Flatter: Racing finds way to unite to fight slander of a star

This was going to be a column about how the Triple Crown as we know it is dead. That it could be brought back to life with some miracle of common sense. But a retired football player who may have thought his brother’s one visit to the Kentucky Derby qualified him to be an expert on horse racing has pushed the original topic to the bottom half of this page.

Thank you, Jason Kelce, for reminding us that we as a sport actually can come together on something. We have met the enemy, and he is you.

On the “New Heights” podcast he does with his brother Travis, the older Kelce went all-flat earth and Aaron Rodgers about the greatest racehorse who ever lived. One who last competed 14 years before Jason was born and died when the future Hall of Fame center was only 2.

“All major speed records in the Triple Crown races are still held by Secretariat, who set them in 1973,” J.K. said Wednesday.

“That’s wild,” Travis said.

“It’s not that wild,” Jason said, “because Secretariat was juiced to the gills. What we are talking about here, Secretariat just happens to be right in the heart of the steroid era.”

“Dude,” Travis said, laughing. “’Seventies?”

“Nineteen seventy-three, every football player, every baseball player, they were juicing them to the gills. You don’t think Secretariat was ----ing juiced to the rafters? Of course it’s the fastest horse of all time. They didn’t drug-test Secretariat the way they did Mystik Dan.”

“That’s a good point.”

“Nobody talks about it. There’s no chance Secretariat wasn’t doping.”

Jason, a married father of three who just signed a contract to begin telling tales next football season at ESPN, pulled back only a little when he went on social media Thursday.

“You know who else has enlarged hearts?” he wrote. “People who take copious amounts of steroids.  I’ll admit I don’t know whether Secretariat was on steroids or not. ... The enlarged heart in my mind is actually more evidence that at some point the horse was being juiced.”

Within two hours, the Kelce who does not date Taylor Swift tried to unring the bell.”

“I’m sorry everyone,” he wrote on X. “Wasn’t trying to get people riled up. I really thought it was just known that, in the ’70s, steroid use was rampant. I’m not trying to take away from Secretariat’s or anyone from that era’s legacy. You’re right. Without proof, it is unfair to assume these things publicly. I apologize.”

You can stuff your sorries in a sack, mister. As of Friday morning Kelce’s original Xweets and that slanderous part of the podcast had not been removed.

That’s right. Slanderous. I kept waiting for it to be punctuated by a prove-that-it-isn’t argument that 8-year-olds roll out when they say something outrageous like milk is made of liquified chalk. That was one from my childhood.

Kate Tweedy, who I met last year during the 50th anniversary of Secretariat’s Triple Crown, reached out to me Thursday afternoon. She and her brother John are surviving children of Secretariat’s late owner Penny Chenery. They wanted to issue a statement while friends of racing with whom I share a point of view stormed the J & T citadel.

“Kelce ... admitted that he knows nothing about Secretariat and bases his opinions entirely on the fact that Secretariat belonged to an era when drug use in athletes was rampant,” the Tweedys said. “The fact is Secretariat was never given performance-enhancing drugs.”

Apology notwithstanding, it seems Jason Kelce, whose academic expertise is quantified by his marketing degree from the University of Cincinnati, applied an anthropomorphized diagnosis to deem that a once-in-a-lifetime racehorse with a freakishly large heart like Secretariat was getting the same sort of drugs that he said all his antecedents were hopped up on in the NFL. Yeah, Jase. All us multi-legged creatures who lived through the ’70s look alike to you.

I wonder what Kelce thinks about Phar Lap, the Depression-era champion who was to Australia what Secretariat would be to America. He also had a massive heart that was discovered only after he died in California. He, too, was once in a lifetime. They happen. They should be cherished rather than turned into piñatas for knee-jerk cynics. Maybe Kelce has some crack-pot theory about Phar Lap’s fatal consumption of some illegal, cardio-stunting alcohol during the Prohibition.

Lacking legitimate equine or veterinary evidence to support his position, Kelce reminded me of when Jim Rome, horse owner and radio talk-show host, asked the late commissioner David Stern 12 years ago if the NBA draft lottery was rigged.

Part of Stern’s response was to fire back his own loaded question, asking Rome, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Maybe Jason Kelce was trying to show his new bosses at loudmouths-first, sports-no-better-than-second ESPN that he can move one needle by making dubious claims about another. If that is the case, and based on the tall tale he spun this week, it could be a long season for the discerning football fan watching the self-styled worldwide leader. That company sure has changed since I worked there.

But back to the Triple Crown, which Secretariat won in 1973. He was the first to do it in 25 years, and he like Seattle Slew and Affirmed and American Pharoah and Justify did it the hard way. At 1 1/4 and 1 3/16 and 1 1/2 miles over a five-week period.

Mystik Dan already has been denied the opportunity to join them, because the Belmont Stakes* will be run next month at 1 1/4 miles. Somehow, starting the race on a turn at a temporary home while Belmont Park’s grandstand is being rebuilt was fine in the 1960s at Aqueduct but not in the 2020s at Saratoga.

Supposedly, the shortening of the race is only for as long as it takes to rebuild Belmont. The skeptic in me wonders. Because it is only 1 1/4 miles this year, there is every reason to expect the race to fill. And the same thing should happen again next year. By the time Big Sandy reopens, why wouldn’t the New York Racing Association be tempted to keep the Belmont Stakes* at 1 1/4 miles? Oh, wait. It would start on a turn. So, too, would the Breeders’ Cup Classic, presuming it ever returns to New York for the first time since 2005.

Of course, Mystik Dan’s trainer Kenny McPeek nearly pre-empted the idea of a Triple Crown in 2024 when he suggested last weekend that his colt might not line up in the Preakness. As this week has gone on, it seems more likely he will go.

The mere thought of the Kentucky Derby winner sending regrets to the Maryland Jockey Club used to be unthinkable. But the recent precedent of Country House’s absence in 2019 led to Rich Strike’s rejection in 2022. Gasps have become nods.

Beyond Mystik Dan, the Preakness has become a non-starter for most non-winners of the Derby. Last year there were not any who lost and advanced. This year it looks like Just Steel will be the only also-ran from last weekend who will race at Pimlico. For 18 of the first 21 years of this century, there were at least four Derby horses in each Preakness. Since 2021 there have been no more than three in any given year.

The two-week gap may be great for traditionalists trying like me who want to protect the sanctity of the Triple Crown. For all but one horse every year, though, this does not apply.

The move of the Preakness to late May seems inevitable. Even though the Stronachs are getting out of the Maryland racetrack business, they are maintaining control of the Preakness brand, and they already have been open about pushing the race to what would be Memorial Day weekend most years.

As it is, the race will be shifted to Laurel Park while Pimlico supposedly is rebuilt, whenever that happens. The state money to pay for it was approved Thursday with the signature of Maryland governor Wes Moore. Didn’t we hear all this before in 2020? Lather, rinse, repeat.

I would repeat my admittedly hackneyed opinion that the Kentucky Derby watered down the Triple Crown when it continued to exclude a Hall of Fame trainer for a third year. However, someone just came in and took a glue gun to the B key on my key*oard.

BB. There. It seems to be working again.

I actually have one simple way to preserve the five-week calendar for the Triple Crown. Since the Kentucky Derby upped its purse from $3 million to $5 million this year, and the Belmont Stakes* went from $1.5 million to $2 million, maybe the Stronachs can take some of that bonus money it is throwing around and re-aim some of it into a bigger Preakness purse.

Back in 1985, when Spend a Buck was lured from the Preakness with a $2.6 million carrot on the end of a stick called the Jersey Derby, the counterattack was a Triple Crown bonus system. It lasted off and on for most of the next 20 years.

Ah, money. The root of all incentives. Hey, Jason Kelce made nearly $82 million in his NFL career, and brother Travis is sitting on a new deal worth $34 million. Between them and the billionaire the younger one is dating, maybe they could double down on that apology.

What is it they say about a fool and his money?

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.