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Almost Preakness Day

It's Black-Eyed Susan Stakes Day at Pimlico, which means tomorrow is Preakness Day, the most overlooked and overshadowed jewel of horse racing's Triple Crown. The Preakness has the misfortune of being the second race and the shortest and comes too close to the Derby, being only two weeks later. The proximity to the grinding mile and a quarter of the Derby causes many of the losing Derby horses to skip the Preakness for freshening with an eye towards going after the Derby winner in the Belmont, which comes three weeks after the Preakness.

Being a somewhat overlooked race bodes well for Big Brown as he will face only one other Derby horse in Gayego. Big Brown will go off as the odds on favorite to win in a race that almost everyone will be wishing and hoping to see both the colt win and all of the horses to complete without incident.

In an all too familiar pattern, Big Brown's principal owners IEAH has announced that Big Brown will not race past this year. An announcement about where he will stand at stud and the deal that will be made with the stud farm and his stallion syndication was supposed to have been made yesterday but the announcement was postponed as the deal apparently fell through. For IEAH to get the maximum value from the syndication deal, he better win tomorrow. Leaving value aside for the moment, retiring Big Brown after six races, assuming he goes on to run in the Belmont, is no good for either the industry or horse racing fans. Big Brown has the potential to be the star the industry needs to help rebuild its fan base. It would be a great benefit to the industry to see him, like Curlin, run as a four year old. More importantly, for the benefit of the breed, it is important to see him run as much as possible to determine if his bad feet are a condition that would ultimately be a conformation and racing flaw that would be passed along to his offspring. As we discussed earlier, the injury problem with horses as shown with Eight Belles and Barbaro is attributable, in my opinion, mostly to breeding horses for quick sale rather than for racing durability. Early retirement of quality horses to the breeding shed only reinforces the problem.

The owners of Pimlico are praying for more than just a safe trip of all of the horse tomorrow. Among other things, the principal owners of Magna Entertainment are praying that the weather forecast calling for a sunny day with highs in the seventies comes true as it will help bring out a crowd. Pimlico definitely needs a crowd as the viability of the track is more and more dependent on the Preakness. The failure of Maryland to pass legislation allowing slot machines at the track has put the continued operation of Pimlico, and with it the location and perhaps the date of the Preakness, in question. The Preakness has been sponsors and corporate tent buyers in recent years and the current economy is helping matters. Although attendance was a record 121,000 last year corporate sales were down. Even though the Preakness managed to drive Pimlico's profit up, Magna lost over $100 million last year. It wouldn't take too many down years at Pimlico to put the Preakness in jeopardy.

Full post as published by Sports Biz on May 16, 2008 (boomark / email).