The Backwards Triple Crown
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
We’re having a hard time getting our head around the decision to run this year’s Triple Crown races backwards. By which we mean the Belmont will be run first, this Saturday, to be followed by the Kentucky Derby and then, lastly, the Preakness. Which is all mixed up, apparently because of Covid-19. Normally, the Run for the Roses is the first of the greatest three race series in the Milky Way. Then the Preakness and the Belmont.
We confess the new concept confuses us. It reminds us of a column we once failed to finish because it was too difficult. In it we attempted to imagine how a race announcer might “call” a race among slow lorises. A slow loris is a nocturnal strepsirrhine primate — a cat-sized, furry fellow whose eyes and nose are on the front of its face, like a human. The slow loris is supposedly the slowest moving of all mammals.
We first came to appreciate such lorises at the Bronx Zoo. One had to enter its nocturama, because slow lorises sleep during the day. To move from one branch to another, a slow loris could take half an hour or more. While we were there, we saw two slow lorises get into a fight. One of them took a swing at the other. It was like watching a clock move. The other one tried to dodge the blow, by jerking his head a micrometer a minute.
When we later tried to explain this to the children, they rolled around on the floor laughing. So at bedtime we tried to “call” a race among slow lorises in which the object was to place last. “Little Jimmy is in the lead, lagging by about two lengths,” we announced. “Uh oh, Ringle Eyes has suddenly stopped. The crowd is on its seats. Will Little Jimmy rocket past Ringle and lose the laurels? Stay tuned. We should know within a week.”
You can see why the column was impossible. Then again, too, what’s the point of the Triple Crown if the races are going to be run backwards? It’s hard to fathom, like a race without jockeys or Man o’ War in the Sanford Memorial back in 1919, when horses started from behind a line. By one account, Man o’ War was restless at the start. The jockey was turning him around, when the gun went off with the steed facing backwards.
It seems, though, that the jockey got Man o’ War pointed right in time for him to make a run that will be remembered forever. Like the immortal Whirlaway, one of the most glorious horses to watch (please see above) because of his flowing tail. He was dubbed Mr. Longtail. He once ran a race on the outside rail — and still won. The whole concept of it seems to be incapable of computing, and yet it happened.
Which brings us back to this year’s Triple Crown. The idea of beginning the Triple Crown with the longest and hardest of the races . . . well, it somehow takes all of the suspense out of the thing. Suppose Tiz the Law, the six to five favorite on the morning line, wins the Belmont. Who is going to stay awake through the Derby and the Preakness? By the time Tiz the Law rumbles past the wire at the Preakness, after all, we could already know whether he won the Triple Crown.