For the second consecutive year, the road to a Triple Crown has ended before reaching Maryland.
The decision has sparked a wave of debate among stakeholders who argue that such choices are a detriment to the sport. Many involved in horse racing have spent the last decade struggling to balance equine welfare with the need to keep the sport relevant to a depleting fanbase.
Trainer Cherie DeVaux announced last week that Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo will skip the 151st Preakness Stakes on Saturday. The decision effectively sunsets any hope for a Triple Crown winner in 2026, marking a growing trend of Derby champions bypassing the second leg of the series.
DeVaux, the first female trainer to win the Derby, said the colt needs more than two weeks to recover from his dramatic, late-running victory at Churchill Downs.
“The horse just ran the race of his life,” DeVaux said. “Asking him to race again, we just want to give him the best opportunity for the best outcome.”
Golden Tempo joins a list of recent winners who opted for rest over the quick turnaround. In 2025, the Bill Mott-trained Sovereignty skipped the Preakness after winning in Louisville, later returning to win the Belmont Stakes. Other recent Derby winners to bypass the middle jewel include Rich Strike (2022) and Country House (2019).
The decision comes amid heightened debate over the Triple Crown’s traditional five-week schedule. Since Justify swept the series in 2018, modern trainers have increasingly prioritized recovery time.
“I think the health and welfare of the horse comes first before tradition,” trainer Brad Cox previously told reporters. “Running them back in two weeks is not necessarily going to help their longevity.”
While some argue this trend preserves the sport’s superstars for longer campaigns, not everyone is celebrating.
“This isn’t about putting the horse first. There is a long record of Derby horses being best in the Preakness,” said two-time Eclipse Award-winning racing writer John Scheinman, a Baltimore resident who covered racing for eight years at The Washington Post. “The bottom line is the possibility of a Triple Crown is literally the only thing guaranteed to put the public’s eyes on horse racing. Anything people in racing do to diminish that is the work of fools.”
Golden Tempo will instead be pointed toward the Belmont Stakes in June. This year’s “Test of the Champion” holds personal significance for DeVaux, as it will be held at Saratoga Race Course while Belmont Park undergoes renovations. DeVaux grew up in Saratoga Springs.
With the Derby winner absent, the Preakness field is expected to include up to 14 horses. The race will be held at Laurel Park this year due to ongoing redevelopment at Pimlico Race Course.
The struggle for Maryland racing is currently playing out in the state legislature. While the state recently approved a $400 million plan to rebuild Pimlico for a 2027 return, lawmakers paused a $48.5 million proposal for the Maryland Stadium Authority to purchase and redevelop Laurel Park into a permanent training hub.
“By any measure, the Preakness is one of the most important races in the country,” Scheinman said. “Its prestige and identity are in jeopardy, and Maryland racing has been undermined and is teetering.”
The Triple Crown has only been achieved 13 times in the past 107 years. Critics of the current trend argue the achievement is supposed to be difficult, and that altering the tradition to accommodate modern training theories diminishes its value.
However, proponents of the “patience first” approach point to the success of Sovereignty. Mott famously told reporters, “We’re looking at a career, and you want the career to last more than five weeks.”
Mott argued that running a tired horse back too quickly can “break” them. He later admitted there was no specific injury sidelining the horse.
“There was no reason physically why we couldn’t have run… we had no excuse other than we didn’t feel like it (was best for the horse),” Mott said.
The strategy worked. Following Sovereignty’s win in the Belmont Stakes, he then won the Jim Dandy Stakes and the Travers Stakes. He finished his 3-year-old campaign winning the Eclipse Award as Horse of the Year.
In the cases of recent Triple Crown winners American Pharoah and Justify, their stories are inseparable from trainer Bob Baffert. While Baffert is a Hall of Fame trainer, his career has been shadowed by more than 30 medication-related infractions over four decades.
The most significant controversy occurred in 2021 involving Medina Spirit, who finished first in the Kentucky Derby before testing positive for a corticosteroid. Baffert initially denied the use of the drug but later attributed the result to Otomax, a topical ointment used for a skin rash.
Medina Spirit was disqualified and the victory awarded to runner-up Mandaloun. Baffert served a 90-day suspension and a two-year ban from Churchill Downs tracks. Baffert released a statement in July 2024 taking responsibility for the positive test, leading to his reinstatement in 2025.
Baffert, who has won the Preakness Stakes a record eight time, was considering running unbeaten colt Crude Velocity in the Preakness. Coming off a rousing win in an undercard stakes race on Derby Day, Crude Velocity has won all three of his career starts.
So what does racing do this weekend – on national television no less – to promote itself without showcasing the most recent superstar? Do they embrace the trainer with the admitted drug positives? Do they avoid the topic of where racing is headed in the state of Maryland? Do they dismiss DeVaux’s decision to bypass the Preakness as nothing more than a trend?
Whatever decision is made by people within the heirarchy of the sport, odds are quite good those choices will be highly scrutinized by any number of people.
They’re not all right. They’re not all wrong. That’s the nature of the business.
That’s all.
