FROM the excitement in the air, the electricty pulsing through the barns, the buzz in the media and the rising anticipation among millions, you know something big is about to happen in the American turf world.
You can feel it, sense it, taste it. We’re sitting on a Triple Crown. After 26 long, frustrating years, filled with hopes and disappointments, we finally have a horse ready to scale Olympus and take down the single greatest – and most elusive – prize in sports.
Smarty Jones is the name and winning is his game. The flash chestnut who swept the Kentucky Derby and raced into folklore with a record-shattering blitz of the Preakness Stakes, is poised to do it all over again in the Belmont Stakes this Saturday.
The potential rewards will match the magnitude of the feat. Nearly a million dollars in prize money, a $5 million bonus that will make him the richest thoroughbred in 300 years of the turf, his name engraved in history, his place secure in the hearts of everyone who sees him do it – and a $50 million breeding future.
Here is destiny’s child, a legend in the making.
Of course, he has to do it, first. Holding the celebration before the coronation – as so many of us seem to be doing – is fraught with risk. The odds against winning the Triple Crown are almost insuperable. In 121 years, only 11 great horses have done it. Dozens of the finest horses to gallop the planet have tried and failed.
The level of competition, the distances of the three races over three different tracks in three different states, all shoe-horned into five weeks, place a unique premium on talent, soundness, physical fitness, mental preparation, pedigree, management, riding – and luck.
Few make the cut. But Smarty Jones to date has passed each of them with a flourish. The Belmont, at a mile and a half, is generally the least dazzling of the Triple Crown races, a plodders’ delight. But when the Crown itself is on the line, the Belmont suddenly becomes everything, the alpha and omega of the whole sport.
That’s why 110,000 or more will come out to see him at the weekend. Belmont Park is the perfect showcase for a horse to prove his stuff. It’s a huge grassy park, a mile and a half around, with a long, lung-busting backstretch run, wide turns and a long run-home – a kind of Tour de France for horses, designed to test stamina and valor to the core.
Saturday’s last quarter of a mile is going to be one of the most dramatic climaxes of any horse race in America in a long time. Smarty is either going to be there, winging and soaring to the thundering delirium of the crowds – or faltering under the oppressive weight of the campaign.
Five horses in the past seven years – Silver Charm, Real Quiet, Charismatic, War Emblem and Funny Cide – have won the Derby and the Preakness, only to go down in the Belmont. But not one of those five went into the Belmont with the same high expectations that are bubbling around Smarty Jones or bearing his now-global celebrity.
Smarty might have modest credentials, unknown connections, a humble home base at Philadelphia Park and a down-home name, but when the racing crowd looks at him they see Rocky Marciano, a heavyweight knockout artist.
Throughout the past month, I have been alternately enthralled and cautious with Smarty Jones – for good reason.
The first Belmont I saw – in 1958 – Tim Tam, from the all-conquering Calumet Farm Kentucky Derby factory, was considered unbeatable. Yet he lost by a city block to Cavan. He fractured a bone in the stretch run and literally limped under the wire, bravely holding for second.
After that, we saw a slew of “unbeatable” Belmont sureshots bite the dust bidding for the Triple Crown: Carry Back in 1961, Northern Dancer in 1964, Canonero in 1971, Spectacular Bid in 1979, Pleasant Colony in 1981, Alysheba in 1987 and Sunday Silence in 1989. You could pave the sidewalks of New York in gold with all the money lost on ’em.
The history of the Belmont, like all great races, is fleshed with great drama, controversies and rivalries.
For example, there never was a Belmont like the 1971 fiesta when a then-record 86,000 swarmed through the gates to see Canonero’s bid to sweep the Triple Crown.
The copper-colored Venezuelan shipper, who stunned the Derby and blew the Preakness away, was the Latino idol of the hour and they came by the thousands, with trumpet, song, dance, gala costumes (and cash) to cheer him and bet him. Canonero injured himself in the running and finished off the board but he gave New York racing an experience it had never seen before or since. A day to remember.
To this day, no one can make head or tail of Spectacular Bid’s failure in 1979. His raucous, amiable trainer Buddy Delp blamed a safety pin in the horse’s foot the day of the race; others blamed Buddy for giving the horse to jockey Ronnie Franklin, a temperamental amateur with substance problems, who started the week with a furious public brawl with Angel Cordero.
Two years later, another Triple Crown hopeful, Pleasant Colony, came unstuck amid a furor over his veterinarian, Dr. Janice Runkle, who was mysteriously banned from the barn the day of the race. A few months later, her body was discovered in an out-of-the-way site in Michigan.
One of the most remarkable Belmonts fixed forever in my mind was in 1998 when Victory Gallop, ridden by Gary Stevens, beat Real Quiet by a nose on the line.
A year earlier, Stevens had won just about everything on Silver Charm, trained by Bob Baffert. They even hit the $4 mill Dubai Cup.
But here they were, a year later, fierce rivals. Baffert won the Derby and Preakness with Real Quiet and if he could take the Belmont, he’d win the Triple Crown and a $5 million bonus.
At the eighth pole, Real Quiet was four lengths in front. Stevens was seven lengths back on Victory Gallop. How easy it would have been for Stevens to “give one” to his old friend Bob. Instead, he rode the hide off Victory Gallop, denying his great benefactor history and 5 mill by a margin of about one inch.
To this day, Baffert swears Real Quiet won. He still calls him my “Triple Crown horse.”
But when anyone challenges the integrity of horse racing and all its interlocking human alliances, I think of Real Quiet and Gary Stevens.
No matter what he does Saturday, Smarty Jones is unlikely to dethrone Secretariat as the ultimate Crown-bearer. Secretariat’s golden gossamer looks, his unbelievable winning times, topped by his 31-length victory in the 1973 Belmont, is now the stuff of fables.
But if Smarty waltzes off with the Belmont Saturday, it is unlikely that even Secretariat could surpass him in popular acclaim. He’ll bring the house down. Look for the placards, “Smarty for President.” There is something about this new red idol who has captured the public’s fancy. It’s hard to explain because it’s a kind of magic.
In the last 30 years, only three horses – Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed – have won the Triple Crown. They were in every way great horses, known at the time they won the Belmont Stakes, but certified with lustrous performances later against older horses, proving that a great horse is always a great horse, at any time and in any company.
Does Smarty belong in this group? So far he has exhibited not one flaw. He has won every race, all eight of them, over many distances, on all kinds of tracks in all kinds of company, galloping with such cool disposition, fluid strides and mature poise that the Belmont Stakes appears almost easily within his grasp.
The world expects it of him. They’ll bet him accordingly. No one really expects him to lose. But if for some unforeseen reason, he falters, not one horseman or bettor will be shocked.
The Belmont Stakes at the end of the Triple Crown trail is just that formidable a task, even for a warrior like Smarty Jones. The coronation is due at dusk, Saturday, and if he makes it, you can be sure of one thing: He will deserve it.