30 Cents on the Dollar: Big Brown and the thinning ranks of the handicap division

The owners of Big Brown — not ones to let the grass grow beneath their feet — were quick to find a post-racing home for the big boy. All it took, reportedly, was $50 million, and racing’s newest star already had a second career lined up.

This, many have said (including in the most recent print edition of the Blood-Horse), is a sign of the greed of Big Brown’s owners.

But, of course, Big Brown is not the first three year-old star to have a nonexistent four year-old campaign. In fact, he joins a veritable who’s who of recent racing heroes to make a quick exit: Smarty Jones, Bernardini, Afleet Alex, Point Given, Empire Maker, Street Sense, Hard Spun. Even the much-beloved Secretariat closed out his career in October of his sophomore campaign.

If Big Brown’s owners are greedy, it’s possible that they simply caught the same “greed disease” infecting the owners of many terrific horses of recent vintage.

Moreover, the very scarcity of contrary examples — Curlin, of course, and older horses Invasor and Ghostzapper, whose connections brought them back for abortive seasons following their Horse of the Year campaigns — suggests that the focus on greed — which is a focus on the personal flaws of the owners — leaves much out of the picture. One person grabbing the money may be greedy; a steady stream of different people all coming to the same conclusion at different times isn’t a personal flaw — it’s a problem for racing.

So, what’s driving the defections?

First, obviously, is the lucre of the breeding industry. And it’s hard to argue with the 50 million reasons for retirement that Three Chimneys provided to IEAH, Big Brown’s primary owners. That’s a lot more money than they could ever hope to make racing him and quite possibly more than they would have gotten for breeding rights were they to bring him back for a 2009 racing campaign. The chastening example of Volponi, whose value declined when he followed his Breeders’ Cup win with a disappointing season, lives on.

Beyond the baleful influence of breeding on the racing product, American racing itself offers virtually no incentive for its three year-old stars to return. The money, the fame, the prestige — the juice — all are showered on the youngsters while their elders toil for lesser purses, far from the limelight.

For one thing, there are arguably no races for older horses that have a real national profile. And of course, there is no older horse series comparable to the Triple Crown. For a horse like Big Brown, there is little in the way of prestige to tug him back for an additional season. Winning races like, say, the Suburban, the Stephen Foster, or the Pimlico Special is great — and honorable — but conveys nowhere near the cache of the races he’s already won.

If, say, Big Brown were to return next year, he could contest the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont — for 75 percent of the Belmont Stakes purse in front of a crowd that will probably be about a tenth the size of the Belmont crowd.

Of course, the globetrotting option — a la Curlin — is available and can be lucrative. But it has its own risks — more than one horse has had his season knocked off kilter in Dubai — and to Americans, at any rate, winning the Dubai World Cup or the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe pales in comparison to the Derby or other American classics.

And then there’s the issue of money. Consider this: on the same weekend that Big Brown contested the $2 million Kentucky Derby, the richest race at Churchill for four year-olds was the $500,000 Turf Classic.

At Pimlico, older males ran in the $250,000 Pimlico Special while Big Brown was cleaning up in the $1 million Preakness.

And in New York, while Big Brown tries to secure the Triple Crown in the $1 million Belmont, older males will tussle on the turf in the $400,000 Manhattan.

In other words, while Big Brown was running for $4 million in purses, your older horse — call him Old Grey — topped out at $1,150,000. Old Grey was running for less than 30 percent of the purses available to Big Brown.

This picture is not an anomaly. In the three Triple Crown states plus Florida and Arkansas — two of the major routes to the Crown — a total of six one-million dollar races are contested. All six are restricted to three year-olds.

(California is an exception to this rule; both of its million dollar races, the Santa Anita Handicap and the Pacific Classic, are for older horses).

Similarly, in the current Pimlico meet, half of the richest races — including the Preakness, with a purse four times the size of any other race at the track — are limited to three year-olds.

And at Colonial Downs, whose two month stand starts in June, three year-olds can race in the $600,000 Colonial Turf Cup and the $750,000 Virginia Derby. Old Grey? He’ll have to settle for one of a handful of $60,000 stakes sprinkled through the meet.

Meanwhile, Colonial’s owner, Jacobs Investments, has put up the cash to create a turf version of the Triple Crown — the Grand Slam of Grass, with a $5 million bonus. It’s limited to — you guessed it — three year-olds.

Many of us who love racing bemoan the focus on younger horses and the thinning ranks of the handicap division.

We want owners to bring back their stars for the good of the sport. But it’s awfully hard to ask that — with a straight face, at any rate — when the sport itself seems to send the message that the older horse division is strictly second-class.

Racing can fight back against the lure of the breeding shed with the tools at its disposal: by increasing handicap purses, by creating a handicap triple crown (I know, I know, the New York tracks had a series formerly known by that name) or similar series, by injecting some real energy and excitement into racing for older horses.

Or we can pretend that it’s just greed and nothing more that takes horses from the track.