New York in August, instead of June.
Street Sense is going to skip running in the June 9th Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park (details in a Blood Horse article well worth reading) and aim for the Travers Stakes at Saratoga in August. Since there is no Triple Crown on the line, Carl Nafzger and owner Jim Tafel are giving Street Sense a chance to rest up from the tough back-to-back races of the Derby and Preakness, not to mention the two prep races he ran this spring in Florida and Kentucky.
There is a sophisticated handicapping system out there which analyzes horse's races...and it says Street Sense ran an even better race in the Preakness than he did in the Derby. His best lifetime effort still came up a few inches short, otherwise we would have some Triple Crown mania going on right now.
Next year will be 30 years since the last Triple Crown winner, which was Affirmed in 1978. Many aspects of the 1970s are best forgotten, but in horse racing, it was a fantastic decade with three Triple Crown winners: Secretariat in '73, Seattle Slew in '77, and Affirmed.
I started working on the racetrack during the glorious 1970s decade of horse racing greatness, and remember thinking at the time how wonderful it all was and all the super horses I was in the midst of.
Since 1978, there have been quite a few Triple Crown near misses, horses who won the first two but did not win the Belmont: Spectacular Bid, Pleasant Colony, Alysheba, Sunday Silence, Silver Charm, Charismatic, Real Quiet, War Emblem, Funny Cide, and most recently, the popular Smarty Jones in 2004. It's not that the sun rises and sets on the Triple Crown, it's just that it is the historical measure of greatness, since 1919 when Sir Barton became the first Triple Crown winner.
I'm going back to painting now. I'm working on some Street Sense paintings. Also, I am working on a self published photo book of Street Sense's Derby. Though there are scads of photographers around Derby time, since I am an insider with the Street Sense team, I got many photos during Derby week that others don't have and I want to put it all together in a book. The book will be for sale and I'll let you know when it is ready, probably later this summer.