Bill Mott Skips Preakness, Rekindling Triple Crown Winners Debate
Bill Mott’s decision to skip the Preakness with Sovereignty has put triple crown winners back at the center of a schedule debate that has never really gone away. The Kentucky Derby winner was left out of the second leg last year, and Mott’s reasoning pointed straight at what comes after the spring classics.
Bill Mott and Sovereignty
“The Triple Crown, I think it’s fine the way it is,” Mott said in Louisville. He added: “But there’s so many things after. You’ve got some big purses, you’ve got some important races. 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 is the crux of the argument. Mott did not want to break the Triple Crown with Sovereignty, but his choice also avoided asking a Kentucky Derby winner to turn around and run in the Preakness on the current schedule.
Five Weeks, Three Races
The Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes are run within five weeks in May and early June. The Preakness has followed the Derby by two weeks for 70 years, even though the original standard looked very different.
Sir Barton won the original Triple Crown in 1919 in a span of 32 days, and he also won a fourth race between the Preakness and Belmont. That older sequence is often raised whenever the modern calendar comes up, because the present-day version asks three-year-olds to keep returning on a short turnaround while the sport has more races waiting after the classics.
Derby Rest Patterns
This year’s Derby field offered a snapshot of that pressure. Only three entrants in the 20-horse Derby field had run back on three weeks’ rest, and none had run back on two weeks’ rest. Those numbers line up with the concern Mott raised: the Triple Crown asks for quick returns at a stage of the season when many barns are already thinking beyond May.
The debate now reaches beyond trainers. Television interests and racetrack ownership groups are part of the discussion, which means the calendar question is no longer just about whether a horse can handle the spacing. It is about how the sport wants to use its biggest 3-year-old races and whether the current rhythm still serves the horses, the event schedule and the season that follows.
