For all but one of the past 58 years, horse racing’s Triple Crown arrived at the same time on the calendar. The Kentucky Derby was run on the first Saturday in May, followed two weeks later by the Preakness and three weeks after that by the Belmont.
Three races for 3-year-olds in five weeks. Win them all and enter racing’s pantheon.
Those last two sentences remain true. But after 48 hours of upheaval this week, the times — and in particular the calendar — are changing. (The only exception since 1969 came in the pandemic year of 2020 when two of the three races were held in September.)
On Monday, Churchill Downs Inc. and the New York Racing Assn., which host the Derby and Belmont, respectively, announced a new six-race series for 3-year-olds that includes those two races on their traditional dates, but not the Preakness. The Thoroughbred Championship Series will feature a points system, with horses who compete in at least four races eligible to share a $5-million bonus pool that will pay down to the top eight finishers.
Then on Wednesday, the Maryland Jockey Club announced the Preakness would be moved back eight days, to the fourth Sunday in May. That date usually falls on Memorial Day weekend, though 2027 is an exception.
The goal is to get more Derby horses to run in the Preakness after more than 85% of the entrants in the last five years, including three winners — Rich Strike (2022), Sovereignty (2025) and Golden Tempo (2026) — skipped the Maryland race. Their trainers cited the short turnaround between the two events; very few horses these days compete in races two weeks apart.
“This extra week between the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness opens the Preakness to potential participants who use modern training methods,” said Bill Knauf, president and general manager of the Maryland Jockey Club.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Bob Baffert, the only trainer to win the Triple Crown since 1978, with American Pharoah (2015) and Justify (2018), said via text message. “Extra week and on a Sunday. Triple Crown tradition stays intact. Win-win for all because you have a choice to go for it if you think you have the right horse after winning the Derby.”
Baffert had said in a post Monday on X that the “greatest achievement in racing will always be winning the Triple Crown.”
But if horses were skipping the Preakness because of a 14-day turnaround, how many will run a week later knowing it’s just 13 days before the Belmont, especially since the latter race is part of the new series?
This year, no horse competed in all three races. Last year, there was one: Journalism, who sandwiched a win in the Preakness around runner-up finishes in the Derby and Belmont.
“As a traditionalist, sentimentally it’s difficult to see the timing and structure of the Triple Crown being adjusted,” Aron Wellman, president of Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, which co-owns Journalism, said in a phone interview. “However, as a proponent of innovation and recognizing that the industry at large has fallen behind the times in so many respects, I applaud the innovation of Churchill Downs Inc. and NYRA.”
Did those outfits just put a dagger in the Triple Crown?
“I don’t know how much more of a dagger Churchill and NYRA should be blamed for putting into the Triple Crown when in the last two years, the winner of the Kentucky Derby has skipped the Preakness and waited for the Belmont,” Wellman said.
He also noted that Churchill Downs made an $85-million offer this spring to purchase the intellectual property rights to the Preakness, but the state of Maryland matched it.
“If anything, Churchill’s move to secure the IP [intellectual property rights] for the Preakness was a gesture on their part to try to save the Triple Crown because the daggers have already proven, if not fatal, then close to it,” Wellman said.
“So I don’t place any blame on Churchill and NYRA for the steady decline or demise of the Triple Crown. … And now knowing that they [can’t] institute whatever changes they were going to make, they’ve taken it upon themselves to try to do something positive for the industry and their respective brands. Which I applaud them for.”
The other races in the new series are the Matt Winn Stakes in July at Churchill Downs, the Jim Dandy in late July or early August at Saratoga, the Travers in late August at Saratoga, and a new “championship race” that will be scheduled in September at Churchill. Each race will have a minimum purse of $1 million (the Derby is worth $5 million; the Belmont and Preakness $2 million each).
NBC will televise the Churchill races, with Fox handling those in New York. NBC also announced a new deal to carry the Preakness through 2032, the same year its rights to the Derby expire.
