Eckenrode thinks 300 people came through. Equistar had an open house for Smarty on a January day with a miserable forecast. If you are lucky, you might catch Smarty Jones grazing inside the circular driveway that fronts the barn where he is housed. Like the guy two weeks ago who was driving from Boston to Keeneland in Kentucky and just wanted to stop by to see him. Get off the turnpike at the Lebanon exit pass a bunch of silos and more than a few cows miss a few turns and, then, finally end up on Crooked Road, which will take you to Equistar. Smarty Jones is not so easy to find these days. It was a metaphor for how he ran, always fast enough to get away from trouble. He left the quarantine facility in Miami for Pennsylvania just before a deadly salmonella outbreak. Smarty got out of Uruguay around the time of a fire at the farm where he was at stud. ”She called back that afternoon and said, ‘Rodney, let's do this.’ “ ”I talked to her that morning,“ Eckenrode said. Pat Chapman did not care about any of that. They're afraid to train them that hard," says Fay Donk, who, with her husband, has a barn at Belmont.There are bigger farms in better locations with more facilities than Equistar. "I think a lot of people don't train their horses as hard as they used to train them. To win the Triple Crown, a horse has to win three tough races in just five weeks, but most modern thoroughbreds have never run that kind of brutal schedule. There's another theory about why it's been so long since the last Triple Crown winner, one that has to do with race schedules and training. "It's part of the equation, and it's probably stopped some horses from winning the Triple Crown," Panza says. Therefore we use a much sandier mix" - hence the park's nickname, the Big Sandy. With two Triple Crown winners in the last four years, Smarty Jones has become something of an artifact, one who got close to the gates of history but not. "We get a lot of rain here, and there's humidity. Smarty Jones dominated the sport in 2004 like Zenyatta did in 2010, when the Eclipse Award voters got it right and named Big Mama Horse of the Year despite her Breeders' Cup Classic defeat. "This track is a lot sandier than most tracks," says Panza. There's another, more subtle thing that can make it harder to win at Belmont. And they're probably going to run out of energy and speed before they get to the finish line." "If you do that in the same spot on the track here as you do at other race tracks," Genaro says, "you're still half a mile from the finish line - and you're gonna use up your horse. "Ordinarily, when they come around the far turn, that's a good time to ask your horse to start to put in his maximum effort," says Teresa Genaro, who writes the blog Brooklyn Backstretch. "This is a stepping stone up, and not every horse is bred to go that far," says Martin Panza, senior vice president of racing operations at the New York Racing Association, which runs Belmont Park.īelmont's size has an effect on the riders' strategy, too. None of the horses in the Belmont field have ever raced at that distance. At a mile-and-a-half long, the track is big, too. More than 100,000 people can watch the race from its massive grandstand. The first thing you notice about Belmont Park is that it's big. No one can say exactly why there's been a 36-year drought since the last Triple Crown winner, but there are several theories. Since 1978, a dozen horses - Sunday Silence, War Emblem and Smarty Jones among them - have won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, only to stumble before the finish line at the Belmont Stakes. Only one more race stands between California Chrome and horse racing's Triple Crown, but it could be his toughest challenge yet. Smarty Jones was one of a dozen horses since 1978 to win the first two legs of the Triple Crown, only to lose at the Belmont. Birdstone (right), ridden by Edgar Prado, upsets horse Smarty Jones to win the Belmont Stakes in 2004.
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