Cinch Magazine- Your Online Equestrian Source

The Canadian Triple Crown, An American Copycat?

J.L. Orchard, Cinch Magazine

As the Canadian Triple Crown runs its course, Cinch Magazine will write a three piece series on the similarities and differences of the Canadian and American Triple Crowns.

June 21 Woodbine, Toronto – Eye of the Leopard reaches ahead in the last strides against Mr. Foricos Two U to win the 2009 Queen’s Plate. The field on Sunday consisted of 13 horses, including the two fillies, Milwaukee Appeal and Tasty Temptation. Both fillies placed first and second respectively at the Woodbine Oaks two weeks earlier. Milwaukee Appeal finished third at the Queen’s Plate behind Mr. Foricos Two U.

It was the hottest day of the Woodbine race season thus far and Eye of the Leopard maintained his position to the outside, giving his “all” when asked. Eye of the Leopard has now won three of his four starts and finished the Queen’s Plate at 2:03.84.

Queen’s Plate vs. Kentucky Derby – Both races have survived, uninterrupted, through times of financial calamity, and war, but the races that mark the first jewels of the Canadian and American Triple Crowns are hardly the same, in history, or in style.

The Queen’s Plate began as a testament to the prestige of horseracing. A symbol of early Canadian culture. A place where store clerks rubbed shoulders with royalty. In the 1800s there was no such thing as the NHL. The statements of the day were made at the racetrack … there was no Hollywood.

For the British Commonwealth of Canada, whose race days reflected European horseracing, the Toronto Turf Club craved a day that could hold its prestigious own to the English Derby and gain for Toronto the recognition of the Royals. Wednesday, June 27, 1860, with the blessing of Queen Victoria, the small Toronto community of fewer than 45,000 welcomed the inauguration of the Queen’s Plate.

Seven years later, on July 1, 1867 … the day of confederation … Canada became her own country. Making the Queen’s Plate older than the nation it claims to define.

That opening Queen’s Plate at Carleton racetrack didn’t win the Queen’s Plate for Toronto. From 1863 until 1881 the race skipped from one Ontario track to another until its permanent placement at Toronto’s Woodbine Racetrack.

The Kentucky Derby, however, began as an emblem of Churchill Downs regality. You cannot have the Derby without the Downs, and you cannot have the Downs without the Derby.

On May 17, 1875, almost eight years after the inauguration of the Queen’s Plate, Churchill Downs opened to a public audience of 10,000. With it came three races to mimic England’s premier: Epsom Oaks, St. Leger Stakes, and Epsom Derby. They were called the Kentucky Oaks, Clark Handicap, and the Kentucky Derby.

The esteem of the Queen’s Plate did not rely on the splendor of the track it was run at but instead on the people that attended. Toronto’s postmaster, T.C. Patteson believed Canadian horseracing should be a “sport of royalty,” and devised a crafty scheme in which to draw the Royals in. In 1881 he invited the Governor-General of Canada and his wife to attend the race with him. Afterwards, Patteson wrote under a pseudonym name to The Mail commenting that Her Royal Highness was late, delaying the start of the race. There afterwards, Canadian horseracing was known as a “sport of royalty.” Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, was the wife of the Governor-General.

It wasn’t until 1939, when King George VI attended, that a reigning monarch witnessed the Queen’s Plate (or King’s Plate as it was called from 1902 until 1951 while Queen Victoria’s male heirs ruled), and for years afterwards, a member of the Royal family awarded the winning prize.

In the seventeenth century, King Charles II offered silver plates to tracks as race prizes. The Queen’s Plate received one valued at 50 guineas. With time the plate was exchanged for a 12 inch gold cup, and the phrase, “The gallop for the guineas,” though still used, was made implausible after George III cancelled the minting of guineas.

Churchill Downs began awarding a standard gold trophy to its Kentucky Derby winners in the year of its Golden Jubilee, 1924. The Kentucky Derby claims to be the only American sporting event that awards a solid gold trophy, each one being handcrafted beginning in fall in order to be ready by May.

The phrase, “Run for the Roses,” was coined the following year during the first network radio broadcast of the Derby. The first rose garland was an arrangement of pink and white roses awarded to the winner of the 1896 Derby. The red rose became the Derby’s official flower in 1904 and a garland of 554 roses in awarded to today’s Kentucky Derby winners. Each garland includes two seals, a green satin backing, and a “Crown” of green fern, ribbon and roses. A 60 rose bouquet wrapped in ten yards of ribbon is awarded to the winning jockey. After the Derby the garland is freeze dried in order to preserve it. Race goers can watch the making of the garland prior to the Derby.

Prize and prestige is the going appeal of the Kentucky Derby, which awards US$2million, double that of the Queen’s Plate. The downside is that you can’t get into the Derby with less than $51,100, when all’s said and done.

While the Derby shorted from 1 ½ miles to 1 ¼ miles in 1896, the Queen’s Plate has gone through a series of changes itself. The distances of the Queen’s Plate races have gone everywhere from 1 1/8 miles up to 2 miles from 1868 to 1956. It has remained at 1 ¼ miles since 1957.

Until 2007 the Queen’s Plate was run on dirt, and the fastest win, Izvestia in 1990, is 2:01 4/5. The Kentucky Derby, also run on dirt, has had two winners break the two minute mark, the most noteworthy one being Secretariat in 1973 when he finished at 1:59 2/5.

The Queen’s plate has run on synthetic since Woodbine added the Polytrack to its course in 2007. The synthetic warms under the sun and becomes sticky, like a tar mat on a hot day, slowing the speed of the track. But this change to Polytrack has raised the stakes for future Canadian Triple Crown winners, who now have to run on all three racing surfaces, Poly, dirt, and turf, in order to win the Triple Crown. It is a necessity for the winning racehorse to be diverse.

The oldest racehorse to win the Queen’s Plate was nine year old Palermo in 1862. In 1938 the age limit was restricted to three and four year olds, dropping to three year olds the following year.

Betting on the Queen’s Plate has paid greater differences than the Kentucky Derby. The shortest-priced winners in the Queen’s Plate were Horometer in 1834 and Victoria Park in 1960, both paying $2.10, whereas, Citation paid the lowest at the 1948 Kentucky Derby, at $2.80 with odds of .40-1. The highest priced Queen’s Plate winner was Maternal Pride when he paid $193.35 in 1924. Donerail was the longest shot at the Kentucky Derby in 1913, paying almost ten dollars less at $184.90 with odds of 91-1. But despite these figures, the Kentucky Derby is a betting ground with a record $107,598,904 wagered from all sources for a single Derby.

When it comes to women, the Kentucky Derby doesn’t hold its own against the Queen’s Plate. In 150 years, 33 fillies have won the Queen’s Plate, including one Triple Crown winner, Dance Smartly in 2001. 34 geldings have also won the Queen’s Plate, leaving only 84 colts as champions. In the 2009 race, the colts were well outnumbered with seven geldings and two fillies entered. One of the four remaining colts, Eye of the Leopard, did win. The Queen’s Plate has even had female jockey, Emma-Jayne Wilson, aboard a winner.

But there seems to be elusiveness for fillies in the Kentucky Derby, a feeling that was enforced last year when second-place filly, Eight Belles, had to be euthanized after the race. Only three fillies have won the Kentucky Derby in 135 years.

The Kentucky Derby’s glory is its track, and its prizes. It has brought in records of 163,628 race goers, not to mention the millions of viewers tuned in through one of the Derby’s many media outlets. But while an estimated 1.5 million attend the two week Derby Festival each spring, the Queen’s Plate’s attendance has dwindled to some 18,000 regulars.

Needless to say, the Queen’s Plate’s regulation of Canadian-bred thoroughbreds has greatly hampered its international appeal. It benefited some by the removal of its “Canadian-owned” restriction in 1959, and benefited in 1944 when it lifted the restriction of Ontario-bred horses only. But the Queen Plate’s glory is its historical aurora; the appeal is that it is Canadian. Although the oldest continually run race in Canada no longer seems to define Canadians as a whole, it is Canadian horseracing, then, now, and forever.

When the Toronto Turf Club set out to bring a royal race to Canada, they weren’t after world-wide recognition or uncountable attendance, what they were after, and what they have preserved in this race is tradition. A race to call this nation’s own.

The stories of dreams and people’s journeys that revolve around America’s race are alive and well within the “Race for Canada.”