ELMONT, N.Y. — Welcome to Heartbreak Alley, home of shattered dreams and fractured bones.
The proper name for this place is Belmont Park. But after what happened here Saturday, and for that matter the last three years, any name that conjures up images of sadness and sadism would be proper.
They made a sports movie called "Field of Dreams." This is Agony's Acres.
For the third consecutive year, a horse came here with the chance to win a Triple Crown, the ultimate in the sport of kings. Charismatic was loaded into the gate here Saturday with the Kentucky Derby and Preakness trophies nicely tucked away in the Newport Beach home of owners Bob and Beverly Lewis. The Lewises also had the same situation in 1997 with Silver Charm, as did owner Mike Pegram last year with Real Quiet.
Each time, it seemed so right, so logical. Racing wanted it, could taste it. So did the fans, many of them mostly people who get interested in horse racing only when there is history lurking. The sportswriters come in record numbers and write enough stories to ruin an Oregon forest. ABC is beside itself and record amounts of hair spray are shipped in.
But it's almost always the same. The horses don't win. The mile-and-a-half torture chamber disguised as soft sand and gentle turns has its way.
The exhibits:
* Silver Charm, a horse that scratched and clawed to stay ahead when it saw an opponent get in front, didn't see Touch Gold and lost a race it had nicely tucked away at the eighth pole.
* Real Quiet, the second consecutive Bob Baffert-trained colt to try to win the Triple Crown at Terror Turfway, had it won at the eighth pole and got beaten--actually nipped by a nose--by Victory Gallop.
* And then came Charismatic, the Cinderella from California, the horse that trainer Wayne Lukas said captivated the public because, as a two-time claimer, he was looked upon like a last-round draft pick going to the Super Bowl. But not only did Charismatic, while trying as gamely as Silver Charm and Real Quiet before him, get beaten in the stretch by a horse--Lemon Drop Kid--that had finished so far behind him in the Kentucky Derby that he was already being washed down when that crossed the line, but he stepped wrong sometime late in the race while changing leads and suffered a broken left leg that will end his racing career, but not his life.
Dreaded Downs had won again. It is a park without pity, the root canal of horse racing.
