No one will win the Triple Crown this year. Not when the 3-year-old ranks consists of a bunch of evenly matched horses, none of whom will ever draw a comparison to Secretariat, Seattle Slew or Affirmed or, for that matter, Fusaichi Pegasus or Point Given. It's not a Triple Crown kind of year. But, lately, when has it been?

Should the inevitable happen and the Triple Crown and the $5 million bonus check that goes along with it go unclaimed again, the drought will have reached 25 years next year. That will equal the longest stretch ever between Triple Crown champions, the two and a half decades it took us to get from Citation in 1948 to Secretariat in 1973.

And the way the sport and the makeup of the American race horse has changed, it may not stop at 25, 35, even 45. The Triple Crown and the modern horse get along like Ally McBeal and a Big Mac Extra Value Meal Super Sized.

The Triple Crown was invented in a very different era for very different horses. It began in 1932 when Daily Racing Form columnist Charles Hatton linked the three races and dubbed them the Triple Crown. The horses Hatton was writing about back then were veritable machines compared to the pampered and brittle colts of today. Horses would run 13, 14 times at 2 and their trainers wouldn't think twice about running them in races five or six days apart. In fact, the Derby Trial, run the same week of the Derby, was the prep race of choice for many. In 1948, the three weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont was evidently too much time for trainer Ben Jones. He stopped off at Garden State on his way to Belmont Park and won the Jersey Derby between the two Triple Crown races. The Jersey Derby was one of 20 starts he made in 1948, including the Derby Trial.

A horse bred in 1932 probably was not bred to be the next super miler who would create fast, precocious offspring of his own some day. That seems to be all anybody wants today. It was a horse bred for classic distances and for stamina and sturdiness. No one wanted a horse who could go six furlongs in 1:09 as a 2-year-old, but a horse that could win the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup when they were five.

"Breeding programs have changed so much since then," said trainer Wayne Lukas, who has predicted that there will be three different winners of the Triple Crown races this year. "You have such greatly escalated prices at the yearling sales and at the 2-year-old-in-training sales that the emphasis is on speed, and that's what the breeders lean toward. In the old days, you had outfits like Calumet and the Whitneys and their emphasis was on producing a classic horse."

The Triple Crown was created for such classic horses, colts who could easily handle the rigors of facing three tough races in five weeks and could get a mile and a quarter in May and a mile and a half five weeks later in June. The Triple Crown was a challenge. Today, it seems like an impossibility.

The 3-year-olds who will go to the gate Saturday in the 128th Kentucky Derby are nothing like the 3-year-olds that Hatton watched and wrote about in 1932. Few will be bred to go a mile and a quarter, let alone a mile and a half. Few will have the required toughness to hold up through five races in just three weeks. Virtually all of them will race with the help of Lasix, the anti-bleeding medication. Most will be by dams who raced with similar drugs. Some will have been pushed very hard early in their careers, maybe to win a huge pot like the one offered in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile or to attract attention at the 2-year-old sales.

"When you run a horse so fast so young, you compromise their careers," said Billy Turner, the trainer of 1977 Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew.

The way to solve the Triple Crown drought is to change the Triple Crown. If someone were to create the series today, the Derby would be a mile and an eighth, the Preakness a mile and three sixteenths and the Belmont a mile and a quarter and the races would be at least four weeks apart. That would give the horses a fair chance.

Of course, it's never going to happen. Nor should it. The fact that the Triple Crown is such a challenge is what makes winning it so special. Somehow, the complexities of the series always trip up the pretenders, the Real Quiets, the Kauai Kings, the Forward Passes. To make it any easier would cheapen something very special.

Perhaps a very special horse will come along some day and become racing's 12th Triple Crown winner. It will take nothing less than an animal with immense talent, class, speed, stamina and sturdiness. And that's the way it should be. Maybe it will be worth the wait ... the very, very long wait.