By the 1920s, horse racing was rebounding from the trying circumstances of the previous two decades, where the sport has contracted from more than 300 racetracks prior to 1900 to only 25 by the end of the 1910s.
Everyone has an opinion in horse racing. It’s one of the most alluring aspects of the sport. Debates rage about which horse was better, which performance was greater, or which rivalry was the most memorable.
Handicappers, racing writers, and fans rarely — in fact, almost never — agree.
But there is one performance that stands out as unequivocally one of the best races a horse has ever delivered on the Triple Crown stage: Afleet Alex’s Preakness Stakes victory in 2005.
For those that ponied up $190,000 apiece for membership in Secretariat’s breeding syndicate, the period between the powerful chestnut’s loss in the April 21 Wood Memorial Stakes and the May 5 Kentucky Derby was gut-check time.
Real Quiet did not look or act the part of a champion early in his career. He was so crooked up front that he sold to Michael Pegram for only $17,000 as a yearling in 1996. He was so lacking in girth that his trainer, Bob Baffert, jokingly nicknamed him “The Fish.”
