Mage prepares for Preakness Stakes, aims to win the Triple Crown
BALTIMORE -- It's the nature of the Triple Crown: Kentucky gets the big party while Baltimore gets the leftovers.
There are eight horses set to run in the Preakness, and only one of them raced in the Kentucky Derby. The good news is it's the horse that won the derby.
Mage is keeping the Triple Crown hope alive.
Pimlico has been Mage's home for nearly a week. His trainers say he has settled in and that they're pleased with how he has performed during his stay.
He even showed some feistiness after a workout on Wednesday.
The Preakness is the first race in which Mage is the betting favorite, but his owners are not buying the characterization that the race is all about Mage. Every horse participating in the race "deserves to be here," co-owner Ramiro Restrepo said.
"They are all top-quality horses. It's a grade-one race," he said. "You respect all the contenders. This is the Preakness. This isn't a race in the middle of nowhere for a ham sandwich.
The race is indeed not for a ham sandwich. There's $1.5 million on the line. Plus, Mage is in pursuit of something priceless: the Triple Crown.
And this year, the horse-racing industry is celebrating Secretariat, the greatest horse to achieve that feat.
In 1973, Secretariat bolted through Baltimore to add the Preakness to his Kentucky Derby win. Then, he capped the crown with a victory at the Belmont Stakes.
Fifty years later, a two-ton bronze statue depicting the storied horse with jockey Ron Turcotte aboard stands at Pimlico. It was sculpted by artist Jocelyn Russell who was asked by those closest to Secretariat to capture the horse's charisma.
"And so, that resonated with me," Russell said. "So, as I worked on the monument project, I just kept thinking 'charisma, charisma.' I was looking at photos, watching the races—anything I could bring into the project. It was in the background, it was going on my screen constantly and I was working on him. So hopefully, this does represent what I was trying to capture at that moment."
The Secretariat statue is on tour to all three Triple Crown races. Its permanent home will be in Lexington, Kentucky, near Claiborne Farm, which is where Secretariat resided after racing and was buried.