The Sport of Pharoahs

Since I entered an age of conscience thought, there have only been three things I hoped occur in my lifetime: a Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl win, a Louisville Cardinal National Championship in basketball, and a Triple Crown winner.  The one that took the longest probably shouldn’t have taken that long at all.

The coverage after American Pharoah crossed the line to immortality was incredible to say the least.  A horse owned Sportscenter for the remainder of the day.  My twitter feed was full of racing fans talking as if they had just undergone a religious experience.  The connections of American Pharoah were on the verge of tears.  And just about everyone in the place was on their feet cheering.  None of this reaction shocked me in the least either.

Believe me when I say that it’s nearly impossible to put into words what this is for horse racing.  It isn’t quite this extreme, but imagine if you followed a sport and they just didn’t crown a champion.  Imagine if the last Super Bowl winner was the 1972 Dolphins b/c no one had run the table since then.  Years upon years of will it ever happen swirled around a sport that lived and died in the public eye on three Saturdays each year.

And then, it actually happened.  I’ll admit, I was grinning as I watched my hundreds of dollars in bets go down the drain.  I’ve made plenty of money betting against Triple Crowns; I didn’t mind giving one back.

There have been a lot of things out there about American Pharoah and his place in history.  Read those articles if you want, but they’re wildly disingenuous.  American Pharoah is officially bigger than horse racing, and the masses will quickly squash any opinion that conflicts with thinking he’s one of the greatest horses to ever live.  Here’s what we certainly know at this point about American Pharoah:

• He’s going to win the 2015 Horse of the Year.  He could run three more times and run last in all those races; he’s already locked up the award.  And he’s earned it too, as he has dominated a very talented crop that looked too deep to produce a Triple Crown winner.

• Everywhere he runs from here on out is going to be an event.  The connections have said they want to run 3-4 more times, with the Breeder’s Cup Classic being the ultimate goal.  Beyond the three Triple Crown races, horse racing has been regulated to deep cable, but now, expect to see his return race on a national stage with bigger ratings than any Triple Crown race this year.  It’s going to be a spectacle, and it’s going to be fun to watch.

And now, a couple assertions…

If American Pharoah stays sound and runs 3-4 more times, he probably gets beat at least once… and that’s a good thing

For years, the only way a horse was ever going to enter the public conscience for more than a fleeting moment was to win the Triple Crown.  Now, there’s a new way: beating a Triple Crown winner.  It’s more likely he loses at least one race before he goes undefeated.  Any horse that knocks him off all the sudden becomes more famous than any Derby winner in recent memory.

Pharoah is good, but he’s not unstoppable.  The Derby has been the only race of his career where he’s really had to work for a win.  His Preakness and Belmont runs, while flashy, were served up on a silver platter by others who, wisely or not, thought they had a better chance seeing if Pharoah tired after being allowed to canter for the first 75% of the race rather than go nuts from the word go and probably beat both Pharoah and themselves.  In those races under optimal conditions, Pharoah did not run particularly fast on the Beyer Speed Figure scale.  In fact, he still hasn’t run as fast as Materiality’s Florida Derby.  (And yes, he’s beaten Materiality twice, so who cares, but I’d love to see them clash at a more normal distance like 1 1/8 miles… maybe we’ll get that battle in the Haskell in August.)  A lot of talk has focused on how his Belmont was the 2nd fastest running of the race for a Triple Crown winner.  That's nice and all, but the track was playing remarkably fast, and that's why when he was assigned a speed figure that normalized the track conditions, he was given a 105 Beyer.  Good, but nowhere close to world beater.  Part of me hopes he keeps running and turns into the monster everyone thinks he is.  Right now, he’s not there yet.

It’ll be less than 37 years before we get another Triple Crown.  In fact, it’ll probably be less than a third that time.

The Triple Crown drought that occurred was a statistical anomaly.  I know I didn’t tell you math would be involved, but sorry, here it is.  Between Affirmed and American Pharoah, 12 other horses entered the gate with a chance to join the most exclusive club in horse racing.  (I’ll Have Another in 2012 is being excluded, since he scratched from the Belmont the day before.)  Now, let’s assume that all those horses had a roughly 25% chance of winning the Belmont.  Some were certainly higher (Spectacular Bid, Real Quiet, and Smarty Jones come to mind) and some were certainly lower (sorry War Emblem & Funny Cide, but the truth hurts), but 25% seems like a fair enough reasonable estimate.  Assuming those are the true chances, then horses losing in the Belmont 12 straight times would only happen about once in every 32 times.  We should have gotten two or three Triple Crowns, which would have occurred 49% of the time.  In fact, we had a better shot of getting SIX Triple Crown winners than zero (table below).  Horse racing: where luck reigns supreme.

So in the 36 editions of the Triple Crown, 12 got a crack at it.  If that clip continues, and my modest 25% chance of one of those horses winning the Belmont is in fact correct, then we can say that we should be getting a Triple Crown once every 12 years (33% * 25% = 8.3...3%, or exactly 1/12^th of the time).  Or, we could have just as easily noticed that all three races have been run for 136 years together, and there have been 12 Triple Crown winners, so 136/12 = 11.3, meaning we’re getting a Triple Crown winner every 11.3 years.  (If I did this calc last year, 135/11 = 12.3 years, so close enough.)  And hey, we’ve now had four Triple Crown winners in the last 42 years, or one every 9.5 years.  You people are SPOILED!

In addition, a number of horses probably should have broken the streak already.  Just in the last few years, Afleet Alex was a questionable Derby ride away from taking it in 2005, Smarty Jones lost by a length in 2004, Real Quiet lost by a nose in 1998, I’ll Have Another probably beats the weak 2012 group if he shows up, and the two best TC Trail three year olds of my lifetime, Empire Maker in 2003 and Eskenderaya in 2010, won exactly 1 and 0 Triple Crown races respectively.  (Eskenderaya was injured before the Derby in 2010, but I will swear up and down he’s the best three old I’ve ever seen through the prep season in my lifetime.)  Those are the six that stand out to me in the last 20 years or so, and my table above only includes two of them.

So in the end, I’m glad Pharoah won the Triple Crown.  Not only b/c I can scratch it off my sports bucket list, but because now we can stop talking about the drought.  See you on or before June 5^th, 2027 when we’re talking about the next Triple Crown winner.