The story of this year's Belmont will forever be to me how the bluebloods of the New York racing world refused to let an upstart from Philadelphia Park win the triple crown on their home court.
Servis knew what was coming. He was taped last week talking about how he expected some "strange instructions" to be given to some of the other riders. And I guess in my naivity I thought he was saying that he was expecting to have to overcome some rough riding by his competitors.
But you don't have to look any further than the race Purge ran to uncover some "strange" riding instructions. As far as I can tell the only thing Purge was in that race for was to "pressure" Smarty Jones.
On paper Purge had the ability to be the pace setter. And I think it was the potential of Purge's early speed that forced Elliot to race for position early.
But Purge chose not to grab the lead and thereby string the horses out. He chose to take up a position that forced a "pocket" of pressure around Smarty, from which, as has been pointed out by others, Smarty never got a breather.
And so Smarty turned for home. And for a brief moment the question was how many lengths is he going to win by? (And maybe it wasn't a lack of nerve which prompted Elliot's early move, but a media induced conviction that he was obligated to chase the ghost of Secretariat.) But here comes Birdstone, rested and trained by Zito over the deep Oklahoma Training Track, as has been pointed out by a previous astute poster, to run the exact type of off the pace race he ran.
And at that point there was not much Elliot was going to do. Chavez might have whipped the horse home, Pincay might picked up his head and carried him over the wire, Shoe or Julie might have sweet talked him to victory with their hands, but Elliot is Elliot. He's a pretty good rider on the Pennsylvania circuit who, looking into the glare of the headlights, did the best he could and the horse came in second.
That's horse racing. And that's the Triple Crown. Again, this ain't no Mud Club, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.
This was the Belmont Stakes with a Triple Crown on the line. And I think Servis was absolutely correct to presume the heavy weights in the racing/breeding industry were going to do everything they could to insure that their most cherised prize was not going to go to an upstart Pennsylvania bred from Philadelphia Park.
But there's always next year.



Post Edited (06-07-04 20:14)