I’m not a fan of horse racing but this is incredible.
http://deadspin.com/this-is-what-it-would-look-like-if-american-pharoah-rac-1709988755
Interesting. I don’t know anything about horse racing and didn’t even hear about the triple crown winner until Monday. I just made the assumption that the current horses are faster. I was expecting pharaoh’s time to kill secretariat’s…
I don’t know much about racing either, but from what I have read the modern horses are bred for shorter sprint races (derby and Preakness) and not for the longer races like Belmont. They can be compared to a runner that runs the 100m vs 1000m. Horses that can blow away the competition in both race types are one in a million.
I never understood why the Triple Crown was such a big deal until I watched a video about it recently.
Apparently, when mammals exert themselves, lactic acid builds up. Humans can get rid of this acid quickly, but horses take a long time, like 3-5 days. So the three races of the Triple Crown are all well within the rest period. That means the horse that wins all three races never truly recovered from the first race while running the second, and same with the third. Above that, its running against fresh horses that haven’t run in weeks.
All of this just makes Secretariat’s run that much more amazing.
Also keep in mind that each race presents different challenges for the horse and jockey. Different lengths and Belmont is the longest, different surfaces (dirt, grass, sand), the curves are tighter on some tracks and wider on others. You add all that the physical exhaustion issues and it becomes a really big deal for a horse to dominate all three races the way these two did. Secretariat was faster but American Pharaoh is pretty impressive too.
Not much of a horse racing fan but my Mom has become a sports nut in the past few years (she’s 85 this year and never cared for any of the sports I played as a kid, who knew?). :
Paul
Im curious how they match up in the other two races. If Pharoah would have beat secretariat in one of them, then neither would be triple crown if they raced together.
Secretariat holds the record for all three races
Well there ya go. Hard to beat that
Yeah Secretariat is a horse racing icon; it’s unfair to American Pharoah to keep being compared to him.
Tony Gwynn was a great HOF baseball player but he’s no Babe Ruth. They were both very good ball players.