Crist: Pharoah could be King of the Pick 5

The “official” sign was barely up on American Pharoah’s Triple Crown victory when pundits began saying that his next mission was to complete an unprecedented “Grand Slam” of the three classics and then the Breeders’ Cup Classic at season’s end. In addition to having a shopworn name swiped from half a dozen other sports, this proposed Grand Slam is a bit of a bogus proposition: It is unprecedented because it did not exist as a possibility until this year. The Classic was first run in 1984, six years after the last Triple Crown winner before American Pharoah.

There is a different unprecedented achievement, with an extra leg and a more legitimate history, that American Pharoah can attain Saturday if he wins the Travers at Saratoga: He would become the first horse ever to win the Derby, Preakness, Belmont, Haskell, and Travers, the five most prestigious 3-year-old races on the calendar. Nominations are open for a catchy name for this fivesome. (Super High Five? Pentagon? The Quintet?)

It’s not that much of a stretch to think of the five races as a coherent entity. The Travers has long been thought of as a summer extension of the Triple Crown, and the Haskell has emerged as a worthy predecessor to it in recent decades. Most of the 3-year-olds who have won a divisional championship without winning a Triple Crown race took the Haskell and/or Travers, including Wajima, Holy Bull, Skip Away, and Will Take Charge. In fact, only two horses (Slew o’ Gold in 1983 and Tiznow in 2000) have ever been awarded the Eclipse for champion 3-year-old male without winning at least one of the five races.

Winning them all would be a spectacular achievement. In 24 of the 47 years since the first Haskell, it has taken either four or five different horses to win the five races. Only seven horses have won both the Haskell and Travers, much less doing so after sweeping the Triple Crown.

American Pharoah already is one of just two horses to have won four of the five races. The only other was another Bob Baffert trainee, Point Given, in 2001. After finishing fifth in the Derby, he ran off Preakness, Belmont, Haskell, and Travers romps, becoming at the time the only horse to have won four straight races worth $1 million or more.

Only six horses have won even three of the five races since the Haskell was first run in 1968. Obviously, these include the three previous Triple Crown winners, none of whom won the Travers or Haskell (though Affirmed did finish first before being placed second behind Alydar in the 1978 Travers). The only others to win three of the five are Big Brown (2008) and War Emblem (2002), who both completed a Derby-Preakness-Haskell triple, and Thunder Gulch, who won the 1995 Derby, Belmont, and Travers.

(A nifty footnote to Thunder Gulch’s triple is that his trainer, D. Wayne Lukas, completed a personal sweep of the five races that year, also taking the Preakness with Timber Country and the Haskell with the filly Serena’s Song.)

For a Triple Crown winner even to run in both the Haskell and Travers is extraordinary, the kind of thing only a great horse could do. Win or lose, American Pharoah’s presence in the Travers, instead of an easier route through the Grade 2 Pennsylvania Derby or some phony new race at Monmouth, is sporting and generous. Great horses are supposed to run in great races.

American Pharoah’s owner, Ahmet Zayat, deserves an additional tip of horseplayers’ caps for saying that one of the reasons he passed on the Pennsylvania Derby is that he disapproves of that state’s exorbitantly high takeout rates. It is appalling that a state with more purse money than it knows what to do with charges the nation’s highest takeout rates – up to 30 and 31 percent on trifectas and superfectas.

If American Pharoah wins this Travers, his campaign against 3-year-olds will have been among the best in American racing history, and he’s still got that date with the Breeders’ Cup Classic and a potential showdown with Honor Code and Beholder. If he wins that on top of the five sophomore races, there’s just one problem: What do you call a six-pointed crown?