This week’s Sports @ Large

With the resumption of the blog, we resume the custom of posting the script to this week's Sports @ Large. If you live in the Baltimore area, you can hear Sports @ Large each Monday at 5:30 p.m. or during "Maryland Morning" each Tuesday during the 9 a.m. hour on WYPR 88.1 FM. If you don't live in Baltimore (and why don't you?), check out the streaming audio at www.wypr.org

It didn't take long for social network users and newspaper copy editors to grasp the significance of Rachel Alexandra's win at Pimlico Saturday.

Before you knew it, there were Facebook messages posted about how the Preakness winner ran like a girl. Meanwhile, headlines in the Sunday paper made great reference to girl power.

Saturday was a remarkable day at Old Hilltop, and, by extension, in the world of horse racing, which saw a filly win the second leg of the sport's most important series, the Triple Crown, for the first time in 85 years.

But the events of Saturday offered only a one day pass from the dire problems that confront the sport of kings, and not even a full pass.

Perhaps you noticed the crowd of just under 78,000, the smallest Preakness crowd in 26 years, and more than 35,000 fewer people than the 2008 announced attendance.

You better believe that people in and around racing noticed. You could try to explain away Saturday's numbers behind the decision to bar outside alcohol from what has been an annual day of decadence and depravity.

Even so, you also have to note that the relatively sparse gathering wasn't the greatest advertisement for an industry that needs all the kind words it can get.

In many ways, horse racing, like newspapers, is a victim of the times.

People aren't reading papers the way they used to, and they aren't going to the track the way they did in the days when Ernest Hemingway and Rudyard Kipling waxed rhapsodic about the majestic beasts who ran and the lively jockeys who rode them.

And going 31 years now without a Triple Crown winner that the public can rally around has also helped to render racing irrelevant for many casual fans, which means most of us.

But the industry isn't doing a lot to help itself.

Take for instance, the decision of the New York Racing Association to pull the Belmont out of the television contract that had bound the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont to one network, NBC.

New York officials took the Belmont to ABC last year, and experience tells us that when you force viewers to search for something that they aren't usually interested in, they won't.

That is, unless, a horse is going for the Triple Crown, which, thanks to Rachel Alexandra's win over Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird, won't happen this year.

Of course, there could be a decent curiosity factor if the two Triple Crown winners were to meet in next month's Belmont, but Rachel Alexandra's owners may very well follow logic and keep her out.

The theory there is that she lost steam near the end Saturday on the shortest of the Triple Crown tracks and might not have the stamina to complete the mile and a half in New York, the longest of the three races.

And let's not even talk about the specific problems with racing here, which will require nothing short of a miracle to resolve.

For now, let's put all that on the back burner and let the girl have her fun. She surely earned it.