posted June 5, 2008 at 15:22 in Triple Crown Betting Trends

I can’t really blame any online racebook or horse betting fans who weren’t watching any other horse in the 2008 Preakness Stakes besides Big Brown. After all, we were all at the mercy of the NBC Network production team that kept their cameras squarely on the Kentucky Derby winner.

It was difficult to see what any other horse in the race was doing. But if we had been paying attention to those horses other then Big Brown we might have seen that Macho Again, was being steadied at the ¼ pole. We might have seen that Macho Again was going five wide around the turn. We might have seen that Macho Again was moving like a freight train through the lane, not giving up even though Big Brown was turning into a speck of dust in front of him, fighting with every breath to turn Big Brown’s Preakness romp into a real horse race.

Macho Again ended up finishing second in the Preakness Stakes, beating Icabad Crane by a quarter of a length. Of course, Big Brown was awesome in the Preakness, but Macho Again, by just showing how incredibly big his heart was, was just as awesome…on a much smaller scale, of course.

Did Macho Again’s incredibly tough Preakness run set him up for a more serious race in the Belmont Stakes? Maybe not. Maybe Macho Again is just a cheap horse with a big heart.

Then again, maybe it did. I’ll tell you one thing, at the BetUS online future book odds of 40 to 1, I have to take Macho Again seriously.

His father, Macho Uno, won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. His grandfather, Holy Bull, is one of the greatest horses I have ever seen step foot onto a racetrack. Holy Bull was done in during his Kentucky Derby race by a muddy Churchill Downs racing strip. Macho Again didn’t even run in the Kentucky Derby.

He did run in the Derby Trial, though, on April 26th. That set him up beautifully for his second-place Preakness run.

Now, he goes into the Belmont Stakes as a huge long-shot. Does he have a chance to shock the world?

Not really. Looking at this race on paper, Macho Again shouldn’t like the 1 ½ distance of the Belmont Stakes. He isn’t bred for the distance and he probably would much prefer to run a mile on the grass.

But Big Brown wasn’t bred for the 1 ¼ mile Kentucky Derby and look what he did? The point, of course, is that because Macho Again’s heart is so large, because he’s such a competitor, he could turn any situation into a winning one.

Is he good enough to beat Big Brown? Probably not. But his heart is good enough for me to say that there’s an outside chance that he could do it.

What exactly are those chances? Oh, probably around 30 to 1 which makes the 40 to 1 that online racebook fans are getting on Macho Again in the BetUS online future book absolutely great.

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