One stumble, one bad break, or two minutes are all that separate a champion from a flop. Superstars are whisked off the track and sent to the stud barn mere weeks after their greatest triumphs. So it’s no surprise that a big horse can completely change a trainer’s career. Just ask John Servis.

A year ago, I was congratulating Servis on putting in a valiant effort with Smarty Jones, the horse that took the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and made all of us believe that we had a Triple Crown horse. Team Smarty had captured the imagination of America, and a record crowd gasped at the Belmont Stakes as Smarty was passed, deep in the stretch, by the Nick Zito-trained Birdstone.

This Saturday, Servis made it to the Belmont winners’ circle, standing next to a filly named Round Pound, who had just grabbed the one-mile, Grade I Acorn. Zito’s In The Gold even poked a head in front deep in the stretch, but Round Pound had guts, and she went by Shug McGaughey’s Smuggler to win. It was her fourth win in a row, an impressive feat after being laid off since winning the Grade II Fantasy stakes at Oaklawn Park on April 15.

Servis had some success before Smarty, winning graded stakes with two fillies named Jostle and Zonk, but his big winners had been few and far between. This year, the horses coming out of his barn are noticeably more competitive than they had been before the big horse came through. Already, he’s had Rockport Harbor, now on a layoff after a very bad run as the favorite in the April 30 Lexington Stakes.

Fox Hill Farms owns Round Pound and Rockport Harbor, and they owned Jostle as well, having been a client of Servis’s since 1991.Yet the post-Smarty Servis is suddenly much more prominent than he once was. Maybe Fox Hill Farms would have sent two graded-stakes runners to his barn this year anyway, but still, 2005 is a very different year for Servis than 2003.The big horse altered everything.

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Zito’s first big horse was Thirty Six Red, who won the 1990 Gotham (Grade II) and the Wood (Grade II),and placed in the Belmont Stakes (Grade 1). That horse set him on a path that landed him in the National Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame last week.

Aside from the Hall election, this has been a year of disappointments for Zito. The Brooklyn-born trainer had five highly rated horses going in the Kentucky Derby and three in the Preakness, and came up woefully short both times.

In fact, if you were to watch only the races broadcast on network television you would be under the impression that Zito couldn’t train a dog to eat. Why, you’d be wondering, send up a guy like Zito instead of a guy like Tim Ritchey, Afleet Alex’s trainer? For the past four years, Ritchey’s horses have been in the money about 50% of the time. He keeps a 45-horse stable at Delaware, and last year was the 13th year in a row that he’d been in the top four trainers at that park.

The simple answer is that nobody cares about Delaware Park, and Ritchey had never won a Grade I race until Alex came along. The pockets backing Ritchey’s stable aren’t anywhere near as deep as those backing Zito; the latter, while an excellent trainer, wouldn’t be going to the Hall if he didn’t train for the likes of Marylou Whitney and George Steinbrenner.

That’s what makes it even more fantastic when Ritchey stands in the winner’s circle, as he did after Afleet Alex’s incredible 4 1 /2-length victory in the Preakness. Can he do it again next Saturday at Belmont? For the past two weeks, Alex has been doing his typical routine of stamina-building jogging and lazy gallops, and he calmly shipped up to Belmont on Saturday. The horse ran well last Wednesday in his first real workout since the Preakness, finishing the 6-furlong breeze in 1:14.20.Yesterday at Belmont, Alex jogged 1 1 /2 miles and then galloped 1 1 /2 miles. He certainly does not look like a horse that went through what he did at the Preakness.

Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo also worked out yesterday, breezing 6 furlongs in 1:14.80. Other than Afleet Alex, he’s the only horse to have lasted throughout the Triple Crown season, and he could take advantage of a thin field that took another hit on Saturday when Scrappy T, who placed between Alex and Giacomo in the Preakness, was scratched from the Belmont.

As for Zito, he’s pegging his Belmont hopes on Adromeda’s Hero (eighth in the Derby), Pinpoint, and the lightly raced Indy Storm, who won a Preakness day allowance race at Pimlico his last time out. It just goes to show that racing – and Hall of Fame elections – isn’t necessarily about immediate success or failure played out in front of a national audience. Though a big horse can change a lot, a trainer cements his reputation by showing up for years, consistently running the best horses in the game, and ending up with a spot in history.