Daily to Derby

The Preakness Problem: What 25 Years of Data Show

I pulled the full Triple Crown charts from 2000 through 2026, excluding 2020, and cross-referenced every Preakness and Belmont field against that year's Kentucky Derby. The question was simple: how many Derby starters are actually coming back for the second leg?

The decline isn't a cliff. It's a slide — 4.8 to 4.3 to 2.6 to zero. The post-2021 era has never produced more than three Derby-to-Preakness runners in a single year. Compare that to 2005, when eight came back, or 2004 and 2013, when seven did.

The three-leg runner is nearly extinct. From 2021 through 2023, zero horses ran the Derby, Preakness, and Belmont. Mystik Dan in 2024 and Journalism in 2025 are the only three-leg runners in the last five years. In 2011, four horses did it.

In that same time period, quite logically, the Belmont has NOT seen the same decline. Derby starters still show up for the Belmont at roughly the same rate they always have — an average of 4.0 per year even in the post-2021 era. The horsemen — and horsewomen — are clearly preferring the five-week gap, and that fits well with what we know about modern training. It's also patently obvious that they're objecting to the two-week turnaround between the Derby and the Preakness.

Bill Mott, a Hall of Famer, skipped the Preakness with two horses good enough to be favored in consecutive years. The morning after the Derby, he told Churchill Downs publicity: "Nobody talks about the Preakness."

One group that does talk about the Preakness: the betting public. As our man Nick Tammaro pointed out, there was over $56 million bet on the Preakness last year in vertical wagering alone, plus another $11.1 million in horizontal bets ending in the race. That's $67 million in handle on a race "nobody talks about."

And it's not just a Triple Crown opinion — it's how these trainers run their entire operations. Tammaro pulled the numbers on the top 10 trainers by earnings and how often they run a horse back on 1-14 days' rest. DeVaux: 0 times in 1,545 starters. Brown: 2 times in 4,472. Pletcher: 11 times in 4,343. The Preakness asks the sport's best trainers to do something that contradicts the way they manage every horse in their barn.

Why Do Trainers Today Want More Time?

It's a valid question as to why. Here is some speculation on my part that I think rings true.

Back in 2008, Rick Dutrow openly acknowledged giving Big Brown monthly doses of Winstrol, an anabolic steroid that was legal in all three Triple Crown states at the time. It wasn't "doping" — it was a routine practice considered by many (though not all) to be a legitimate therapeutic tool. Senior track veterinarian Larry Bramlage said at the time that "most all" trainers used anabolic steroids to help horses recover. Twenty-eight of 38 racing states had no regulations on anabolic steroids whatsoever.

Big Brown won the Derby and Preakness that year, and Dutrow said the horse hadn't received a dose since April — a claim Andrew Beyer and others viewed with skepticism. Whether the withdrawal contributed to Big Brown's infamous Belmont collapse is still debated.

What is not debated is that a national firestorm — including Congressional hearings — soon followed. In addition to the controversy around the Big Brown stuff — steroids were certainly perceived by the public as a performance enhancing drug — there was a bigger problem: Eight Belles' fatal injury in the same Derby. For the record, tests later showed no performance-enhancing drugs in her system, but there was still understandable outrage over the lack of any cohesive effort by the sport to protect its athletes (the creation of The Jockey Club's Equine Injury Database and Thoroughbred Safety Committee soon followed).

The Racing Medication and Testing Consortium developed a model rule on anabolic steroids, and by the end of 2009, every major racing state had adopted restrictions on their use on race day. Regulations on corticosteroids, joint injections, and other therapeutic medications tightened in the years that followed, culminating in HISA's federal regulatory framework in 2023.

The intent at every step was sound — protecting equine welfare. And horses are a lot safer now than they were in 2008 as viewed by any metric you will find. Fatality rate has dropped 47% since 2009, down to a record low of 1.07 per 1,000 starts in 2025 with six consecutive years below 1.5.

Any participant in the sport will acknowledge this as a good thing. But, progress in one area always comes with knock-on effects. One of those is that the pharmaceutical toolkit trainers once relied on to keep horses recovering quickly between starts has been systematically reduced. It is at least worth asking whether the generation of trainers who ran horses back in two weeks without a second thought were able to do so in part because of a recovery infrastructure that no longer exists.

So that's the hypothesis anyway. Obviously, horses are individuals, not machines, and there are examples of horses since 2009 who have run in all three. You have your two Triple Crown winners, but you also have two of my favorite horses of the century: Animal Kingdom, trained by Graham Motion, and Journalism (just last year!), trained by Michael McCarthy. Tomorrow we will hear from both Motion and McCarthy with thoughts on the Triple Crown spacing conversation.

The full study with year-by-year data will be published at dailytoderby.com and inthemoneypodcast.com.

"It's Broken"

NBC's Randy Moss joined us to go deep on the Triple Crown spacing question — and he didn't hold back. Moss has been making this argument for years, and the GT decision brought it to a head.

His headline: "The Triple Crown is in intensive care. The Kentucky Derby is doing great. But because the Preakness has become such a weak link, it's pretty clear what needs to be done."

On the "it's supposed to be hard" argument, Moss was emphatic: "What about making the Preakness tougher to win makes the Triple Crown easier to sweep? It doesn't. It could very well make the Triple Crown tougher to sweep. But the goal is not to make the Triple Crown easier or tougher. The goal is to make the Triple Crown again the series that pits the best of the best three-year-olds and captures the imagination of the public."

On the rematches we're missing: "Imagine what it would be this year with Golden Tempo and Renegade with the Ortiz brothers rematched against each other in the Preakness. That's the sort of thing that has made the Triple Crown what it is."

On the Mott quote: Moss confirmed Mott said "Nobody thinks about the Preakness" and added: "What does that tell you about where we are right now?"

He also dropped an interesting business angle: Churchill Downs purchased the intellectual property rights to the Preakness from First Racing for $85 million. "They did it because they think there is considerable growth potential in the Preakness. And I can tell you Churchill Downs is not in the business of investing $85 million and just sitting back and watching nothing happen."

Peter Pan Tomorrow — Field Still Growing

New since Wednesday:

Bull by the Horns — was entered in tomorrow's Peter Pan at Aqueduct, pulled out to point to the Preakness instead. Rushaway Stakes winner at Turfway.

Potente — BRISnet lists him as the only other Derby starter under consideration for the Preakness (he was 12th). That gives Baffert potentially three entries: Crude Velocity, Cherokee Nation, Potente.

Peter Pan Stakes is tomorrow at Aqueduct. Trendsetter (Lexington upset winner) is entered. Results could reshape the Belmont picture.

Draw is Monday, May 11. Post time 6:45 PM ET on NBC. Limited to 14 starters — and there could be as many as 17-18 possibles. Some are getting left out.

👉 Is It Time for Fixed Odds in Horse Racing? with Marshall Gramm — ties directly to our Kalshi feature. 2.6K views.

👉 Who Was Best in Kentucky Derby 2026? with Total Performance Data — the GPS data dive.

👉 KDBC Betting Challenge Winner Ed Deicke — contest recap.

👉 Saturday Late Pick 4 with Darin Zoccali — Preakness preview weekend action.

Daisy Phipps Pulito on On the Lead — the Phipps family racing manager on a century of breeding and the partnership that produced Golden Tempo.

Tomorrow: The other side of the Triple Crown debate. Not everyone agrees it needs to change — and the trainers who've actually done it have something to say about it.

👉 Preakness Top 5 — PTF and JK

👉 Derby Recap with PTF and Mikee P.

👉 Why You Can't Bet the Derby on Kalshi (ITM Original)

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👉 Phipps, St. Elias Partnership Produces Derby Winner (BloodHorse)

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