For a long time, too long a time, in fact, this has been a sport with no real stars. Even some very good horses have had a hard time pushing racing to the front pages of the sports sections and most good horses are sent off to the breeding shed after two or three years and a minimal number of starts. That's just not enough time to capture the public's attention or imagination. Horse racing is starving for publicity but cannot develop a marketable horse. It's among the sport's more pressing problems.

The game has many woes and a some extra space in the newspapers or time on the 6 o'clock news is not nearly enough to solve them, but there's no doubt that Funny Cide's story can do a lot of good for this industry. For that reason, if you like this game, root for this horse. You won't be alone.

"What a publicity vehicle this horse could be," said Bill Nader, a senior vice president at NYRA. "This horse could become very big, and not just on the sports pages. It's everything you could want in a story."

For obvious reasons, NYRA executives will be rooting harder than most for a Funny Cide victory in the Preakness. In normal situations, a horse going for a Triple Crown sweep in the Belmont Stakes will put at least 20,000 extra people in the stands. That's what happened last year with War Emblem, but Funny Cide has the potential to be a much bigger draw.

"If Funny Cide wins the Preakness, the floor is 100,000 in attendance and the ceiling is, who knows?" Nader said. "It will be as many people as we can fit into the place."

People will come to Belmont Park not just to witness a potential Triple Crown, but to see the horse everyone can root for. It's hard to relate to horses with fancy pedigrees who are owned by Arab princes or your run of the mill millionaires or trained by the same dominant individuals who seem to win everything that matters. But that's not Funny Cide. He's the one who crashed the society ball at Churchill Downs.

He came into the Kentucky Derby more or less unknown and unrespected. He was the modestly bred gelding from New York, the last place that is supposed to produce a Kentucky Derby winner. He was trained by a hard-working guy who toiled in relative obscurity for most of his career. The ownership group consists largely of a bunch of high school buddies who don't come close to qualifying as rich horse owner types. The jockey had battled back after a 10-year slump and had revived his career at age 42.

People like that stuff.

The story then took a strange and unwelcome twist when the Miami Herald came out with that irresponsible story alleging that jockey Jose Santos may have cheated when riding Funny Cide in the Kentucky Derby. The rest of the media, including outlets like NBC, jumped all over the story of the picture, the black spot in the rider's hands and the battery that wasn't. For a couple of days, Funny Cide and Santos were the biggest story going.

While that's not the kind of publicity anyone wants, it did make Funny Cide and Santos household names, something that's usually impossible to achieve in this sport. Plus, Santos was clearly wronged and many are starting to understand that. That will make him even easier to root for in the Preakness.

The Preakness will be big and the Belmont could be huge. But that's usually where the story ends. Has anyone heard a word about War Emblem lately? After the Triple Crown series, a horse may make a few more important starts, but most quickly fade out of the spotlight. Even Secretariat, the most famous horse of his era was gone, sent off to a stud, after his 3-year-old year.

That's not going to happen with Funny Cide. A gelding, he will not be a sire. Instead, as long as he stays healthy, he should race dozens of times and could still be going strong as late as, say, his 8-year-old season. That's what happened with great geldings like Forego and John Henry, who were among the most popular horses ever. They ran hard and they ran often and they gave their fans a reason to keep coming back to the track.

Racing needs bigger fields, lower takeouts, less in-fighting. It needs to deal with the drug problem. It needs to find a way to better compete with casinos and lotteries. It needs all that and a lot more. Funny Cide can't do it all by himself, but he can become the most visible horse the sport has produced in decades and he can create bedlam at Belmont Park in three weeks. He can create the type of attention that can be a real positive for a sport that doesn't often have a lot to cheer about.

The possibilities have a lot of people very excited.