The Triple Crown

The Triple Crown is the pinnacle of horseracing achievements for three-year-old thoroughbreds. It requires winning three of the biggest stakes races in the world, back to back to back, all within a five-week stretch that starts on the first Saturday of May. The races, in order of running, are The Kentucky Derby, The Preakness Stakes weeks later, and The Belmont Stakes three weeks after that. Each of these races is a prestigious event in and of itself but when a horse combines to win all of them the feat becomes legendary. In fact, only eleven horses have been Triple Crown winners, with eightteen others winning the first two legs and not completing the triumvirate.

Daily Racing Form sportswriter Charles Hatton coined the term “Triple Crown” in a 1930 article hailing the second winner of all three races, Gallant Fox. The first horse to win the Triple Crown, Sir Barton, in 1919, actually did so 11 years before the term came into use. The 1930’s and 40’s were the heydays of Triple Crown racing with seven winners from 1930 to 1948. Those winners were:

Gallant Fox – 1930

Omaha – 1935

War Admiral – 1937

Whirlaway – 1940

Count Fleet – 1943

Assault – 1946

Citation - 1948

The 1935 winner, Omaha, was sired by the 1930 winner, Gallant Fox. This is the only case where one Triple Crown winner was fathered by another. After Citation’s win in 1948 twenty-five years passed before another horse would go down in history as a Triple Crown winner. Horseracing was in a major decline before Secretariat hit the stage in 1973 and broke all the records on the way to a Triple Crown that marked a major resurgence in one of America’s biggest spectator sports.

Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby in impressive style, running every quarter mile of the race run faster than the previous, on his way to a 2-1/2 length victory in 1:59-2/5 over the 1-1/4 mile course, the first and only horse to run the Derby in less than 2:00. He also handily won the Preakness Stakes and whether he broke the track record of 1:54 for the 1-3/16 mile race is still a matter of dispute with clockers from The Daily Racing Form timing the race at 1:53-2/5 and the track officially recording a time of 1:54-2/5, less than half-a-second over the record. The Belmont Stakes was icing on the cake for Secretariat. He won the 1-1/2 mile race by 31 lengths in 2:24, 2-3/5 seconds better than the previous record.

Secretariat brought horseracing and the Triple Crown back into the limelight in the 1973 He was followed by Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in 1978, the first back to back winners. Since that time several horses have won The Derby and The Preakness, only to be upset at The Belmont. Competition gets steeper every year as purses and third-party bonuses increase the value of the Triple Crown and more and more high quality colts are being bred with the sole intent and purpose of capturing horseracing’s annual run for a place in history.