Birdstone wins!
This Derby-win-Preakness-win-Belmont-loss pattern has become very tiresome. STOP TEASING US! I hope that next year’s Derby winner loses the damn Preakness just to spare us the buildup.
And to add insult to injury, he loses to a New York horse.
The Philadelphia curse strikes again.
I remember thinking when Smarty kicked that he’d kicked way too early and I could tell he wouldn’t be able to hold off birdstone. I’m aching for a triple crown winner, I was pretty disappointed.
In my lifetime, I would like to see a great horse. I thought when I saw Fusaichi Pegasis come around that that would be my chance but no such luck. Next year I guess.
You know, it annoyed me to no end that Smarty was touted so highly. It’s like everyone forgot that Funny Cide and Silver Charm and all the rest also “seemed poised for greatness”, etc., but somehow, every time it happens, we still get three weeks of Secretariat retrospectives.
Well, I’m going against the crowd here - I thought it was just heartbreaking. I thought he was just a beautiful animal, and I really wanted to see him make it. And it was so close! That last few seconds were just so sad to me. Sorry, Smarty - I was pulling for ya!
It’s pretty tough for a horse to be the best in the country at all distances, especially when the entire pack is working together against you. That’s kinda like expecting Lance Armstrong to win the Tour de France without a supporting team. The Belmont, a beetch of a distance, again took it’s toll on a horse that’s superior at the more normally seen, shorter distances.
This bugs me as well. In baseball, when someone is, say, close to .400, there’s all kinds of historical retrospective: “The last man to hit .400 was Ted Williams in 1941, and since then Tony Gwynn hit .394, and George Brett hit whatever, and Todd Helton came close, etc, etc” but in horse racing it’s like the recent past never happened. There’s been near triple crown winners in 4 of the last 6 years, right? Or 5 of the last 6 years? But everyone seems to have forgotten all of that. At some point the sample size has to be large enough to say that it’s just not likely to happen.
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