John Pricci

Racing people have always believed the sport needed a super horse to survive. And after Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed won Triple Crowns in a span of six years, the 1970s became known as racing’s new golden age.

With his stunning victory in the Kentucky Derby, the sport’s believers hoped Barbaro could be “what racing needs.” It is no small irony that Barbaro did more for the sport in his struggle to survive than he might have as a Triple Crown champion.

The day after the Preakness, all three networks featured reports on Barbaro’s operation at Penn's New Bolton Center. Barbaro has made the nightly news every evening since. His name appears regularly in crawls on the all-news cable networks, even if horse lovers hesitate to read them because of radiographs that showed a right hind leg with a plate and 23 screws where three healthy bones used to be.

Barbaro was a subject in a Jay Leno monologue and received well wishes from the op-ed pages of major newspapers in Dallas, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia. There are fence posts lined with home made greeting cards and candles from well wishers, and you can make a donation to the New Bolton Center in Barbaro’s name on Penn’s Web site.

Columns have been written decrying the sport and portending a bleak future, and think pieces have acknowledged conflicted feelings and concerns for the sport’s self-inflicted wounds while it publicly wrings its hands over how it can attract new fans. In wake of the premature racing careers of Point Given, Smarty Jones, Afleet Alex, and current national concern for Barbaro’s health, the sport can start to attract new fans by making its glamour event more humane.

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My teeth are much longer and hair much grayer since seeing Kelso win the 1961 Met Mile at under 130 pounds. But now I believe tradition is too high a price to pay. With the life-threatening injury to Barbaro, two Triple Crown tracks have an opportunity to do the right thing for today’s thoroughbred, and the sport’s future, even if no one else does.

Following the Belmont Stakes the past three years, I have called for a change in Triple Crown scheduling. This time, I can’t wait and it has nothing to do with the fact that only three of the Derby’s 20 starters showed up in Baltimore for the Preakness. Parenthetically, one sustained a life-threatening injury, another a minor one, with the third back at his home track for a large dose of R&R.

Last year, columnists Bob Ford and Dick Jerardi, and Bloodhorse magazine editor-in-chief Ray Paulick, called attention to the grueling anachronism that has become the Triple Crown. Already this year, Jerardi has written “I have seen enough” and noted author Andrew Beyer now believes an altered schedule “might make sense for the horses …”

Due mostly to a lack of national leadership, tracks in racing states will continue doing only what’s in their best interests. But their selfishness pales in comparison to the greed of the bloodstock marketplace. It began in the late '80s when buyers from Europe and Japan engaged in bidding wars for our blue-blooded stock. It made breeders and bloodstock agents rich but depleted the gene pool.

As yearling prices increased and sales became a much bigger money game than racing, stud farms began to breed for looks and speed, not stamina and durability. Currently chic 2-year-old-in-training sales require that horses breeze extremely fast furlongs of 10 or 11 seconds, before bones have had a chance to set properly.