Racing finds a horse worthy of crown

BALTIMORE -- The winner of Saturday's Preakness could be better named. They should call him Foregone Conclusion.

Big Brown isn't bad. In his case, it's more a description than a name.

The UPS people certainly like it. They bought in to sponsorship rights after he routed the field in the Kentucky Derby. For the next three weeks, you will read 37,000 permutations, clever and corny, about what Brown can do for you. Expect to be told often how this horse, like UPS, will deliver for you. How they're both on time, always first. Etc. Etc.

Options are leaving the country or keeping your TV turned off.

That's why, Foregone Conclusion would be more accurate and less prone to upcoming commercial overkill.

The foregone conclusion is that Big Brown will win the June 7 Belmont, making him the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978. That's a huge deal. In the 30 years since Affirmed did it, 10 horses have won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and failed in the Belmont. That includes Real Quiet 10 years ago, with Kent Desormeaux, Big Brown's jockey, in the saddle.

Real Quiet lost by a nose. More like an eyelash.

Desormeaux talks about his regrets in that one. Not likely he'll have regrets on Big Brown. This time, he's not riding a horse, he's strapped to a rocket ship.

The jockey called his race an "armchair ride."

He broke from the seventh hole, tucked in behind several others horses, slid close to the rail so he didn't have to run 20% farther than the other horses as he did in the Derby, then waited until it was time to switch on the after-burners.

Just before turning for home, Desormeaux moved his hands forward on the reins three or four times and Big Brown went to a gear other horses only dream of.

"I just let him go. I said bye bye," Desormeaux said.

He won by 5 1/4 lengths and Desormeaux was holding him back at the end.

"He's going back to the barn," Desormeaux said, "and he only used half a tank."

The jockey called the performance "scintillating." Trainer Rick Dutrow Jr. called his horse "Godzilla."

Southern California trainer Paddy Gallagher, whose Yankee Bravo was in the group of 11 others mostly running as stage props for Big Brown, said, "It looks like Big Brown might win the Belmont farther than Secretariat."

Secretariat won by 31 lengths in 1973, completing the first Triple Crown in 25 years. He died in 1989, but that race remains immortal for sports fans. One 3-year-old doesn't dominate like that. Secretariat did, and now Big Brown is.