Every successful sport has changed with the times, trying to keep in step not only with the nuances of how their games have evolved but how lifestyles and technology have altered the way fans want their favorite pastimes presented.

Elongating the Triple Crown series is not about the next Triple Crown winner as it is about the quality of the three races as a series going forward, about how it can best continue to fire the imagination of the modern sports fan.

The majority of Americans experience horses only through various forms of media and no longer in the flesh. The covered wagon was replaced long ago. Horses are not a way of daily life in this country anymore.

All-time greats are recognized as such for a reason. Eleven Triple Crown winners in the last century hardly qualifies as a common occurrence. Elongating the series doesn’t make winning it easier to achieve. Whenever more contestants are allowed to bring their ‘A’ game to an event, it becomes more difficult by definition.

Thoroughbred racing and, apparently, many of its most loyal fans, continue to resist change consistently vigorously. That can happen when an industry is rudderlessly incapable of big picture vision and because the quick-riches instant gratification dynamic permeating American life makes getting no satisfaction a rule rather than an exception.

Lacking a central authority, no one in the industry has looked at the Triple Crown and tried to capitalize on its popularity in more dynamic ways. The only reality for te host tracks is making the big amount of bucks possible. On balance, a longer series can do this while doing what’s best for today’s thoroughbred.

Whatever the spacing, it’s unreasonable to expect to see a Triple Crown winner around every stretch turn. Three victories on disparate surfaces at three different distances-- the first at a daunting 10 furlongs so early in the year that many Derby horses aren’t yet 3-year-olds--is extremely difficult. How many racehorses can three-peat under far less adversity? Lookin At Lucky wasn’t yet 3 when he won the Preakness!

Field size is a very difficult obstacle to overcome. How often does the “best horse” lose the Derby because of a less than ideal trip? Very often, of course. And traffic, surface and distance issues notwithstanding, how much of a role does pilot error play?

Today’s top 20 riders are much more likely to be better athletes than those of racing’s golden age. But can they match the skill set and guile of the old-time race riders before the advent of videotape? There are so many imponderables that go into producing a Triple Crown champion it’s a wonder it’s ever happened at all.

By my count, two months of event exposure for the sport is better than five weeks. It’s simply a matter of math and common sense. Modern horsemen have changed their training methods to adapt to the physiology of today’s thoroughbred? Don’t you think trainers would run more often, earn more purse money, if they thought racing more often was the right tack?

Yesterday we considered reasons why lengthening the Triple Crown series is not an injustice to memories of past champions whose physiology was not the product of today’s commercial breeding market. Today’s thoroughbreds are faster, sleeker, more athletic; they are also soft-boned and stamina has been bred out of him.

Longer spacing sustains the drama of the chase and doesn’t make it the Triple Crown easier to win. In our view, it’s more demanding since a greater number of challengers get to bring their A game. It tests the acumen of the horsemen who guide their careers.

D. Wayne Lukas would change the TC but his tack would be akin to stirring champagne. A nine-furlong Ky Derby? Hardly. A 10-furlong Belmont? As anachronistic as a mile and a half on dirt might be, nobody really wants that. But he is right about this: “People have opinions but the horses have the facts.”

But horses lie, too. There is not a racing fan in America that doesn’t think that Todd Pletcher and Calvin Borel are not first ballot Hall of Famers. So did they mislead the public about Super Saver’s condition?

Would Pletcher, as a disciple of Wayne Lukas, who won the Preakness more often with his Derby runners by not giving them a workout in the interim, have risked putting Super Saver over the top with a soft three-eighths of a mile on Monday of Preakness week if he didn‘t believe that‘s what his high energy colt needed?

It’s one thing to get beaten by a better horse, or horses. It’s another to not show up. But that’s the reality of enervating efforts. “It happens, that’s racing,” said Borel. “You really don’t know until the three-eighths pole” whether your Derby-winning Preakness horse will make the same effort. And that would be true two weeks later. Only the stress of a race can expose the toll an effort takes on today’s thoroughbred.

True Triple Crown excitement will be little more than false hyperbole until something is done to change it. Modern thoroughbreds are genetically challenged to win three races in five weeks, any three races, much less the series. Why shouldn’t the Triple Crown be all it can be?

Had Super Saver somehow won the Preakness, he would have returned in the Belmont. In the name of reason, can’t all fans understand how that might have been bad for Super Saver, bad for the Triple Crown series, and bad for how this sport is perceived by the general public.

In the modern era, the quick turnaround from the Derby to the Preakness deviates from the norm, begging the question is it good for the horse, and can anything not good for the horse be good for the sport?

If most if not all those top horseman quoted from the DRF story in yesterday’s piece agree that the Preakness is easier to win with a quick turnaround, why such resistance to stretching the time out further? Since 1993, the Derby winner has finished in the exacta 12 times. Again, how does elongating the series make it easier to win?

As we’ve been advocating for the past five years and as top veteran reporter Ed Gray wrote earlier this week, “the Triple Crown has a rich history but it’s time to stop looking back at the way things used to be and start living in the present and building for the future.

“The Triple Crown as presently constructed is obsolete and needs an overhaul that will make it considerably more relevant than it is today. Spreading out the three races over a two-month period, at the very least, would encourage increased participation and give rise to healthy rivalries among the top 3-year-olds.

“I respect the tradition of racing but I don’t think the industry should be held hostage to it. With so many more lucrative opportunities available for 3-year-olds following the Triple Crown than there used to be in the good old days, trainers have become increasingly hesitant to subject their young horses to the physical demands of running three races within a five-week span.”

Like Gray and others this spring, I believe the future benefits of crowning a new Triple Crown champion which beat a larger number of better-conditioned and more mature rivals is far more beneficial to the sport and the spirit of the Triple Crown than severing traditional ties with the past.