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Thursday, April 19, 2001
Reflections on Preakness Stakes
By Jim McKay
Special to ABC Sports Online
Local knowledge about this track is important here. One year, there was a horse named Linkage trained by Henry Clark, a Hall of Famer from Maryland. Clark trained at Pimlico for more than 50 years. He passed up on the Kentucky Derby just to have a chance to win the Preakness. He thought it was a lock, everybody did. A local jockey who had ridden the whole card the day before, and the rail was very much favored. Linkage was ridden by Bill Shoemaker, who flew in overnight on the red eye. So the trainer thought he had the best jockey in the country, but he didn't have the knowledge about the rail and was beaten.
By the time we got to the Kentucky Derby, we started right into work. You are so caught up with that you aren't thinking this would be our last Derby. And as soon as the race was over, we jumped in the car and ran for the airport to go home. So I think it will hit me more a week before the Derby and the Preakness next year. The Preakness a little more because it is a home game for me. The first Preakness I actually covered was in 1948 when the great Citation won. That was a local telecast, the one national telecast was on radio. But we did it for the local station.
I can say that our crew loves to come to Baltimore more than any other horse racing place. It is more relaxed, the people are friendlier and it's just more fun all around. I am a resident, so it's just a little bit different than the rest.
|  | | This is the way the field stood as Secretariat crossed the finish line during the 99th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill on May 5, 1973. |
When the winner of the Kentucky Derby comes to the Preakness Stakes, which happens almost always unless the winner gets hurt, the Triple Crown is still alive. So there is a great deal of excitement over the question: "Can the horse win the second jewel of the Triple Crown and then go on to the Belmont?"
At the Belmont Stakes, unless a horse has already won the first two races, the Triple Crown competition doesn't exist and the excitement isn't nearly as high.
The Preakness and the Derby have several things in common. First, they are both run on city racetracks, and there aren't many of those around anymore. Both are very old tracks as well. Only Saratoga (est. 1863) and Belmont (1867) is older than Pimlico (1873). The Preakness and Derby are also the biggest sporting events that happen in their respective states every year. The Belmont, of course, is in New York City, so it's only the biggest sports event there that weekend.
The Preakness, like the Derby in Kentucky, means a great deal to everybody who lives in the state of Maryland. And when they play "Maryland my Maryland," that's just as touching to local people as "My Old Kentucky Home" is to everyone else. Somehow, "New York, New York," doesn't quite cut it.
The greatest race I ever saw was the Preakness in 1989, when Sunday Silence and Easy Goer went at it. As they came down the stretch, their legs moved in unison as if they were a shadow of one another. Their heads bobbed up and down in unison too. There was absolutely nothing to choose between them. At the wire, Sunday Silence won by the narrowest of noses.
As the two horses came down the stretch, you could almost sense the size of the crowd's roar wasn't for one over the other, but for this pinnacle of competition. The 1989 Preakness Stakes was what a horse race should be. It had a kind of excitement you always hope for but seldom get.
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