The tenuous Triple Crowns

by Bob Heyden

The week before the Little Brown Jug is upon us, it’s necessary to point out for the 23rd straight year there will not be a Pacing Triple Crown winner as Fragment captured the Messenger at Yonkers and Sweet Lovin Lou upset at The Meadowlands in the Cane Pace.

No Pan Intended was the last Pacing Triple Crown winner in 2003.

If neither Fragment or Sweet Lovin Lou wins the Jug, it’ll be 29 straight Pacing Triple Crown races held with 29 different winners and the 2020 Messenger was canceled due to COVID-19.

For a repeater, you have to go back to 2017 when Stay Hungry took both the Cane and Messenger and seven years before that to Rock N Roll Heaven in 2010 who captured the Jug and Messenger en route to Horse of the Year (HOY) honors.

This would be the longest dry spell ever for single winners only. So, what’s up? Better yet, what happened?

The last seven years of the 1960s saw seven Triple Crown winners with three on the pace and four on the trot. The top nine Cane Pace purses were consecutive from 1982-90. The Hambletonian saw its eight biggest pots from 2005-12 and the Messenger from 2006-09. The Jug is still a huge event and it’s purse is high, and the Kentucky Futurity has maintained a high-profile status, but not so much the Yonkers Trot, as its biggest purses were from 2006-09 with Glidemaster sealing the deal in 2006 with a record $728,930.

It’s not the individual races so much but the series, especially on the pacing side, that seem to have had much better days as not a single horse this year raced in both the Cane and Messenger, which was 100 per cent unheard of in yesteryear.

We have two Triple Crowns and that no doubt waters it down some.

There have been 490 Breeders Crown races and 525 Triple Crown events, counting this year’s Kentucky Futurity and Jug in that total.

The Breeders Crown is going great guns and really is the decider in year-end divisions and ballots. Yet the Triple Crown often seems like that favorite uncle who made us all laugh as kids who doesn’t seem funny anymore.

Nothing would be more welcome than some kind of resurrection or even a rebirth of sorts to let’s say the Messenger and the Cane and the Yonkers Trot.

What was once a badge of honor winning those races now seems more like a footnote. Many fans are not even sure, or curious about, what makes up our Triple Crown(s).

It has bounced around a bit, switched venues with a bit too much regularity, but it might just be the general malaise that racing everywhere has endured and with it it’s treasured history.

No doubt the Triple Crown needs not just a tune-up but an overhaul, that is, if we even want it to be somewhere near what it used to be. Is that a pipe dream? Probably. I loved it when the spotlight really did shine on the horses in the post parades for the big races back at Yonkers and Roosevelt and even on the odd occasion at Freehold. Remember, the only pacing dead heat in a Triple Crown race came at Freehold in 2004 with Timesareachanging and Western Terror in the Cane Pace.

I look at the entirety of the Triple Crown series like someone standing on the ocean’s shore with the Crowns on a raft a couple hundred feet out. They’re stuck and still too far out to really recognize.

How far will it drift? Is it retrievable? Hey, not all of us today look like we did when we graduated high school. Heck, for me personally, I’m just hoping the ceremonies continue.

BOB-BING AND WEAVING

• Best Chip was the fastest horse on Meadowlands Pace Night (1:46 4), Hambletonian Day (1:46.1), and Canadian Pacing Derby Night (1:46.4). Not bad for a horse who started his career five-for-40.

• Bourbonista S is our reigning North America trotting queen with a 1:48.4 record. She started out six for her first 25.

• Super Chapter just won the Yonkers International Trot after the Cashman and certainly has his hat in the HOY ring. It would be a first, since no HOY trotter sired a HOY trotter. Will Chapter Seven, the 2011 HOY, become the first?