Bill Mott is not asking the sport to remake the Triple Crown. He is asking it to leave the calendar alone.
Mott, who skipped the Preakness with Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty last year, said, “The Triple Crown, I think it’s fine the way it is.” He added, “But there’s so many things after,” pointing to a packed racing schedule that, in his view, makes it hard to push a horse through all three legs and still have something left for the rest of the season.
“You’ve got some big purses, you’ve got some important races,” Mott said. “And I think if you use those horses up in the Triple Crown, a lot of times they can’t make it to the end of the year.”
That decision last year, when Mott passed on the Preakness with Sovereignty after the Derby, reopened an old argument about whether the Triple Crown races are too close together. The Derby, Preakness and Belmont are now run within five weeks in May and early June, and the second jewel has followed the Derby by two weeks for 70 years. The tradition traces back to a very different era of the sport, one that began long before television money and modern racetrack ownership groups became part of the conversation.
This year’s Derby field offered a blunt snapshot of how the sport now treats recovery time. Only three horses in the 20-horse Derby field had run back on three weeks’ rest, and none had raced again on two weeks’ rest. That is the reality behind the schedule debate: the classic is still revered, but the way top horses are managed has shifted around it.
The pressure on the calendar is not new. Sir Barton, the original Triple Crown winner, captured all three legs in 1919 in 32 days and even added a fourth victory between the Preakness and Belmont. That version of the sport no longer exists, and Mott’s view reflects a growing split between tradition and preservation: win the crown, or keep the horse healthy enough to matter later.
The question now is not whether the Triple Crown remains meaningful. It does. The question is whether the sport is asking too much of the horses at the center of it.