Derby, Preakness Winners Skip Belmont. So Will You, Most Likely.

Both Kentucky Derby winner Super Saver and Preakness champion Lookin’ at Lucky will skip the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, and both for the same reasons: fatigue and the heavy toll a long race like the Belmont takes on a horse.

Fair enough. It’s easy to forget the walking cash on the hoof a Triple Crown racewinner is, and how fragile thoroughbreds can be. Their absence, however, all but scuttles chances for decent ratings for the Belmont. Without a Triple Crown on the line, the Belmont will see a small viewership anyway. Without recognizable winners, that small viewership could drop to a scale properly described as miniscule.

One solution? Spacing the races out, as Pat Forde of ESPN proposes, which would allow horses to recover and would also milk a bit more public interest out of a public’s very short attention span. Sure, there’s no central organization to make this happen in an instant, but there is one buyer: NBC, whose recent penny-pinching has to have all parties involved nervous about the future of televised racing. If anyone could make that happen, it’s them.