At a morning press conference at Churchill Downs yesterday, Carl Nafzger, the trainer of Kentucky Derby winner and last year’s 2-year-old of the year Street Sense, said that he and owner James Tafel had made their decision, and that the horse would not run in the Belmont.

“Let’s don’t chase spilled water,” Nafzger said. “We got beat and we got outran. So that’s behind us, and our decision now is to regroup.”

This is just one of the worst examples of what is becoming a torrent of unsportsmanlike comments from Nafzger, who also said that Tafel “wanted to win the Triple Crown like you wouldn’t believe.”

“We’re not going to the Belmont. We have set goals for this horse — we want the Travers, and we want the Breeders’ Cup Classic.”

The best I can hope for is that they are lying, and that Street Sense is hurt. A despicable thing to hope for, but it’s better than the idea that they are so unbelievably simpleminded and frightened.

Modern racing is plagued by attrition. Horses are fragile and unpredictable things. Small injuries that put a horse on the shelf for a month or two are the regular state of affairs. Heavily hyped horses hit the track and run the wrong way. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the grueling Triple Crown trail. By the time we get to Belmont, race fans find themselves confronted with a motley assortment of also-rans, and many of the horses touted through the spring have departed. Last year, Barbaro was in the hospital, Bernardini opted out of the race. There were good runners there, you’ll remember: The horses that had completed the superfecta behind Barbaro in the Derby were all freshened up for the Belmont. That was because they had all skipped the Preakness.

Rarely do we see guts, rarely do we see the spirit of real competition.

There are some Belmont Stakes I will always relish — the sun shining, the joint jumping, “Go Smarty!” hand fans pinned to the wall, and before that, the whole Funny Cide circus. A particularly well-worn memory for me comes from 2002: I had a lot of friends with me at the track, we were right on the rail, and it was a beautiful day. A record crowd was in attendance to see if War Emblem could complete the Triple Crown, having won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, and it seemed as if the majority of them had green and white striped War Emblem sticker pasted onto some article of clothing. War Emblem had a horrible time getting around the Big Sandy, but my wife cashed a ticket on the longest odds horse to ever get under the wire in front: Sarava.

All three of the races I mentioned above had a horse in the gate gunning for the Triple Crown. The buzz was incredible. The build up unimaginable.

But that was a singular thing. We were rooting for Smarty or Funny Cide or War Emblem. It wasn’t not about racing, per se, it was about a horse.

This year was looking different. We were poised at the threshold of something very real. Belmont was set to be the race of the decade. The Derby trifecta had repeated in the Preakness. Hard Spun, Curlin, and Street Sense had set themselves up not only as the best colts of the 3-year-old generation, but as real competitors, strong horses willing and able to come back at one another.

Yesterday morning, the owners and trainer of Street Sense delivered what I consider to be the biggest blow to thoroughbred racing I have witnessed since I began writing about it. This is worse, I believe, than Barbaro’s breakdown — which was tragic luck, after all, not willful abandonment. Barbaro’s breakdown was a bad deal of the cards, an aleatory nightmare; this is a decision to deprive the sport.

If Street Sense had proved himself less than we thought, that would be one thing, but on the first Saturday in May, Street Sense broke the Juvenile curse by becoming the first winner of the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile to win the Kentucky Derby, and the first Juvenile horse of the year to take the roses since Spectacular Bid. He took that race by coming on the rail like some legendary mystery train, whooshing by his competition as if they were donkeys.

Street Sense’s Preakness was incredible. He ran his race, and when he shot by the field on the far turn, it looked as if there was no stopping him. On the stretch, he ran his final furlong and a half in 18 4/5 seconds: That’s hoofing it. At the wire, he was just a click off of setting a record for the fastest Preakness ever. Think about it — that’s the description of the horse that lost.

If Street Sense was looking around on the stretch, “gawking” as Borel claimed (though it seems, in retrospect, that it was Borel doing the gawking, not the horse), it wasn’t the crowd he was looking at — it was the Freak.

The once precocious Curlin was pushed into the deep end at the Kentucky Derby and should have drowned. He surprised us when he shook it off and rallied through adversity to get up into the money. At the Preakness he blew our minds, when he found another gear on the stretch and came back to grind down Street Sense in the last steps of the race. It was thrilling. People have been mentioning it to me since. The competition had the fans engaged. People cared.

There we would have been, the sun shining, the three best 3-year-olds back on the track. “Who do you like?” would have echoed in the halls. There would have been friendly arguments and cockeyed theories. We would have had three stickers to choose from. It wouldn’t have been a Smarty Jones party: It would have a real horse race. And in one fell blow, Nafzger and Tafel have turned the sport of kings into a circus of chumps.

mwatman@nysun.com