Who are all the Triple Crown winners?
By Zoe West
Winning the Triple Crown is one of the most difficult feats to accomplish in horse racing. Here are the 12 horses who are also Triple Crown winners.
To win the Triple Crown requires a very young horse to perform under pressure and perform at an elite level consistently over the course of a few months. There have only been 12 horses who managed to win it all: Sir Barton (1919) Gallant Fox (1930) Omaha (1935) War Admiral (1937) Whirlaway (1941) Count Fleet (1943) Assault (1946) Citation (1948) Secretariat (1973) Seattle Slew (1977) Affirmed (1978) and American Pharoah (2015).
The Triple Crown is a series of three races run over the course of about a month in the spring. They are open to three-year-old thoroughbreds, and have become something of a pinnacle for the sport. As the stature of the races has grown the pressure has only increased, and horses must perform at a higher level for longer in order to even be given a chance to start. Very few horses have accomplished the feat over the years, and their names are remembered in racing lore long after their deaths.
Triple Crown winners are few and (generally) pretty far between. Though that’s more true in some decades than others. Over the past century or so, countless horses have competed in the three “jewels” of the crown, and almost all have fallen short. Some only by a few feet, or even a few inches.
The 1940s and the 1970s were good times for racehorses. Outside of then, not so much. There were many many near misses, but no one actually accomplished the feat between 1978 and 2015, a gap of 35 years.
It may be interesting to note that the Triple Crown was not always considered such a big deal. In fact, Sir Barton did not “win the triple Crown” at the time. He just won three stakes races in the spring of his three-year-old year. The moniker of the “Triple Crown” was not used at all until several years after he swept them, and it wasn’t formally created until created until Gallant Fox won in 1930.
Next: 20 short stories about the 2018 Kentucky Derby horses
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