The really, really great match race

Once, just once, I’d like to pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness or the Belmont.

Every year, I bet $5 on a horse and, every year, that horse finishes last.

This year, I bet Archarcharch to win the derby. How could a horse with that name lose? It was a perfect trifecta; sort of like betting on a sorority like Sigma, Sigma, Sigma. I can’t even pronounce Phi Mu.

I lost the Preakness and the Belmont, too. Let’s not get into the dirty details.

Since I was a kid, I have been fascinated with horses, even though I know next to nothing about them. I just love the history and the competition.

For example, one of my favorite horses, Native Dancer, emerged in the 1950s. Also known as the Gray Ghost because of his coloring, Native Dancer won 21 of 22 races, and made a great argument for the greatest horse ever. His one loss: the Kentucky Derby. He lost by a nose and many track purists believed he was fouled more than once in that race.

About 20 years later, another horse, known even by those unfamiliar with racing, did what no other animal had done for 25 years. He won the Triple Crown. Secretariat not only won the big three races, he set records in each. By his career’s end, the big red horse had won 16 to 20 races.

Perhaps the greatest of them all, Ruffian, was a filly like Kenyatta, the prancing filly that recently retired.

Ruffian’s damsire (maternal grandmother) was Native Dancer. Ruffian won the filly Triple Crown in 1975, and ended her career 10-0. Dubbed the “Filly of the Century,” she set new records in the eight stakes in which she raced, as well as two track records.

Her final race was a match race against the Kentucky Derby winner, Foolish Pleasure. In the “equine battle of the sexes,” Ruffian was leading by half a length when both sesmoid bones in her right foreleg snapped. Tragically, as the anesthesia wore off after the surgery, she thrashed about wildly and did more damage to her body. At that point, she had to be euthanized.

America might like other sports heroes more than Kenyatta, but horse racing was arguably the first great sport in America. The sport of kings was the sport of the common man in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although sports news was slow to appear in newspapers, horse racing was reported early on.

Racing was common prior to the Revolution, and by 1724 the thoroughbred Fortune may have been the first thor-oughbred imported to Virginia from England. Racing was so popular at Lexington, Ky., which hosts the modern Kentucky Derby each year, that a town ordinance forbidding racing in the streets was passed in 1788. By 1789, formal races were being advertised. The Kentucky Gazette, for example, ran the following story Aug. 22 of that year.

“A purse race at Lexington on the 2d Thursday in October next, free for any horse, mare of gelding, weight for age, agreeable to the rule of new Market (three-mile heats) the best two in three; one quarter of an hour allowed between heats for rubbing. Each subscriber to pay one guinea, and every person that enters a horse to pay two guineas including his subscription.”

Probably the most important horse to come to America was Diomed, a former Epsom Derby winner in England. In 1798, he was sold to Col. John Hoomes of Virginia for 50 pounds. At 21 years of age, Diomed was too old to race but became famous in retirement. Diomed produced 55 sons while in Virginia and, by the 20th century, almost every successful racehorse bred in America could be traced back to him.

One of the first great races was a match race between Sir Henry and American Eclipse held on Long Island in 1823. The horses raced four-mile heats, best two of three. Sir Henry, which represented the southern contingent, was 4 years old. American Eclipse was a 9-year-old. Sir Henry won the first 4-mile race in 7:37, the first time 7:40 had been bettered in the United States! American Eclipse won the second race, and by now thousands of dollars stood to be won or lost. In the final, American Eclipse won by a length.

About the race, Sporting Magazine wrote on July 23, 1823, that the competition had been “a most interesting race, not only as relates to the stakes, $20,000, but as being made by one party of sportsmen against another … that interest must have been increased an hundred fold. We cannot wonder at the backers of Eclipse being proud of their horse; neither can we wonder, in the moment of triumph, that ‘Long Island Eclipse’ was to beat all the world; but the world is a wide place, and no doubt Mr. Fan Rast, his owner, is aware of this.”

What impresses me more than anything is that American Eclipse and Sir Henry raced a total of 12 miles. Wonder how many horses could do that today, not to mention in the same time?