Betting on this year’s Triple Crown races started with a bang but ended with a whimper. Although betting on the Kentucky Derby set a record this year, consistent with trends stretching back two decades, betting on the Preakness and the Belmont declined. The Preakness lost some of its luster when the longshot Derby winner, Rich Strike, passed on the race, and though Rich Strike returned to run in the third leg of the Triple Crown, the series had by then seemed to slip its moorings, populated by an ever-changing cast of characters that failed to grip the imagination. The declines in handle for the second and third races of the series occurred at a time when the surprising gains made by racing during the pandemic began to show clear signs of abatement. Somewhat ironically, given those gains, handle at Pimlico in Baltimore and Belmont Park on Long Island dropped despite the two tracks holding the races without pandemic-related restrictions on live attendance for the first time since 2019. Still, commingled betting on the Derby set a record, again, up 9.9 percent compared to 2021, when attendance was limited due to coronavirus protocols (the Derby had another $8.3 million in betting from a separate pool in Japan). The Derby remains unchallenged in its spot as the most popular race for bettors in the United States, with a total of $168.8 million in commingled wagers this year, dwarfing the $65.3 million bet on this year’s Preakness and the $50.3 million bet on the Belmont. The Preakness total was down 5.0 percent compared to last year, when Pimlico limited attendance to 10,000. Although Pimlico’s parent company, 1/ST, never released handle or attendance numbers for this year’s race, the track had no restrictions on attendance this year. A heat wave gripping most of the mid-Atlantic and East Coast on the date of the Preakness probably had a negative impact on attendance, which is often reported by 1/ST to be somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000. Handle on the Belmont this year then dropped significantly, down 16.5 percent. Aside from the return of Rich Strike, the Triple Crown this year had no clear narrative, and the Belmont suffered the most. The morning-line favorite, We the People, was a late-blooming horse who had not run in either of the other two Triple Crown races, and the impressive Preakness winner, Early Voting, showed up in the series for only that single performance. Handle numbers for this year’s Preakness and Belmont also have to be measured against the figures generated in a year in which the post-Derby races were a constant topic of discussion in the mainstream media due to the positive drug test for the 2021 Derby winner, Medina Spirit. As is said, any publicity is good publicity, and the controversy surrounding the Derby last year kept the Triple Crown in the spotlight throughout its run. :: Get ready for Saratoga and Del Mar with a Quarterly subscription to DRF Past Performances  The declines this year also reinforced that racing’s gains throughout the pandemic – which occurred at a time when sports-betting companies joined racing in offering lucrative incentives to place online bets and the government was sending out stimulus checks – has reached its ceiling. Last year, April’s betting total was up a whopping 30.4 percent compared to April 2019, prior to the pandemic, but this year, betting in April was even with last year. For the entire year, total betting on U.S. races has been level with the same time period of 2021.