Should the timing of the US Triple Crown be changed?

By Peter Fornatale

This is an issue that has been debated for decades, and one that has really come to a head in recent seasons, with most Kentucky Derby winners choosing to forgo an attempt at the historic treble. You will hear arguments on both sides, delivered with religious fervour. I was an early adopter of the idea that it should change - I wrote an editorial in the New York Times in 2007 that advocated for a reimagining.

Then, for many years I was agnostic on the topic, really seeing both sides of the issue. I still think reasonable people can disagree on the answer, no matter how unfashionable that concept is currently. But as we sit here in the June of 2026, with five of the last eight Derby winners choosing to bypass the Preakness, that middle jewel in the crown, I have chosen a side.

I'll start making my case by saying that I think we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking whether the timing of the Triple Crown should be changed, we should pull further out and ask: What is the Triple Crown for?

The Triple Crown was not created by design. It was what you might call an accident of sports writing.

In the May of 1923 - seven years before Charles Hatton popularized the phrase in the Daily Racing Form - an anonymous turf writer watched Vigil win the Preakness and wrote a piece about the season ahead. The Derby hadn't been run yet. The Belmont was weeks away. And this columnist wrote: "The three-year-old that would win all three of these great races would be hard to catch in the matter of money won and should be the best horse, but, at least, one should wait until all three have been decided. The chances are that it will be a long time before a three-year-old good enough to capture this American triple crown crops up."

It is the earliest known use of the phrase. Our anonymous writer was considering these important races as a test of a potentially historic horse for sure, but moreover he was thinking about them as a series: three races that, taken together, would reveal the standing of the best three-year-olds. 

The point was to find the best horse by watching the best horses run against each other. He was thinking of these races as we think of the Grand Slam in tennis or the majors in golf, not as "winner take all" but more a challenge to measure the greatness of all participants, so we might better evaluate them as individuals because of their relationship to one another.

It took decades for the concept of the Triple Crown to be formalized: Sir Barton was retroactively crowned the first winner in 1950, 31 years after his sweep in 1919, while Gallant Fox - in 1930 - became the first to carry the title in real time.

The Triple Crown wasn't meant to be any sort of endurance test - for many years horses would have starts between the other races. That's just how horses were trained then. Horses are bred and trained differently now, and I think it's time that our most famous races evolved to reflect that change in equine condition and get back to the idea that our best three-year-olds should all compete in all three of our most-storied racing events.

If, on the other hand, you believe that the whole point of the series is to allow one storied horse to sweep, perhaps the current spacing is just fine. It is a challenge that rewards only the most spectacular - or spectacularly lucky - three-year-old.

But to me, this comes at the expense of appreciating each crop of horses as a whole. In our zest for one kind of 'tradition', we are ignoring an important aspect of what makes the Triple Crown special: that it is a chance to see the best horses of each generation meet repeatedly, building rivalries as well as epic, season-long storylines that capture the imagination.

Think about what I consider to be the greatest Triple Crown campaign in history. It wasn't Secretariat's, magnificent as he was. For my money it was Affirmed and Alydar in 1978. They met 10 times. They finished first and second in nine of those meetings. Across the three Triple Crown races, they were separated by a combined two lengths over nearly four miles of racing. The Belmont, decided by a head after the two of them ran side by side for the final seven furlongs, is arguably the greatest horse race ever run.

Steve Cauthen: "It was like an Ali and Frazier fight."

Laz Barrera: "Affirmed is greater than Secretariat, or any Triple Crown winner, because only Affirmed had to face Alydar."

What made that series transcendent wasn't that Affirmed proved himself three times in five weeks. It was that in doing so, he not only won but bested a serious rival each time. The rivalry was paramount; the sweep was the ultimate pay-off. Under today's conditions, Alydar likely would have skipped the Preakness.

If 1989 were now, Easy Goer trains up to the Belmont, and Sunday Silence's historic Preakness victory - one of the greatest stretch duels in racing history - never happens.

And this brings me to the heart of the problem. I have heard many smart people in this sport say that the Triple Crown is supposed to be hard. I've heard it from trainers I respect. I understand the impulse. But I think this argument conflates two very different kinds of difficulty.

There is the physical toll of running three races in five weeks. That is hard on the modern horse, no doubt. And there is the competitive challenge of beating the best of your generation, repeatedly, across three races. I would argue that the latter is actually much harder, especially when you consider that later-blooming challengers would be added to the mix. I think my argument is irrefutable when you consider the difference in the quality of competition.

The current spacing maximizes the first kind of difficulty and minimizes the second. That's exactly backwards in my view. The five-week window doesn't make the Triple Crown harder to win. It makes it harder to contest. And a race that the best horses don't enter - the Preakness - loses its relevance.

Consider what a properly-spaced series would look like. With a month between races, Golden Tempo would face Renegade and the rest of the Derby field in the Preakness and the Belmont. He would have to beat the best horses of his generation not once, but three times. As Randy Moss said in our recent interview: "Imagine what it would be this year with Golden Tempo and Renegade, with the Ortiz brothers rematched against each other in the Preakness."

The sweep gets harder AND the series gets better. Isn't that what we're really after?

For the right horse, three races in five weeks is not an impediment - Journalism proved that last year, running in all three legs and winning the Preakness. He'd have won the Triple Crown if not for being foaled in the same year as Sovereignty.

But as his trainer Michael McCarthy told me, "He was kind of a throwback type of a horse. He had the physical attributes and the constitution to handle three races in five weeks."

I will add that the data screams that Journalism is very much the exception, not the rule.

But let's get back to the why. The numbers are stark. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Derby's top three finishers all returned for the Preakness 14 times in 20 years. Now that has happened once in the past 17 years - something fundamental has shifted.

The most common answer is that training philosophies have changed - horses run less frequently now than they used to for a myriad of reasons that would need another essay to cover. That's true, but it's not the whole story. We have to specifically consider changes to the medication landscape.

Let me be crystal clear about something before I go any further: the reforms that racing has implemented around horse safety - from the elimination of anabolic steroids to the progressive tightening of therapeutic medications to the establishment of HISA's federal oversight - are not only good for racing, they are essential. Erring on the side of horse health is necessary to safeguard the animals and also the sport's social license to exist. Fatality rates have dropped 47% since 2009 to a record low. These are achievements the sport should be proud of, and they are really just a starting point to where I'd like to see the game end up.

But these reforms have had a secondary effect that racing has not reckoned with. The pharmaceutical toolkit that trainers once relied on to help horses recover quickly between starts has been systematically reduced. And the people closest to the horses are saying so openly.

Cherie DeVaux, the trainer of this year's Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo, said it on the record to Teresa Genaro of The Athletic earlier this week: "Things that could [have gotten] a horse who came out of a race a little sore could have been done in the past within the rules - now we don't have that. We are not allowed to do that."

And then she said something even more significant: "I can confidently say that there are horses that were very good horses, and great horses in the past, that would not be able to run in the current regulatory climate that we have now."

DeVaux may be the only one making this connection publicly, but the words of other top trainers and their actions all suggest that most of the top conditioners are simply not interested in running three times in five weeks.

The sport did the right thing on safety. Now the schedule needs to catch up with the reality of this new, safer world. You cannot simultaneously tighten the rules around horse welfare - correctly - and maintain a schedule that was built for an era when those rules didn't exist unless you are okay with the current, weakened Triple Crown series as opposed to one that pits the best against the best.

DeVaux framed her decision in terms that should trouble everyone who cares about this sport's future: "Do we want to focus on the Triple Crown series, or do we want to focus on the horse's career for the entire year?"

That shouldn't be a choice. And it wouldn't be one in a properly designed series for the world in which we live - as opposed to a world in which many of us, including myself, still wish we lived.

Generally speaking, the worst answer to the question of why something is the way it is has to be "because we've always done it that way." Tradition is worth defending when you can explain why the tradition exists. But nobody can explain why the Triple Crown is three races in five weeks - because nobody chose that, and for large parts of its history that wasn't how it was.

If racing is going to act, it should not settle for a head-fake. Moving one race back a week is not going to move the needle. If the sport is going to make a change, it should be done right - in a manner that truly changes the dynamic and encourages participation in all three races.

The most obvious solution is elegant and easy to remember: the first Saturday in May, June and July. The Derby stays where it is. The Preakness moves to the first Saturday in June. The Belmont takes the first Saturday in July. Each race gets its own month. The spacing is long enough that no responsible trainer has a reason to skip. And the series runs across the heart of the summer rather than being crammed into five weeks in spring. These would, no doubt, become marquee days for other divisions of horses as well - having more than one exciting series can only be a good thing.

The best horses need to run against each other more often. This was true in the 1920s and it's even more true in the back half of the 2020s. We've got the marquee events that the public knows and loves, and we have the horses to fill them. So let's put our best foot forward to showcase a product as exciting as possible, and show the world just how great horse racing really is.