Taj Mahal flags late at Preakness, and a dramatic win for Maryland racing slips away

Maryland’s horse, the Preakness Stakes favorite, remained in front as he sped toward the three-quarters pole.

The race had unfolded the way Taj Mahal’s married trainer and jockey, Brittany and Sheldon Russell, foresaw. Starting from the rail, he needed to break cleanly and get to the front. Why mess around with the perils of traffic?

“That’s how he ran last time,” Brittany Russell said, alluding to her horse’s smashing victory in the Federico Tesio Stakes that put him in the second jewel of the Triple Crown and gave them all a chance to be hometown heroes.

“We got our own way,” Sheldon Russell agreed. “I didn’t really want to change anything. He was feeling good. He broke good enough. So I had the intent of let’s go to the front and then sort of slow it down.”

The only problem was that Sheldon Russell saw Paco Lopez sitting just off his right flank on a bullet-fast sprinter named Napoleon Solo. Lopez aimed to use Taj Mahal as a pace car and cruise by him when the getting was good. After three-quarters of a mile of stalking, Lopez made his move, and Sheldon Russell felt the fight go out of Taj Mahal.

The dream of a hometown Preakness triumph in the Russells’ backyard at Laurel Park, where they’ve built Maryland’s most successful barn, was over. Napoleon Solo made his move stand up, winning the 151st running of the Preakness in a race missing Kentucky Derby champ Golden Tempo.

“Paco rode a great race,” winning owner Al Gold said. “I didn’t think the horse could go this far.”

Napoleon Solo’s defining win was a redemption tale. After a pair of woeful fifth-place finishes to begin his year, he rediscovered the form that made him a Grade 1 stakes winner as a 2-year-old. “He had everything go wrong his 3-year-old year, and we just kind of stayed the course,” trainer Chad Summers said. “He had a lot of critics out there that told us to just shut up.”

The race was a handicapper’s delight, with a full field of 14 and no obvious favorite. For more casual viewers, it was the brown-paper-bag Preakness — no Kentucky Derby winner, no Bob Baffert, no D. Wayne Lukas, who died last summer after winning his sixth Preakness a year earlier.

This was always going to be an odd year, with the second jewel of the Triple Crown displaced from its historic home at Pimlico Race Course, instead going off 30 miles down the road at Laurel Park before a smattering of fans. Everything that makes the Preakness the Preakness — the boisterous infield party, the historic stakes barn, the possibility of a Triple Crown — was on hold.

Will the race feel more like itself in 2027, when it’s supposed to return to a half-rebuilt Pimlico? The new track will draw the curious, but it won’t fix the fundamental rot at the core of the Triple Crown, with its outmoded five-week calendar that drives more trainers away from the Preakness by the year.

Even if a new television deal puts an additional week between the first two jewels of the series, there’s no guarantee that will be enough to change the minds of trainers such as Bill Mott, Todd Pletcher and Brad Cox. They prefer to give their star horses four or five weeks off between races.

The topic came up again in Saturday’s post-race news conference. Gold was asked if the Triple Crown races need to be spaced out. “I think it’s a good idea,” Gold said. “Tradition is dead. Nobody wants to run in two weeks.”

With little overlap between the Derby and Preakness fields and no guarantee the Derby winner will show up to headline in Baltimore, the essence of Maryland’s most important race is under siege.

That didn’t make the win any less sweet for Summers, Lopez, Gold and the rest of Napoleon Solo’s connections. A classic win is a classic win.

“Twenty years I’ve been riding to be in a race like that, and I was able to pick the right horse,” Lopez said, recalling how his grandfather, also a jockey, told him he would be a great rider from the time he was 5 years old.

Such exultation always has a flip side. In this case, it was the Russells and Taj Mahal coming up short on a day that could have felt like a Laurel Park fairy tale.

As Taj Mahal strode calmly from Russell’s Barn 5, about 45 minutes before post time, a trainer from a neighboring barn shouted: “Good luck, Brittany!”

You could feel the home crowd trying to will a story of Maryland perseverance to a conclusion of purest satisfaction.

The 36-year-old Laurel-based trainer held her children’ s hands. Six-year-old Edy wore pink cowboy boots and a matching bow in her hair. Four-year-old Rye wore Spider-Man boots.

“This is nerve-racking,” Brittany Russell said to a friend. She wasn’t worried about herself. Rather, she didn’t want Taj Mahal to wait too long for the parade of 13 competitors that would accompany him to the paddock for prerace saddling. Nonetheless, she laughed plenty, taking it all in as well-wishers shouted that she looked sharp in her light gray, checked suit.

“All right, guys, now we can do this,” she said when it was time to walk.

“I feel a little emotional,” Russell acknowledged to NBC interviewer Donna Brothers. “This is a big deal.”

It was just that for a trainer who was down to three horses after her top owner pulled 20 from her fledgling barn at Laurel Park in 2018. She and Sheldon, one of Maryland’s top riders, married a week after that existential crisis. They rebuilt from the ground up.

In 2023, Brittany became the first female trainer to lead the state in victories. She held on to her title in 2024 and again in 2025, earning the confidence of big-time owners such as Tom Ryan of SF Racing, who moved Taj Mahal to her after he struggled as a 2-year-old in the California barn of eight-time Preakness winner Baffert.

Starting in February, the Florida-bred colt went undefeated in three straight races at Laurel Park, each win more impressive than the last. He had the Russells, and a lot of other people, believing he might be the horse to beat Saturday. A victory would have made Russell the first female trainer to win a Preakness, on the heels of Cherie DeVaux becoming the first to win the Kentucky Derby.

Russell beamed as she cupped her husband’s left boot and boosted him onto Taj Mahal’s back.

An initial sign of danger came when their horse covered the first quarter mile in 22.66 seconds, a bit hot. “Oof,” Brittany thought to herself. Still, Sheldon felt the colt ease back, with plenty seemingly left in his tank.

When the race was over, he wondered if Taj Mahal lost his oomph on the long run-up to Laurel’s sweeping first turn. But in the moment he felt he had a chance.

He didn’t know he was cooked until he saw Lopez and Napoleon Solo looming, with too much ground left to cover. Sheldon Russell offered no excuses after Napoleon Solo turned on the jets and Taj Mahal faded to 10th.

“I just didn’t really have anything left in the end,” he said. “If it was our day, then I think it would have been our day. This just wasn’t our day.”

“Yeah, disappointing for Taj Mahal,” NBC analyst Randy Moss summarized.

Brittany Russell, however, came to a different conclusion after her first Preakness, a fantasy she never could have conjured as a horse-loving girl growing up in Pennsylvania Amish country.

“It’s been unbelievable,” she said. “No matter what happened here today. We made it here.”

Interview complete, she could only ask: “OK, where are my kids?”