Churchill Downs Incorporated and the New York Racing Association on Monday announced a six-race championship series over a span of five months that includes the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes and a $5 million prize pool, set to begin next year.
The first and third legs of the Triple Crown are scheduled next year for the traditional five weeks apart between May 1 and June 5. A spokesperson for the Maryland Jockey Club said a date for the Preakness next year has not yet been announced and declined comment on the championship series of races in Kentucky and New York.
The Preakness is not included. Note in both 2025 and 2026 the Derby winners skipped the Preakness as they apparently considered it too soon for their horses to recover.
The Triple Crown has been been popular for close to a century. Thoughts about if this new series will replace it in popularity?
Given how few horses actuially compete in all three legs of the Triple Crown, escpecially how many Kentucky Derby champions are immediately withdrwan and put out to stud, I doubt a six-race series is going to attract a lot of top-tier horses.
The last time a horse won the Triple Crown was Justify in 2018. There were 20 horses in the field for the Kentucky Derby, eight for the Preakness and nine for the Belmont. Only three horses ran all three races. There’s never going to be a six-time winner in a single year - looking at the article, I doubt there will even be a single horse entered in all six races - so why bother?
I know why, money. But unless you actually bet on the races, who cares.
This is a tough call, and I say that as a fan of horse racing.
On the one hand, I understand the reluctance of owners and trainers to race their horses too often. Sure, it’s not unusual to see $5000 claimers race four or five days in a 16-day meet at a B-track (the 16 days being spread over six weeks, note), but you think twice about doing that if you’ve got a $100,000 claimer running for major stakes at an A-track. So, though the Preakness is a major stakes race, it’s just too short after the Kentucky Derby for today’s owners and trainers to be comfortable with entering their horses in it.
On the other hand, it is a fact that racing is not as popular as it once was. There was a time when, if you wanted to gamble, it was the only game in town. But that was long before legal and licensed lotteries and casinos everywhere. Those are much easier to play than learning to study all the information in the Daily Racing Form, and drawing a reasonable conclusion as to a likely winner from it.
A racetrack is a business, and like any business, it exists to make money. In a track’s case, it makes money by taking a percentage of every dollar wagered on racing. If fewer people are wagering, the track is making less money than it would like. Some tracks have responded by turning their facilities into “racinos,” where slot machines and table games provide additional revenue, but sometimes not even they can keep the business going: in the last couple of years, Hastings Racecourse in Vancouver and Golden Gate Fields in San Francisco have shut down totally.
With all that in mind, I noted this in the AP item:
Emphasis added by me. Racing needs to create a new generation of fans. I look at myself, and the other regulars at my local track, and though I hate to admit it, we’re all old. If racing is to survive, especially given the business model I described above, it needs new fans, who will wager.
I can see a six-race series working, if it’s done correctly. No horse will win all six races, of course, but it might work if points are assigned for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, most points at the end of the season get a free pass into the Breeder’s Cup. Just an example, but that might work. At the very least, it would build interest over the season, rather than concentrating it over five weeks in the spring.
Well, here’s an interesting new wrinkle: The date of the Preakness will be moving from its usual third Saturday in May to the fourth Sunday of the month, leaving only 13 days between the Preakness and the Belmont:
I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. It sounds almost as if Maryland is looking at Churchill Downs and the New York Racing Association (NYRA), and saying “Well, if you’ve decided on a six-race series that doesn’t include me, then I’m going to change my calendar to to upset yours.”
Or it might be that Maryland believes that moving the date of the Preakness forces owners and trainers to choose between the Triple Crown or the Six Races of both. Or with only 13 days between the Preakness and the Belmont, they will skip the Belmont.
Divide the six races into two groups of three , with horses committed to each group.
The ultimate race for one group will be the Kentucky Derby, with the Preakness being the ultimate race for the other
Then race the four top horses from each group against each other in the Belmont, so you come up with the true Horse of the Year.
Profit!
By doing separrate groups, they can compress the timeframe for the six races if they want, the two races leading to the Derby and Preakness are more important, and the glory of the Triple Crown still means something. Hell, since there’d be different horses in each “division” you could even run the Derby and Preakness on the same weekend, like the NFL conference championships.
Well, that’s one solution. It might upset the traditionalists, but then, I think any proposed solution will upset the traditionalists.
I’m not sure that I like the idea of committing a horse to a group of competitors. Entering a horse in any race is always completely voluntary; if an owner or trainer determines that this is a race to enter, they’ll enter it; if they determine that this is a race to avoid, they’ll avoid it. If the horse is entered, but the vet or the stewards determine that it must be scratched in the days prior to a race, or on race day itself, then it will be scratched. For these reasons, it seems to me that committing a horse to a set of races won’t get a lot of buy-in.
Then there is the Kentucky Derby, which is so popular that it gets at least a hundred nominations when entries open, if not more. You can buy future wagers on the Derby that early, and while the odds are generally attractive, there is no guarantee that the horse you wagered on will even make it into the race. So, to narrow the field down to 20 starters (the most you can have at Churchill Downs), a point system is used in winter and spring meets at various tracks. That is, if the owners and trainers read the writing on the wall, and realize their horse just isn’t Derby material, and choose to drop their nomination.
If Churchill and NYRA are determined to create a six-race series, then I’d suggest getting other racing associations involved, and stagger the six races with about a month in between each. The Preakness could be moved elsewhere on the calendar. This is not unheard of, especially in the case of major stakes—after all, the Kentucky Derby was run in September just a few years ago, as the world was coming out of Covid.
Wait… wait… wait… so these two specific racing organizations, in response to the Triple Crown being devalued, have decided to toss in three other races and leave the Preakness hanging? Not even a trophy, title, or official prize or reward for whatever this thing is?
I need to know more. Something is not adding up here. I understand that something needs to be done to help restore the prestige of the Triple Crown, but making everything convoluted and confusing isn’t the answer. Look what that did for NASCAR.
By “group” I was thinking along the lines of taking all the thoroughbreds in the same age cohort and randomly dividing them into two groups, not making a dedicated team of, e.g., 12 horses in each group. And the two-year old races and three year-old races other than the six Championship Series would be open to all horses, same as now.
The Triple Crown will not be devalued. It will remain as it always has been: a prestigious accomplishment worthy of the record books. If it is nested inside a six-race series, it will still be the Triple Crown. This approach is not without precedent in other sports: the Masters will always be a prestigious golf tournament, even though it is nested within the race for the FedEx Cup.
There are many stakes races throughout the racing season. Not all are as well known as the Triple Crown races, but they still exist, all the way from ungraded stakes all the way to the biggest, Grade I stakes. It would be easy to include some of these Grade I’s in the six-race series: the Arkansas Derby (Oaklawn Park) in late March, the Travers Stakes (Saratoga) in August, and so on.
@Kent_Clark , I’m afraid I’m not understanding. Could you clarify?