Why the Triple Crown Is Rarely Won

American thoroughbred racing recognizes a champion only when a single horse wins three particular races in one spring. The difficulty is not that each race is hard, though each is. It is that they are not the same race. The series opens with the Kentucky Derby, run over a mile and a quarter. The Preakness Stakes follows, slightly shorter at a mile and three sixteenths. The Belmont Stakes closes it at a mile and a half, the longest of the three and longer than almost anything these horses will be asked to run again. A thoroughbred is not equally suited to every distance. Some carry raw speed that fades late; others settle into a pace they can hold. Conditioning sharpens one quality at the cost of the other, so a horse brought to peak form for the Derby arrives at the Belmont trained for a shorter race than the one in front of it. Ordinarily a trainer would simply adjust. Here there is no room to. The whole series runs inside five weeks, and every entrant is a three-year-old, still growing, already competing at the edge of what its conditioning will bear. Five weeks is enough time to recover from a race. It is not enough time to become a different kind of runner.