THE YEAR AFTER Affirmed had outdueled Alydar to capture the Triple Crown in the most electrifying fashion imaginable, Laz Barrera was entertaining a turf writer at his home just a few furlongs from Santa Anita Park. When the Daily Racing Form columnist asked if he could see the trainer’s Triple Crown trophy, Barrera smiled wryly. “You wanna see my Triple Crown trophy?” he said. “I’ll show you my Triple Crown trophy.” With a flourish, Barrera unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it open, and showed off a seventy-two-stitch scar bisecting his chest. He considered the scar—resulting from bypass surgery after a massive heart attack early in 1979—a memento of all the stress and pressure from the previous year’s grueling classic confrontations.
From the peak of the Belmont Stakes coronation, 1978 had not ended well for Affirmed, Laz Barrera, or Steve Cauthen. In his September return to Belmont Park following the Travers disqualification, Affirmed took on Seattle Slew in a historic showdown pitting two Triple Crown winners against each other for the first time ever. Though the fans made Affirmed the heavy favorite, he finished an exhausted second, a galling three lengths behind Slew.
In their nationally televised rematch back at Belmont a month later in the Jockey Club Gold Cup, Affirmed ran up against even worse luck after hooking Slew in a speed duel right out of the gate. Both Triple Crown winners were roaring side by side through the clubhouse turn when, suddenly, Cauthen’s saddle slipped forward onto Affirmed’s withers. With the jockey unable to balance himself or control his mount, Affirmed flew down the backstretch with Slew at a suicidal clip for a mile-and-a-half marathon. Spent, Affirmed faded to fifth and trudged home through the mud nineteen lengths behind Slew, who himself was overtaken by Exceller to lose by a nose. For Affirmed, it was an ignominious comedown from that spring’s crowning glory.
Despite the disappointing denouement to the season, Team Affirmed cleaned up at the 1978 Eclipse Awards: Affirmed winning as Horse of the Year and champion three-year-old, Barrera as outstanding trainer for the third straight season, and the Wolfsons’ Harbor View Farm as leading owner and leading breeder for the first time ever.
Affirmed and his connections returned to the track the following January determined to avenge the three-race losing streak and to reaffirm his worthiness as a great champion. After two more demoralizing defeats, Barrera knew he needed to make a big change. With Cauthen mired in an unfathomable 110-race losing streak—a shocking fall from grace that mirrored Affirmed’s—Barrera decided to give the mount to Laffit Pincay, the veteran jockey who had filled in twice before.
Affirmed, responding to Pincay’s more dominant riding style, promptly ran off with the Strub Stakes by ten lengths and the Santa Anita Handicap by four and a half. The Santa Anita celebration was shortened, however, when Barrera had to be whisked from the winner’s circle to the hospital, suffering the heart attack that would require triple-bypass surgery. Less than three months later, remarkably, he was back to saddle Affirmed for two straight impressive wins in handicap races. Burdened with a backbreaking 132 pounds, Affirmed was at his gritty best in the Hollywood Gold Cup as he vanquished challengers carrying 12 to 20 fewer pounds.
By the time Affirmed shipped east late that summer for his triumphal return to Belmont, Alydar had already run the last race of his career. Just three weeks after the Travers, Alydar’s 1978 season was cut short by a fractured coffin bone. He came back the following year looking burlier and more intimidating than ever, but he was no longer the same force of nature. He lost four in a row, managed to win a minor stakes, and then struggled to a woeful third in the Suburban Handicap at Belmont on the Fourth of July. Two weeks later, after sustaining a hairline sesamoid fracture, Alydar was retired from a racing career in which he had won 14 of his 26 starts and $957,195 in purses. He returned to Calumet Farm to stand at stud without the kind of hero’s welcome that had greeted the likes of Whirlaway and Citation.
In stark contrast, much fanfare welcomed Affirmed back to Belmont Park later that summer. The golden chestnut struck the New York fans as more muscled up, mature, and substantial than he had been the year before. As a four-year-old, his head had dried out to give it a fine, chiseled appearance, while his neck remained slender, shapely, and elegant. A model of consistency on the track, he ran with the precision of a stopwatch and the grace of Barrera’s favorite two-legged athlete. “If Affirmed was a baseball player, he’d be Joe DiMaggio,” the trainer liked to say. “DiMaggio made everything look easy; he was a perfect ballplayer. Affirmed does the same thing: you never know how hard he is trying.” Affirmed certainly made it look easy that summer in New York, first trouncing 1979 Belmont Stakes winner Coastal in the Woodward and then taking on a challenger even more daunting than Alydar.
In what would be hyped as “The Race of the Century,” Affirmed faced a summit showdown with Spectacular Bid, the gunmetal-gray colt who had been on the verge of his own Triple Crown coronation until Coastal upset him in the Belmont. Affirmed, carrying five more pounds than Spectacular Bid in the Jockey Club Gold Cup that October, rocketed right to the lead and then dared the younger stretch runner to pass him. Time and again around Belmont’s mile-and-a-half oval, Spectacular Bid would discover what Alydar had known all too well. Four times Spectacular Bid challenged for the lead, and each time Affirmed dug in, surged forward, and drew away on his own without any urging from Pincay. Then when Coastal suddenly came charging up to the front on the stretch turn, Affirmed looked him in the eye, too, and promptly snatched back the lead. With Spectacular Bid unleashing a desperation drive down the stretch, Pincay finally went to the whip and Affirmed responded, stretching out and pulling away over the last hundred yards to win by a widening three-quarters of a length.
On the very track where his career had begun in total obscurity and peaked with the Triple Crown coronation in the glare of a national TV spotlight, Affirmed now had fittingly clinched his second straight Horse of the Year title to join the likes of Secretariat, Kelso, and Forego as the only repeat winners since World War II. More than that, the superb triumph had burnished Affirmed’s reputation as one of the most tenacious, resourceful, and consistent warriors ever to grace a racetrack. “Look at him,” Barrera marveled as he entered Affirmed’s stall to say good night after the Gold Cup. “It look like he don’t even run. He knows he’s a champion. No horse can look like that and not be a champion.”
Two weeks later, on the eve of what was to be Affirmed’s farewell race, Barrera made a surprising announcement: the richest Thoroughbred of all time would never compete again. Rather than run Affirmed as scheduled in an Aqueduct stakes on a grass surface he disdained, Lou Wolfson had taken Barrera’s advice to retire the champion colt while still completely sound.
For the record, Affirmed had won twenty-two of his twenty-nine races—including seven of his ten meetings with Alydar—and an unprecedented $2,393,818 in purses. Now, the first horse ever to win $2 million would stand at stud, having been syndicated the year before for a record $14.4 million. But not before enjoying one last curtain call. Parading down the Aqueduct stretch on “Affirmed Day” two weeks later, he would take his final bows: walking and jogging in front of the stands to a fitting ovation, pausing now and then to strike a pose for photographers, holding his head a little higher as if to improve the camera angle on his familiar white-striped face. “It’s like saying goodbye to someone in your family,” Barrera lamented, brushing away a tear. “Watching over this horse was like being with a person you love: seven days a week you worry, going to the barn every morning for three years. I’m going to miss him.”
So would Patrice Wolfson. A few days after the public farewell, it was time for her to privately say goodbye before her special pet was loaded on a plane to start his new career as a stud horse. It was going to be a tough transition for both Patrice and Lou. For the past three years, they had traveled with their colt from coast to coast, following his races and visiting with him most days. Now he was going to Kentucky, far from where they lived. “We’ll get down there every once in a while,” Patrice said as they stood in front of Affirmed’s Belmont stall. “I think they’re trying to wean me away from him right now.”
Lou stood behind Patrice with his hand on her shoulder while Affirmed curled his neck around so he could once again bury his head in her arms.
“I’m gonna miss you, big boy,” Patrice said, her voice starting to crack. “I’m gonna miss you.”
Then, as she stroked his face, she planted a kiss on his forehead.
ARRIVING AT SPENDTHRIFT, Affirmed settled into the farm’s famed stallion barn and bedded down in the stall right next door to his sire, Exclusive Native, who in turn lived adjacent to his own sire, Raise a Native. Like his father and grandfather, Affirmed now earned his living in Spendthrift’s bustling breeding shed, the very building where both he and Alydar had been conceived.
Over the next few years, though, the Spendthrift breeding empire would crumble financially and Affirmed would have to look for new digs. Out of loyalty to Spendthrift boss Leslie Combs, Lou Wolfson had initially resisted the temptation to follow the lead of Seattle Slew’s owners and move Affirmed to greener bluegrass pastures. All this despite the fact that Lou had been given an open invitation to move Affirmed to—of all places—the hallowed home of Alydar, Calumet Farm.
Though hesitant to abandon the sinking Spendthrift, Lou was lured by the romantic notion of Affirmed and Alydar renewing their rivalry in the same Bluegrass breeding shed. “It really would be something to see those two horses side by side again,” Lou mused to a go-between.
A year later, with Spendthrift now in freefall, Lou finally agreed to transfer Affirmed to nearby Calumet Farm. On October 10, 1986, Affirmed strode out of the van and joined Alydar in Calumet’s opulent stallion barn.
As eleven-year-olds, the two chestnut archrivals lived in adjoining stalls, separated by a concrete wall trimmed in oak. Though they couldn’t see one another, each could hear the other rustling through his straw, crunching his oats, and sucking down his water. Outside the barn, they got to see quite a bit of each other during the day—while grazing in their adjacent three-acre paddocks, while nickering at the broodmares that were vanned in for servicing, while being led to and from the breeding shed. Their differences in temperament now could be seen in greater relief: Affirmed remained the more tractable and sociable of the pair, while Alydar was more aloof with a bit of a nasty streak.
The breeding shed was where Alydar’s fans had hoped their star could finally claim a measure of redemption and revenge. They’d never given up the idea that Alydar was the better horse, even after watching their darling get beaten time and again. If he couldn’t best his nemesis on the track, perhaps he could prove his superiority through his progeny.
By the time Affirmed joined him at Calumet, it looked like the Alydar adherents were getting their wish. Alydar—more regally bred than his nemesis as the son of Raise a Native and Calumet’s foundation dam—already ranked as one of America’s most prepotent sires. His yearlings were bringing in an average of $500,000 at auction, almost double what Affirmed’s brought. Among active sires ranked according to the average earnings of their progeny in the mid-eighties, Alydar was second behind Seattle Slew while Affirmed wasn’t even in the top sixty-five stallions on the list. Alydar’s stakes winners were rolling out as if they were coming off an assembly line, leading some to compare him to the greatest of all Calumet sires, Bull Lea.
Alydar’s first foal crop featured two $1 million earners, including Althea, the 1983 Eclipse winner as champion two-year-old filly. His second foal crop boasted Turkoman, the 1986 Eclipse winner as champion older horse while running his earnings past the $2 million mark. By the time his fourth foal crop had produced Alysheba, Alydar could spend the spring classics living vicariously through the progeny he was stamping with his own strapping size, powerful stride, and regal look.
In the 1987 Kentucky Derby, Alysheba accomplished something his sire had been denied by Affirmed: capturing America’s marquee race. After repeating in the Preakness, all that stood between Alysheba and the Triple Crown were the Belmont and Bet Twice, the fierce rival he had outdueled in the first two legs just like Affirmed had Alydar nine years earlier. The difference was that Bet Twice rebounded to spoil the party, winning the Belmont by fourteen lengths while Alysheba faded to a sorry fourth. Alysheba would go on to win the 1988 Breeders’ Cup Classic, the Eclipse Award as Horse of the Year, and a record $6,679,242 in career earnings.
By the time Alysheba was retired, Alydar had produced a talent every bit as good: Easy Goer. In 1989, with Sunday Silence poised to become the twelfth Triple Crown winner, Easy Goer accomplished something his sire couldn’t against Affirmed: turning the tables after close seconds in the first two legs. Playing the spoiler in the Belmont, Easy Goer trounced his nemesis by eight lengths in a time bettered only by Secretariat’s record and then went on to amass $4,873,770 in career earnings.
Alydar’s boosters could now brag that their star had finally risen above Affirmed, who as a sire hadn’t yet produced anything remotely as successful on the track as himself. Alydar may have gotten his redemption in the breeding shed as a prepotent sire, but it would come at a cost.
IN THE WAKE of Lucille Markey’s death at the age of eighty-five in 1982, two years after the Admiral’s passing, everything that she feared for Calumet Farm came to pass—and then some.
Under the terms of Warren Wright’s will, Calumet had been Lucille’s to run as long as she lived and then was to pass to their only son. But since Warren Wright Jr. had died in the midst of the Affirmed-Alydar Triple Crown campaign, the farm had passed to his heirs: his wife, Bertha, and their four children. That’s how control of Calumet wound up in the hands of their daughter Cindy’s husband, J. T. Lundy.
Lundy, a good ol’ boy with extravagant plans for Calumet, immediately began to take out huge loans to restore and update the farm as well as to purchase new, expensive racing stock. Starting with a $13.2 million loan in 1983, he quickly added to that debt with a $20 million mortgage on the farm and another $25 million in loans from Lexington banks. Two years later, he borrowed another $50 million. By 1990, the banks were starting to get nervous. One, First City Bank, called in its $15 million loan in October of that year. Lundy was told that if he didn’t pay off the loan by the following February 28, the bank would foreclose on Calumet, taking everything including the horses. By this time, the farm was bleeding money at a rate of $1 million per month. It didn’t look like there was any way out.
But then, on a chilly night in November, Alydar was discovered in his stall with his right hind leg broken, the bone exposed and hanging by skin and tendons. Though veterinarians tried to save his life, Alydar was eventually put down. Which meant that Lundy would be able to collect on the almost $40 million insurance policy that he’d taken out on the prize stallion.
Many were suspicious, wondering how Alydar could have sustained such a severe break while in his stall. As it turns out, that wasn’t the first time Alydar had a suspicious brush with death. In the early eighties, he had become severely ill and seemed on the verge of dying until an astute vet diagnosed lead poisoning. Lundy told The Los Angeles Times that the horse must have been gorging himself on paint chips that had blown off the barn roof.
The notion that someone might fatally injure a horse for insurance money wasn’t so farfetched. In the early nineties, Americans learned about “The Sandman,” a horse hit man who, for the right sum of money, would sometimes fake an accident or electrocute a horse, leaving vets to usually diagnose colic as the cause of death. When he testified in court, The Sandman admitted to breaking the hind leg of one horse with a crowbar and killing fourteen others through electrocution so the owners could collect insurance money.
Though the insurance money from Alydar’s death may have temporarily staved off disaster, Calumet Farm soon went bankrupt. Lundy would be prosecuted and later sent to jail for his financial wheeling and dealing. But the death of Alydar at the age of fifteen would remain controversial, an unsolved mystery.
LATE IN THE summer of 1991, in the wake of Alydar’s death and Calumet’s collapse into chaos, the Wolfsons decided to relocate Affirmed to nearby Jonabell Farm. Affirmed would stand at stud there until his death at the age of twenty-six in 2001, when he was humanely put down after months of continued pain from laminitis that set in after surgery to repair a dislocated pastern joint.
Laz Barrera, to whom the Wolfsons had generously given the rights to breed one mare to Affirmed every year for life, had paid occasional visits to him at Spendthrift and Calumet. But in 1991, just a few months before Affirmed relocated to Jonabell, Barrera died at sixty-six due to heart failure. For all his success as the first trainer ever to win four straight Eclipse Awards, Barrera would be remembered for what he deemed the best training job of his career: guiding Affirmed to the Triple Crown.
On December 30, 2007—the Wolfsons’ thirty-fifth wedding anniversary—Lou passed away at the age of ninety-five following a protracted struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, during which Patrice faithfully cared for him through what she called the “long, sweet goodbye.” Obituaries in newspapers across the country identified Louis Wolfson, in headlines and leads, as both a controversial financial wizard and a Triple Crown winner. Though his star chestnut’s success could never erase the conviction that had besmirched his reputation, racing in general and the Triple Crown in particular had indeed granted Lou the redemption he desired. “On the back of Affirmed, he was resurrected,” eulogized Steve Wolfson, the eldest of his three sons to follow him into racing. “It was a great bringing together of a family, seeing him rise to the top again. He had lost his name, which meant more to him than anything in the world, and never stopped trying to prove his innocence. Affirmed brought him back. Affirmed and his offspring took Dad to a world where he felt good about life again.”
In the end, Lou Wolfson’s legacy as a sportsman would extend beyond breeding, owning, and campaigning the last horse to win the Triple Crown. Starting in the sixties, he had tirelessly tried to reform a racing industry he saw as stagnating, taking on the patrician establishment that had never allowed him into its club. Again in the eighties, following his remarkable comeback and successful second act in racing, he issued blistering reports advocating reforms to save the sport he loved. Among his recommendations were standardized drug testing, improvement of backside working conditions, and establishment of a national organization to oversee all segments of the racing industry. No one will ever know whether his prescient suggestions would have stopped the eventual erosion of the sport, but as time went on, he would look more and more like a visionary who had foreseen racing’s decline.
Lou’s passing left Patrice as the keeper of the flame for Affirmed’s legacy. Likewise had Lucille Markey’s earlier death left John Veitch to carry the torch for Alydar’s memory. A year after Alydar became the only horse to place second in all three legs of the Triple Crown, Veitch got a share of redemption when Davona Dale—Calumet’s next and last star—won the Triple Tiara, the filly equivalent of the Triple Crown. Forced out of Calumet by Lundy three years later, Veitch went on to become a successful trainer for the Galbreaths’ Darby Dan Farm. Following his retirement from training in 2003, he was elected to the Hall of Fame, joining his father, Syl Veitch, as well as Laz Barrera.
As for the rivalry itself between Affirmed and Alydar, the keepers of the flame remain the jockeys who rode them through their Triple Crown campaign: Steve Cauthen and Jorge Velasquez.
Battling a long slump and weight gain after losing his mount on Affirmed, Cauthen left the United States in the spring of 1979 just before his nineteenth birthday to ride in England. Bouncing back in a country where a jockey’s weight is less of an issue, he won on his very first mount and a month later rode a longshot to victory in his debut English Triple Crown race. He soon mastered the rugged European turf courses and became a star jockey, winning three British riding titles. Though he never rode another American Triple Crown race, he twice won the Epsom Derby—the English precursor of the Kentucky Derby—and became the first jockey ever to complete the international grand slam of derbies by adding the Irish and the French. He continued to win major stakes around the world until he retired in 1992 at the ripe old age of thirty-two. Cauthen, to whom the Wolfsons had given one free breeding to Affirmed for each of the Triple Crown wins, promptly returned to Kentucky and settled down near his boyhood home on a three-hundred-acre horse farm, where he owns and operates his own Thoroughbred breeding business.
For all that came before and after, Steve Cauthen’s name would forever be inextricably bound with that of the mount he deemed the greatest he ever rode. Likewise did Jorge Velasquez, who captured the 1981 Kentucky Derby and Preakness aboard Pleasant Colony, consider Alydar the best mount of his thirty-seven-year career—and Affirmed his toughest nemesis. At the National Racing Museum and Hall of Fame just a furlong from historic Saratoga Race Course, visitors to the “Affirmed, In Front” exhibit commemorating his Triple Crown triumph are greeted by a banner immortalizing the words that a heartbroken Velasquez uttered minutes after the 1978 Belmont in praise of the victor: “This is a great horse . . . as great as Secretariat, Native Dancer, or any of the other great horses.”
Cauthen and Velasquez never raced each other again on their favorite mounts, but they will always have Belmont. On the thirty-fourth anniversary of that stirring duel, the two Hall of Fame jockeys returned to Belmont Park to team up at a signing session commemorating their rides on Affirmed and Alydar. At that and other public appearances, Cauthen and Velasquez once again find themselves side by side—now, to autograph the moving photos of their gripping Belmont stretch duel, to relive that glorious spring of 1978, and to reminisce with fans and with each other about the greatest rivalry in the history of horse racing.
AT THE TURN of the millennium, when The Blood-Horse magazine polled experts to select the “Top 100 Racehorses of the 20th Century,” Affirmed placed twelfth on a definitive list predictably topped by the consensus trifecta of Man o’ War in first, Secretariat second, and Citation third (with Alydar twenty-seventh). With each passing year sans another Triple Crown winner, Affirmed’s stature has only continued to rise.
Since his Triple Crown coronation in 1978, a dozen contenders have won the first two jewels only to falter in the race fittingly known as “The Test of the Champion.” In 2003, when Derby-Preakness winner Funny Cide failed to close the deal in the Belmont, the Triple Crown drought had reached twenty-five years—assuring that it would surpass the record quarter century between the runaway sweeps by Citation in 1948 and Secretariat in 1973. By 2013, when Derby winner Orb had his Triple Crown dreams dashed in the Preakness by a horse named Oxbow carrying the black and gold silks of a reconstituted Calumet Farm rather than the familiar devil’s red and blue of the long-gone Calumet dynasty, the dry spell had reached thirty-five years—and counting.
Each year like clockwork on the first Saturday in May, racing fans and pundits have reiterated the same burning question: Will this finally be the year that the Derby winner goes on to sweep the Triple Crown for the first time since Affirmed in 1978? And when the same answer invariably comes back after the Preakness or Belmont, they wax nostalgic at the memory of that magical spring when Affirmed outdueled Alydar for all three jewels—and wonder how much longer it will be before another champion duplicates a feat most Americans living today are too young to remember ever having been accomplished.
At the time of Affirmed’s Triple Crown, ironically, railbirds and turf writers were starting to get a bit blasé, what with Seattle Slew and Secretariat each having won it over the previous five years. With the seventies destined to go down as “The Decade of Champions,” Affirmed was the Triple Crown winner that got the shortest shrift. Affirmed, with his deceptive elegance and silky smoothness, didn’t have the majestic Secretariat’s explosive power or the magnetic Seattle Slew’s electrifying speed. Nor did Affirmed, with his fighting spirit and indomitable will to win, overwhelm the competition as Secretariat and Slew had done. But what ultimately distinguishes Affirmed was his dominance over an indefatigable rival of comparable ability who made him prove his mettle every step of the way—as a true champion winning the hardest-earned Triple Crown with by far the narrowest combined margin of victory ever. As Laz Barrera was quick to point out, “Affirmed is greater than Secretariat, or any Triple Crown winner, because only Affirmed had to face Alydar.”
Lou Wolfson was, at first, more cautious in his appraisal. Minutes after Affirmed had outdueled Alydar in the Belmont, Lou was asked if he would characterize his golden chestnut as a “great” racehorse. “Yes, a great three-year-old, and so is Alydar,” came his qualified response. “But I want to see him run at four before I call him great overall.”
The grace and grit that Affirmed demonstrated as a four-year-old—winning the last seven races of his career impressively under burdensome handicap weights and running away with the Horse of the Year title in a landslide—convinced Lou that the colt was indeed worthy of the distinction “great.” What’s more, Affirmed had finally won over the skeptics who had never accorded him the level of respect he deserved. From the moment he was born as a one-in-thirty-thousand longshot in his 1975 foal crop until he died as a once-in-a-lifetime champion, Affirmed was always the Rodney Dangerfield of Thoroughbreds: too plebian in his pedigree, too scrawny as a baby, too slight as a Derby hopeful, even too streamlined as a Triple Crown winner.
“Affirmed never got the bouquets he deserved,” Bill Nack, who had famously picked Alydar to win each of their Triple Crown confrontations, wrote twenty-three years later in a Sports Illustrated appreciation eulogizing the victor. “Indeed, the more regally bred Alydar, a product of the finest racing blood at the storied Calumet Farm, was always the more popular of the duo. But Affirmed made an indelible mark on the sport, and in his own unforgettable way—from the eighth pole to the wire in the Belmont Stakes—he crowned his decade as the richest and most competitive in the history of horse racing.”
If it took the passage of time and the absence of any Triple Crown successors to give Affirmed his just due as a racehorse, more years would need to pass before he could likewise finally get some respect as a sire.
By the time Alysheba and Easy Goer took their star turns in the late eighties, their sire, Alydar, had been widely declared the winner in the breeding shed sweepstakes over Affirmed. Of course, Alydar’s superiority there could be explained by many factors, not the least of which was that he had gotten, right from the start, the very best mares because many old-time breeders were convinced that he had the stronger pedigree and was therefore likelier to be the more prepotent sire. Another factor in his favor: he hadn’t been syndicated. Like Secretariat before him, Affirmed was experiencing the downside of syndication. He would, for the most part, only get mares from those who had bought lifetime breeding rights—and if those mares didn’t cross well, there wasn’t much to be done.
But as the years passed, Affirmed’s stock as a stud started to rise. In the end, the two colts were once again separated by the barest of margins: Alydar with 11 percent stakes winners versus Affirmed with 10 percent. The late 1980s and early ’90s brought such stars as Affirmed Success, Zoman, and Peteski, each of whom won more than $1 million on the track. The homebred foal that brought the most joy to the Wolfsons was Flawlessly, who was born in 1988. Lou and Patrice campaigned their Affirmed daughter for five years during which she earned $2,572,536, two consecutive Eclipse Awards as turf champion, and a place in the Hall of Fame. As it turned out, Affirmed had yet another thing in common with Secretariat: both ended up excellent broodmare sires.
THE NAMES AFFIRMED and Alydar remain inextricably intertwined, as tightly bonded by battle as Ali and Frazier or David and Goliath. Less than four decades since Affirmed outfought Alydar for the Triple Crown, their rivalry has reached mythical proportions. It’s not just that the rivalry produced the eleventh and last Triple Crown coronation—it’s that it brought out the best in each rival, in their human connections, and in all of us.
Everyone agrees that there will probably be another Triple Crown winner someday, but there will never be another rivalry quite like Affirmed and Alydar. The two best Thoroughbreds ever to come along in the same foal crop grew up to confront each other six times as two-year-olds for the juvenile championship, then four more times as three-year-olds in the sport’s most important races. Now, in an era when most of the top horses run fewer than ten races over their entire careers, it’s unfathomable that any rivals will ever go head-to-head as often as Affirmed and Alydar, let alone battle as closely and as fiercely as they did.
One of the biggest reasons for that is the seismic shift in how horse racing is viewed. What used to be known as “the racing game” has now become little more than the racing business. The beginning of the end came when breeders shifted their focus from the winner’s circle to the sales ring as auction prices blew through the roof in the eighties. Instead of breeding for competition, people now were planning matings that would produce attractive and early-maturing yearlings. Those expensive prospects couldn’t be turned out to roughhouse in the pasture because they might incur a blemish that would detract from their value. As a result, they wouldn’t get a chance to toughen up for competition or to build the dense bones that can only come from pounding across a field. While the Wolfsons and the Markeys had been in it primarily for the sport, many of today’s owners predicate every decision on how much money a horse can make. Horses often retire early because owners want to start collecting stud fees as soon as possible. The last thing owners want their meal ticket to do is bang heads with a rival that could compromise their colt’s earning power.
And that’s why we love Affirmed and Alydar. We’re nostalgic for a purer, simpler time when sportsmen and sportswomen cared more about the finish line than the bottom line. Affirmed outdueling Alydar for the last Triple Crown marks June 10, 1978, as the end of an epoch, the turning point for the sport, the crowning glory of racing’s last golden age.
Nothing could ever top that peak—not for the two horses, not for their human connections, not for the sport they ennobled. Both of the colts would flash before our eyes on the track and be retired to stud as four-year-olds; both of the farms and their racing stables would fade completely from view; and The Sport of Kings itself would lose much of the luster that had made it once America’s most popular pastime.
But none of that can dim the enduring image of Affirmed and Alydar dueling in the late-afternoon sun on a perfect spring day in New York: a pair of burnished chestnuts galloping nose-to-nose down the stretch, driving and bobbing all the way to the wire.