Is this really a good thing?

[dean smith]

As it turns out, it looks like Mine That Bird is legit and the best (non-Rachel Alexandra) 3-year-old in the country at this time. Yes, everyone loves Rachel Alexandra, but is her ruining MTB's Triple Crown chances really good for the sport?

Look, he probably wasn't going to win it anyway (I'm convinced it's a near-impossibility for whatever reasons after watching War Emblem, Funny Cide, Smarty Jones and Big Brown fail the past few years), but at least it would keep the casual sports fan interested for another three weeks. Now, instead of three solid weeks of horse racing and Triple Crown talk on ESPN (they who tell them what to watch, who to root for, and what is relevent in sports), we might get a few "nice little stories" about silly nonsense like "girls can beat boys" a few days leading up to the Belmont.

For a sport struggling to stay relevent that really only enjoys about six weeks in the spotlight out of the year IF there's a Triple Crown chase, Rachel Alexandra just chopped that time in half.

I've been trying to get my NFL/NBA/MLB obsessed idiot friends half as interested in the sport as I am for years and I've discovered that after the Belmont, the game's momentum comes to a screeching halt. One of them actually sent me an email saying "better luck next year, cuz NOBODY cares about the Belmont now."

I don't know who to blame, RA's previous owners and their incredibly foolish and stubborn refusal to race a filly against colts in the Derby, or the sport itself for not doing everything in its power to make sure there's a Triple Crown chance each year. If that means freezing out a threat in the Preakness or even an outright, good ol' fashioned race fixin', I'm on board!

(I don't know if I even mean what I wrote with that last paragraph, I just got on a roll.)