Lukas rips grueling spring rite - The trainer thinks the Triple Crown races are too taxing.

Other than Funny Cide, upset winner in the Kentucky Derby two weeks ago, name the nine other horses in tomorrow's 128th Preakness.

"Call the best guy you know in racing and ask him to name the 10 horses running here," D. Wayne Lukas, trainer of Scrimshaw (5-1) and Ten Cents a Shine (15-1), said yesterday, throwing down a challenge. "There won't be one in 50 who can do it. I don't know if I can do it."

Lukas wasn't so much throwing down a challenge as he was climbing onto his soapbox outside his barn at Pimlico to preach about what he thinks is wrong with the Triple Crown and, as a result, wrong with racing today.

A Hall of Fame trainer, Lukas has wins in 13 Triple Crown races over a 29-year career. When one of racing's elder statesmen speaks his mind, he is often worth hearing out.

As always, Lukas looked into the knot of notebooks, microphones and cameras yesterday and talked up his horses in the Preakness. But before long, he was on to why he thinks there hasn't been a Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978, and why he believes the sport suffers as a result.

No Triple Crown winner in a quarter of a century is a problem, for one thing. But how can even hard-core horse-racing fans be expected to get to know, or to care about, that year's crop of star 3-year-olds, given the flux of the fields from one race to the next?

Two weeks ago, in the Kentucky Derby, the field was 16 strong; for the Preakness, the field is down to 10 and five of them didn't run in the Derby. Expect more flux in the Belmont Stakes in three weeks.

Lukas believes that even the best thoroughbreds today can't handle the three grueling races over five weeks. If racing wants to have a core of horses that run all three races each year, the Triple Crown format needs to be altered, he said. The Derby should be shortened from 1 1/4 miles and the Belmont from 1 1/2.

"If you ran the Derby at 1 1/8 mile, you'd get fillies and colts and you'd have 20 head every year," Lukas said. "And instead of coming here in two weeks, come in three. Give them a three-week break and you'd get almost everybody back at a 1 3/16 of a mile. Then go three weeks later to the Belmont and run 1 1/4 mile."

"You'd have more horses trying all three legs and you wouldn't have any drop-off in performance and you'd probably have a bigger fan base," he said. "But it is not going to happen in our lifetime. Racing is real reluctant to change. It is hard to buck tradition."

Horse racing's ultimate achievement, in its long-standing traditional form, just sort of evolved. Although each of the Triple Crown races has been around for at least 125 years, it wasn't until 1930, when Gallant Fox won all three, that Charles Hatton, a sportswriter who was a lousy, two-fingered typist, came up with the term because he didn't want to pound out all three. It caught on.

Today, if racing's top minds were to put their heads together to come up with the ultimate test, it would not be the Triple Crown we have today.

"There wouldn't be one guy in the room that says that is a good idea," Lukas said. "We breed quick horses, speed horses."

Bred to sprint, many of today's top thoroughbreds struggle with the distance of the Triple Crown races.

"Almost all of your injuries, whether they are visible right out there in front of the TV cameras or whether they are subtle and we don't hear about them for three, four days, usually occur within the last quarter-mile," Lukas said. "That is where they lay it down, that is where they go to the well, that is where they strain a little bit when they are tired and get the misstep."

Preach as he might, Lukas knows not everyone agrees. Chief among the others is his biggest rival, Bob Baffert.

"I think it's perfect, both the distances and the space between them," Baffert said yesterday. "I wish the Belmont was in two weeks. Everyone would lose interest with more time in between."

Still, Lukas believes that if the Triple Crown format were tweaked, the fields would improve, more fans would pay more attention, betting would go up, and maybe, just maybe, horse racing would matter more than three weeks a year.

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I know this was published before the Preakness, but I became aware of the article's existence when I fished this particular Inky out of the recyling tub in the office where I work this past Monday. I would have posted the article sooner, but the rigors of this job and the 125 mile round trip to it, plus a 4 mile walk 'most every night, have left me so pooped that I didn't even go on the net a couple of nights this week.

foreverfree

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