By
ET
A scene from ‘Race for the Crown.’ Photo: Netflix
The biggest sports superstar of the ’70s was an oversize redhead with great legs who trounced all comers, set records that may never be broken and had one of the classiest retirements in American celebrity. Never wrote a memoir. Never said a bad word about the competition.
But it’s been more than 50 years since Secretariat was literally running away with the 1973 Triple Crown—the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes—and almost as long a time since thoroughbred horse racing was a bona fide obsession of mainstream America. The Secretariat era was a good time for racing: “Big Red” won the crown for the first time since Citation did in 1948; Seattle Slew would do it in 1977; Affirmed in 1978. It was a crowded field, with the great filly Ruffian and 1975 Derby winner Foolish Pleasure engaging in a fatal match race that might well have been the starting gun for racing’s slow decline in popularity over the decades to come.
“Race for the Crown,” a six-part Netflix documentary, doesn’t dwell on history. In fact, it doesn’t address it much at all. While many nonfiction series spend too much of their time selling a viewer on the importance, i.e. traditions, of a subject, “Race for the Crown” portrays the so-called Sport of Kings as increasingly the pastime of billionaire owners whose interest in racing is mostly about ego (which perhaps was always the case) and whose personalities have all the appeal of an unswept stall. There are no Kardashians in sight, but there could be. It’s that kind of milieu.
The racing establishment, so to speak, is represented by owners, jockeys and trainers, among them Bob Baffert, a six-time Derby winner whose horses have failed drug tests or died, with their trainer being suspended. This is acknowledged by the series, which is all about the lead-up to the 2024 Derby, Preakness and Belmont. What’s more significant and left unsaid is that Mr. Baffert’s horses have won two Triple Crowns in recent years—American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2018—and the only people who could name them are those who never look up from their Racing Form.
The trajectory of “Race for the Crown” takes us through the contests that serve as a buildup—and sometimes a qualifying run—for the big spring races to come. (The Derby takes place on the first Saturday in May, this year May 3; the Preakness two weeks later; the Belmont three weeks after that.) They include the Breeders’ Cup, the Wood Memorial Stakes and the Kentucky Oaks. But the program falls into the stylistic rut of many Netflix documentary series, with the music telling us what to think and the more sensational aspects—of the people, not the animals—getting more attention than they deserve. The producers of the series, who are also behind the very watchable and informative “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” succumb as well to the documentary trap of having to focus their cameras on characters and horses without knowing who will come through in the stretch. But the colors, the clothes—and at the Derby, the hats—are visually captivating. The beasts are beautiful. And the actual races are thrilling. People in the know will tell you that horses bred for racing love to run. It’s easy to believe.
Race for the Crown
Tuesday, Netflix
