LINCICOME: Big Brown will always pay unfair price

By Bernie Lincicome, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published May 15, 2008 at 9:07 p.m.

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Garry Jones / Associated Press

Eight Belles died after finishing second in the Kentucky Derby.

If the horse with the ugly name - Big Brown - happens to win the Preakness this weekend and then goes on to take the Triple Crown, there will always be the thought that he still killed the filly Eight Belles in the Kentucky Derby.

This is not true, of course, but had Big Brown been a gentleman and let the lady pass, things might have turned out differently.

You get all that sort of logic now, honest and agonized second-guessing, anything to undo what has happened.

If the jockey had not whipped her down the stretch, if the trainer had not entered her against the colts, if Churchill Downs cared more about the horses that race on its hard track and less about its own foo-faw, if and if and if.

Yet Eight Belles is dead and the second leg of the Triple Crown is going on and the only horse that can be the first in 30 years to win the hardest prize in sports is Big Brown, not revered so much as resented, almost as if he had caused a freeway pileup and sped on.

In the slosh and slurp of post Derby chitchat, as much attention has been given to the dead horse as to the live wire, and what should be now the regular musing over Triple Crown possibilities, rather the notion churns on and on that horse racing is the cruelest activity since the strappado.

NBC is going to revisit it all before the Preakness, paying more attention to Eight Belles now than the network did then. Eight Belles will be as much a part of the Preakness as if she were in the race.

The Preakness is also the place just two years ago where Barbaro shattered his brittle bones, much as Eight Belles, and was allowed to fight on, becoming a symbol of courage and determination, only to die as did the filly, each horse literally having run itself to death.

That is what racehorses do, what they are bred to do, that single thing, and with their huge bodies and great resolve pounding on tiny ankles, it is small wonder more do not die, rather than the reported three in every 2,000 races.

The cry is louder now for Eight Belles to mean more than a second place at America's most famous horse race, that someone or something must pay for her collapse a quarter-mile after the finish line.

She was not allowed, as was Barbaro, to fight on, and the reason may be as simple as she was in much greater pain. But one does wonder, had she been a colt with breeding prospects to protect, whether she might have been given the chance.

Consider already breeding plans are being made for Big Brown for $100 million, and that's the cruelty of the game, after all. The money. No doubt owners and trainers and jockeys and shed-row stall muckers all love horses, in the same way that Michael Vick loved his dogs. But it comes down to the money.

So, humane organizations and governing bodies cry for Eight Belles and demand softer tracks and kinder races and some kind of justice while Big Brown can never be removed from the commotion.

Whatever happens, however great a horse Big Brown turns out to be, he will not be celebrated as he would have been. He will always be tinged by tragedy. Maybe if he had a different name, one not so dull, so easy to reject.

Secretariat was Big Red, a description of his size and hue, very romantic and easily pictured.

This horse is named for a parcel delivery company and, while brown, is more properly a bay and large enough to be called big at 16 hands or so, but still smaller than the doomed Eight Belles, for whatever that is worth.

When Affirmed, the last Crown winner, was nosing out Alydar time after time, from Louisville to New York, there was no great torment over what the competition did to either horse, but only the glory in the rivalry, the great will of each of them against the other.

That is the essence of sports, and if the horses really do not understand, if it is all just raw instinct, if they do not weep for each other, we humans do know and we see in those dumb beasts what we wish was in ourselves.

And we cheer for their courage and cry for their misfortune, and if we have the second-place ticket in the Derby, we cash it as we scope the next race.

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