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The Curse of Len Bias

Sports

Big Brown and the Triple Crown

The sole cloud on Tim Tam’s horizon was Cavan, winner of the major Belmont prep race, the Peter Pan. The bettors couldn’t see it: Tim Tam went off at 3-20. And, like Big Brown, he seemed poised to make the winning move as they headed for Belmont’s far turn. Then, before a disbelieving crowd of 44,000, he limped home, six lengths behind Cavan. He had cracked a sesamoid bone in his right foreleg; he never raced again.

That was the beginning of horse racing’s Triple Crown blues. Starting with Tim Tam and including controversial 1968 Derby winner Forward Pass (on the butazolidin disqualification of Dancer’s Image), 21 horses have gone to the Belmont post with a chance to win the Triple Crown, and only three — Secretariat in 1973, Seattle Slew in 1977, and Affirmed in 1978 — have found the winner’s circle. They’ve run the full gantlet of the agony of defeat. In 1961, Carry Back’s come-from-behind style suggested he’d be even better in the mile-and-a-half Belmont than he’d been in the Derby and the Preakness, but he staggered home seventh — turned out a mile and a quarter was as far as he wanted to go. Forward Pass prompted mixed emotions — his Triple Crown would have worn an asterisk, so some were relieved when he didn’t go past Stage Door Johnny. The following year, Majestic Prince was, like Big Brown, undefeated. How could he lose? Try sitting six lengths behind your main rival, Arts and Letters, after an opening six furlongs in a glacial 1:16 and change. (And that with one of America’s best jockeys, Bill Hartack, aboard.) At the finish, Majestic Prince was still almost six lengths back.