No sadness in Mudville

Many at the heart of racing are not upset at Big Brown's failure to win the Triple Crown, given the corporate crassness of his owners. They have a point.

clipped from sports.espn.go.com Trainer Dutrow eats crow after Big Brown busts at Belmont By Pat Forde ESPN.com (Archive) How now does it feel to be the freshly humbled fool of thoroughbred racing, after your waltz to the Triple Crown turned into a disaster, a last-place finish, a Brownout? How now do you justify all the obnoxious bragging about your horse, Big Brown? How now do you possibly answer for having flagrantly disrespected the difficulty of the task before you? If anyone won -- beyond the remarkable Nick Zito, who now has foiled two straight Triple tries after upsetting Smarty Jones in 2004 -- it was racing itself. Dutrow and IEAH -- newcomers to this level of success -- ignorantly swaggered into their home turf of New York thinking they had it won. And they made a naked money grab along the way. And somewhere -- wherever the racing gods live -- there was unabated laughter at this comeuppance. Karma's a bitch, babe, and so is the Triple Crown.