June 8, 2008
THEY had waited for this mo ment for 30 years, this eclectic gathering of fancy hats and dirty T-shirts, Savile Row suits and flea market cutoffs, all of them here to witness the coronation of a colt, the bronzing of an immortal.
The leaders were coming to the top of the stretch, coming back into the view of this enormous crowd, and they were ready to lift their voices to the musky sky, let the noise rain all over Nassau County. Big Brown wasn't in the lead yet, but that was OK. Surely he was about to fire. Surely, he was about to make his move.
Only he never made that move.
"Something's wrong," Rick Dutrow, the trainer, said to himself, and in a racing season when no one has proffered more opinions and more sound bites than Dutrow, those two words said far more than the thousands that had preceded them.
"At that last turn," Kent Desormeaux, the jockey, would say later, "I had no horse left."
And by the time Big Brown would finally amble across the finish line, 10 seconds after Da' Tara, the wire-to-wire winner, New York City had no more patience left. It was as if the combined venom of Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium had invaded Belmont Park, 94,476 hopeful voices turning to a noxious chorus of boos.
Mighty Brownie had struck out.
Not everyone was broken-hearted by this turn of events, of course. Dutrow had spent plenty of time since the first Saturday in May chirping and singing and defiantly predicting greatness for his horse. "It's a foregone conclusion," he'd said of winning the Triple Crown.
So later on, out by Barn 11, where many of the horses had repaired to walk off their race, here was David Carroll, the trainer of runner-up Denis of Cork, saying, "I've always thought you should win with class and you should lose with class."
Asked if he felt bad for 100,000 people who'd made this pilgrimage hoping to see a Triple Crown winner at last, Carroll said: "Not even a little bit."
