The Woodlawn Vase, awarded to the Preakness Stakes winner, symbolizes the middle jewel of the Triple Crown left out of the new CDI and NYRA championship series. (Jerry Dzierwinski/MJC)
Jon Stettin
Horse Racing Gets it Wrong Again
Churchill Downs Incorporated and the New York Racing Association stood in front of cameras this week and called it a gift to the sport. Six races. Five months. A five million dollar bonus pool. National television on NBC and FOX. A “Thoroughbred Championship Series” designed, according to CDI chief executive Bill Carstanjen, to give fans a reason to remain engaged with the sport’s biggest stars throughout the season.
Read the lineup before you read the press release. Kentucky Derby. Belmont Stakes. The Matt Winn at Churchill. The Jim Dandy. The Travers. A championship finale back at Churchill Downs in September. Six races, two operators, three racetracks, and one conspicuous absence sitting right in the middle of the calendar where it has lived for a century and a half. The Preakness Stakes is not in this series. That is not an oversight. That is the entire point.
Ask yourself why Churchill Downs, barely three months after losing its attempt to acquire the Preakness brand, would join NYRA in building a season long championship that structurally routes around the race. Because that is exactly what happened. Churchill Downs agreed to pay eighty five million dollars for the intellectual property rights to the Preakness and the Black Eyed Susan back in April. Maryland exercised its right to match the offer in June and completed the purchase at the end of July, keeping the race in state hands rather than handing the name to a for-profit company whose record includes the closure or elimination of racing at multiple tracks. Churchill lost that fight. Now Churchill and NYRA have built a television product that makes the race Churchill lost look optional.
BloodHorse asked Maryland Jockey Club president Bill Knauf directly what this new series means for the Preakness. He declined to comment. Separately, an MJC spokesman told Daily Racing Form the organization had “just learned of the announcement.” Whatever conversation built this championship, Maryland clearly was not speaking like an organization that had been part of it.
Here is what the sport needs: the best three year olds meeting each other often enough for rivalries to form and long enough for the public to recognize them. The new series may help accomplish that, and the five million dollar pool is a meaningful incentive. But a point system cannot manufacture stars by itself. It can only organize and reward the horses willing and able to participate. That makes the decision to exclude an existing American classic, not some interchangeable summer stakes, the defining feature of the plan.
Rivalries sell tickets and rivalries sell television time, and nobody in this business is naive enough to pretend otherwise. But you build rivalries by giving horses that already exist a reason to meet each other, not by carving a spot out of the calendar and hoping the demand shows up to fill it. The Triple Crown works precisely because it does not need a marketing department to explain why it matters. Three races, three tracks, one test that no horse has completed since Justify in 2018. Everybody in America who has never watched a horse race in their life still knows what it means to win the Triple Crown. That is not an accident of tradition. That is the entire architecture of American racing’s one remaining piece of mainstream relevance, and it took a century to build.
What CDI and NYRA are proposing looks less like an extension of the Triple Crown than a competing architecture, one that treats the Preakness as expendable because neither organization owns or operates it. NYRA gets the Belmont and Saratoga’s Travers and Jim Dandy inside its own points system. Churchill gets the Derby, the Matt Winn, and a championship race in September that did not exist yesterday. Maryland gets no race, no points stop, and no direct place in the product, and Maryland just spent eighty five million dollars to make sure that race still belonged to the people of that state rather than to a corporation. You do not build a national championship series that skips the middle leg of the Triple Crown by accident. You do it because you can, and because the race you are skipping is not the one signing your television contract.
That may not prove retaliation. It proves something more fundamental: when racing’s most powerful operators were given a choice between strengthening the sport’s existing national architecture and building a product around the races they control, they chose control.
There is a version of this idea that helps the sport. A season long series that includes all three Triple Crown races, that rewards horses for showing up and running honestly against each other, that gives fans a story to follow from May through September, could be exactly what racing needs to build stars the way football and basketball build stars. This is not that version. This is two operators building a made for television product around the two thirds of the Triple Crown they control and leaving the state that just fought to keep its own race out of the argument entirely.
The Godfather told us to keep our friends close and our enemies closer. CDI and NYRA appear to have taken the second half of that advice and left the Maryland Jockey Club standing outside the family entirely, wondering when the meeting happened that decided their race did not matter enough to invite.
You have to wonder how this idea would look for older horses and if that was considered.
Details on nominations, eligibility, and the full 2027 schedule are still to come. So is Maryland’s response. Past The Wire will be watching for both, along for some tired three-year old horses in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
