And among many possibilities for Big Brown's embarrassing last-place finish is this:
Some media reports suggest that Big Brown, who exited from the rail post, was startled leaving the gate by the sight of Roy
Williamson, the starter for the New York Racing Association, who in typical fashion June 7 stood on the track to break the field.
“I see the (starter) on the track; I don’t know what he was doing,” Dutrow said. “But I’m not going to say that is the reason the horse got beat, or got jostled around the first turn. Instead of being (inside) the rail, he was (outside) standing right in the one path. I don’t know if he was there when they ran by him, maybe (Williamson) ducked under (the rail.)
“I said to Kent, ‘Why didn’t you say that in the paper? Everybody is asking me all these asking questions, and you never mentioned anything about this guy on the track, and now you are mentioning it.’ I said, ‘it would have helped if you said that right away.’ They are asking me these questions, and I don’t know. But (the starter) was there, and I don’t know if it played a part or not, and it doesn’t matter. Hey, what are we going to do, call (the New York Racing Association) and say, ‘Hey, what was this about, and we want a re-race?’
It sounds like we will never know the truth about this race. Dutrow definitely has no desire to talk about the speculation he undertrained Big Brown because of the quarter crack.
More here.
Big Brown, of course, is the victim in all of this. It isn't his fault his connections screwed up.
According to Haskin, you just have to question Big Brown's lack of preparation for the Belmont:
It is very possible those missed training days proved more costly than people think, because it wasn’t until then that Big Brown started getting too tough to even walk around the shed row and was crawling out of his skin. Coming off the track one morning he was bucking and hard to handle. Remember, the quarter crack came after a week of little activity, so he went 17 days following the Preakness without working. He became too wound up and it continued all the way to race day in the holding barn and on the track. That’s not want you want to see from a professional horse like Big Brown before a mile and a half race. His strength was his ability to settle and relax, and those missed days and having only one easy breeze in three weeks most likely lit a fire in him that caused him to bubble over on race day. Had his work not been postponed until Tuesday of race week because of the quarter crack, Dutrow, if he so desired, could have blown him out the day before or the day of the race to take the nervous edge off him.
And if the quarter crack was a concern for Dutrow, then Big Brown should have been scratched from the Belmont. The pressure is great to run a Derby-Preakness winner in the Belmont and win the Triple Crown, but one only has to look at the 1969 and 1971 runnings of the classic to know you cannot run an unsound horse in a race and expect to win it.
The responsibility for the debacle rests squarely on Rick Dutrow.
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