For the second year in a row, the Kentucky Derby winner will skip Preakness

For the second year in a row and fourth time in the last eight years, there will be no Triple Crown on the line when horses contest the Preakness Stakes, the middle leg of the series.

Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo will not make the trip to Laurel Park, trainer Cherie DeVaux announced Wednesday, and will instead point to the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga Race Course in June.

DeVaux cited a desire to give the colt a little more of a break after “the race of a lifetime” at Churchill Downs.

“His health, happiness and long-term future will always remain our top priority,” she said in a statement.

Preakness is being held at Laurel Park this year while a project to revamp Pimlico Race Course is underway in Northwest Baltimore. The race is expected to return in 2027, though with temporary seating for fans before a newly built grandstand opens in 2028.

It will still be run at the traditional distance of 1 3/16 miles at Laurel Park, and DeVaux had previously expressed ambivalence about the shorter distance, as well as the quick turnaround.

In the Derby, which is run at 1 1/4 miles, the late-charging Golden Tempo made a last-to-first dash to just catch morning-line favorite favorite Renegade at the wire.

His previous race, the Grade 2 Louisiana Derby, is run at the same distance as Preakness, and Golden Tempo couldn’t pull off a similar closing move, finishing third behind Emerging Market and Pavlovian.

“I’m happy to have a horse that can win the Kentucky Derby, win the Belmont, win the Travers, but he’s so specialized,” DeVaux said Tuesday during an appearance on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “And that’s why we’re waiting to see what his energy level is like when he gets back to the track, see how he’s moving, because he’s going to have to really take a jump forward to be able to take that extra 16th of a mile away from him.”

The Belmont, which is in its third and final year at Saratoga before returning to a rebuilt Belmont Park in 2027, has been run at 1 1/4 miles during its stint in upstate New York, shorter than the traditional distance of 1 1/2 miles.

Mike Repole, owner of Renegade, announced this week his horse will also point to the Belmont. Third-place finisher Ocelli, the biggest long shot in the race, is a maybe for Maryland, according to trainer Whit Beckman.

Last year’s winner of the Run for the Roses, Sovereignty, also bypassed the Preakness for the Belmont, which he went on to win in dominant fashion on the way to being named Horse of the Year at the Eclipse Awards.

The same decision was made for long-shot Derby winners Rich Strike in 2022 and Country House in 2019.

In 2021, Medina Spirit’s win in Kentucky was clouded by a failed post-race drug test. The Bob Baffert-trained colt was allowed to enter Preakness with additional drug testing, which he passed, and finished the race in third.

In February 2022, Medina Spirit was stripped of his title. The colt who was elevated to first place in the record books, Mandaloun, did not run at Pimlico.

Even before DeVaux’s decision, the nearly annual debate about the spacing of the Triple Crown races cropped up once more when a Sports Business Journal report in April indicated the Maryland Jockey Club was open to moving Preakness to three weeks after the Derby as the organization negotiates a new television deal.

But the Maryland Jockey Club said no such calendar shift is set.

The discussion persists because trainers are less inclined to run modern thoroughbreds back after only two weeks’ rest. And that mindset has been a factor in this recent stretch of Derby winners forgoing the challenge of the Triple Crown, even though the quest to capture the Derby, Preakness and Belmont in succession is the sport’s most famous achievement and the one that resonates greatest with the public.

Some top trainers, such as Brad Cox and Chad Brown, have come out in favor of a new calendar with more space between races.

“Listen, I get history and I’m a big fan of history, but the points system has changed the whole dynamic of trying to get into the Derby,” Cox said in April. “The pressure it puts on the horses in regards to getting into the Derby, then to ask them to run 1 1/4 miles to try to have them the best that they can be on that particular day. To turn around and think you got to run 1 3/16 miles 14 days later, it’s a lot.”

Brown said he was initially opposed to changing something so vital to the history of the sport, but he’s come around to the idea of a new configuration.

“The more I think about it and the more I evaluate my own crops of horses year to year, it’s pretty obvious that the horses benefit from more time in between races,” he said. “They run a lot less than they used to over the course of time when you study the history.”

Bill Mott, trainer of last year’s Derby winner and this year’s fourth-place finisher, Chief Wallabee, put it in more blunt terms at Churchill Downs on Sunday when discussing the plans for his colt.

“Nobody talks about the Preakness,” he said. “The Belmont at Saratoga, we need to discuss that.”

This story has been updated.