Sadly, Breeder's Cup is last chance for 4-year-olds

The Breeders Cup could be the last post for 4-year-old horses like the favored Lawyer Ron. AP

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In the 24 years since the start of horse racing's Breeders Cup, it has been relentlessly called "The Super Bowl of Racing,'' which makes it just another event that marketers or media have tried to elevate by lazy comparison to the most overblown spectacle in sports.

Still: Credit is due. The Breeders Cup, which runs Friday (three races) and Saturday (the other eight) at Monmouth Park in New Jersey, is in reality a much more ambitious undertaking than the Super Bowl or the Final Four or the World Series, which are not only desired destinations, but also mandatory ones. Nobody is forced to run the Breeders Cup, yet every year most of the best horses in training are there.

(Yup, $23 million in purses is a sweet incentive, but in many cases we are talking here about owners who aren't generally flying commercial, if you know what I mean. They can skip this dance and still pay the vets' bills).

The centerpiece of the Breeders Cup is the $5 million Classic, the 1 ¼-mile final race on Saturday's card. In simple terms, the Classic is designed as the ultimate horse race -- a season-ending showdown at a classic (pun intended) distance, bringing together the best horses in training. In this sense, it is the Super Bowl, the Final Four and World Series.

Three years running, the winner of the Classic has been voted Horse of the Year. Saturday's edition brings together five horses who ran in last May's Kentucky Derby and also Lawyer Ron, a four-year-old who ran in the 2006 Derby, and has chased off many of the top older dirt horses in training with big victories in the summer and early fall.

It would have been better, yet, if 2006 Classic winner Invasor had not been retired with an injury in May, but in all, the Classic sets up as a terrific race.

(There is one other problem: The Breeders Cup is run every year in late October or early November, arguably the most congested time on the major sports calendar. World Series Game 3 is on Saturday night. A full slate of college football and NFL are on the same weekend. It is a brutal time to try to capture the public's attention with the showcase weekend for a sport that has long since lost the "major'' label, except for a few weeks in the spring of the year.

But it's also a conundrum: Breeders Cup, Ltd. can't exactly run a season-ending championships in July. And ESPN is broadcasting the entire show on Saturday, so racing will capture plenty of short-time viewers who stumble across the event in search of college football).

To me, the best of horse racing is the meeting of generations. OK, not the very best. That would be the far turn in the Kentucky Derby, when three months of speculation are sorted out on the racetrack, with 150,000 people in full throat. Second best is when a good older horse (that's any racehorse more than three years old for you NFL fans out there) meets a good three-year-old. That will happen Saturday in the Classic.

My personal racing history dates only to the 70s, a sort of golden age of racing, with three Triple Crown winners (Secretariat in 1973, Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in 1978) and a fourth, Spectacular Bid in 1979, who surely should have been. But just as much as savoring their work against their peers, I relished watching them run against older -- and eventually, younger, horses. Secretariat against Onion (not a champion, he, but he beat Big Red in the Whitney at Saratoga). Slew against Affirmed. Affirmed against the Bid. In races such as these, you could measure one generation against another.

It is exhilarating that five good Derby horses are still on their feet and training well in late October. Derby winner Street Sense, Preakness winner Curlin (who also defeated Lawyer Ron in the Sept. 30 Jockey Club Gold Cup at New York's Belmont Park), Hard Spun, Any Given Saturday (winner of the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth in late July) and Tiago comprise one of the best three-year-old classes in recent history. Certainly it is one of the most enduring.

Of course, it is unlikely that many of them will keep running beyond Saturday. Street Sense and Hard Spun are already set to stand as stallions at Darley Stud. They are finished for sure. Of the others, only Tiago, a homebred owned by Jerry and Anne Moss (of 2005 Derby winner Giacomo fame), is almost certain to be running in 2008.

This not only robs the sport of the type of generational rivalries described earlier, but it also forces racing into trying to cultivate enduring fan interest with seven-month careers. That's an exaggeration for racing hardcores, who pick up on good horses when they are two-year-olds, but let's not talk about pure racing fans.

Let's talk about the sports fan who starts following racing in April, when the Derby prep season gets serious. Interest intensifies throughout the Derby and Preakness, when racing -- especially if there is a good story line, like Funny Cide, Smarty Jones, Afleet Alex or even, sadly, Barbaro -- comes to life outside the walls of dark, bloodless, simulcast parlors. It becomes a sport again.

Just as quickly, the horses are gone. It is an economic reality that a horse like Smarty Jones (or Street Sense) is far more valuable at stud, impregnating 300 mares per season at $150,000 per live foal, than he is on the racetrack, where life-threatening injury is a daily possibility. This equation has been spelled out repeatedly and seems irreversible and discouraging. Races thrill millions. Breeding makes wealthy people wealthier. (And I guess, in theory, produces more champions who will also retire at age three).

It's a giant leap of faith to suggest that if great horses kept running past age three, to four and then five, that the sport of horse racing would suddenly be re-invigorated to the point where it is again one of the major attractions in U.S. sports. Too much has changed. What is a "major'' sport in the United States? The NFL is. Major league baseball. College football. College basketball, but only in March. The NBA? I'm not so sure. The NHL? Not a chance. Most sports have been marginalized, some more than others.

Racing fights for its public life in this paradigm. A four-year-old Street Sense would help keep its head further above water. Instead, we get Saturday's Classic, which might be a brilliant race and, in harsher reality, a farewell.