While lovers of the sport of thoroughbred racing are reveling in the accomplishments of a throwback of a racehorse and his prescient, single-minded trainer, the sad fact of racing life is that Afleet Alex is the rarest exception to the rule. Surely somewhere in the small print on his foal papers is a typo indicating he was actually born in 1952 and not 50 years later.

The ability to run fast is not at issue here. How Afleet Alex is able to run fast, and far, is. From the world of show horses and steeplechasers, like all horseman of his ilk, trainer Tim Ritchey knows the concept of fitness. But only a horse like this year’s winner of the Double Crown could withstand such a demanding regimen.

No less a Triple Crown presence than trainer Bob Baffert joked before the Preakness: “I’m rooting against Afleet Alex. If he wins, my owners are going to want me to send their horses out twice a day.”

Stallions that enter today’s breeding shed, the best of the best, are more likely to have raced with permitted medication than not and over faster surfaces with much less top soil to cushion the pounding of hooves than those over which 1952 Derby winner Hill Gail raced.

Speed in the stallion and his offspring is the element horsemen covet most. It’s the attribute that cannot be taught like height on the basketball court, the one variable that without equivocation defines class in the thoroughbred. Today’s animals are bred for speed instead of stamina and for the sales ring and not the rigors of racing. Recovery time is the price paid for such displays of break-neck speed so that today’s thoroughbreds run less than their ancestors.

Today’s racehorse is sleek, not stout, and often is inherently unsound, the price paid for decades of medication coursing through the bloodlines of the modern sire. Gone are the days when old-school horsemen, Ritchey notwithstanding, would get to the bottom of their stock to attain total fitness.

Elements of unsoundness, permissive medication, speedy pedigree, lack of stoutness and today’s harder, faster surfaces aside, modern horsemen with a clear understanding of form-cycle analysis race today’s thoroughbred far less frequently than did their his peers of recent decades past. This is true on every race day at any track in America, not just the demanding Triple Crown series.

Traditionalists and lovers of nuance with a sense history must face the fact that almost every horse not named Afleet Alex is incapable of handling the strain of racing at its highest levels. The Triple Crown as presently constructed is nothing if not anachronistic. It follows that for the health of the horse, the silencing of critics who argue for racing’s abolition and to promote the sport in a more meaningful fashion, the Triple Crown needs to be tweaked.

And it needs to happen now.

After an association that lasted 10 years, Visa International will no longer sponsor the series despite the fact that Triple Crown attendance and handle, bucking the national trend, are collectively at or near all-time highs. Visa’s Triple Crown ads have promoted racing better and more intelligently than those generated by production companies hired by racing’s trade organization, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association. For Visa, it was a national campaign and not one lasting only five weeks a year.

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