andy Beyer's speed figures in horses' past-performance charts, rating horses' efforts based on their clockings and the apparent conditions of the tracks. Looking at Big Brown's Beyers, Racing Form executive/columnist/blogger Steve Crist says the star colt's Kentucky Derby and Preakness ratings compare unfavorably with recent Triple Crown hopefuls'.
Read Crist's whole blog entry and the data by clicking here.
About this blog
Kevin Modesti watches sports from a new angle since his promotion from sports columnist to sports editor for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. In his new blog, Modesti not only comments on the big sports stories of the moment-- he talks about what makes them big. Think of it as a conversation with readers about how these stories should be covered.
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