Spectacular Bid – Racehorse
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SPECTACULAR BID—THE HORSE THAT ALMOST WON THE TRIPLE CROWN
In the annals of horse racing history, there are few champions like Spectacular Bid. In every way, the colt was the supreme runner of his era. Trained by Bud Delp and owned by Hawksworth Farm, Spectacular Bid would become remembered as the one horse that won the first two legs of the Triple Crown but finished third in the Belmont. His career deserves to be read beyond that missed achievement, including an unbeaten older-horse season.
A Spectacular Horse is Born
On February 17, 1976, horse breeder Madelyn Jason and her mother Mrs. William Gilmore welcomed a new addition to their breeding farm. The horse was a steel gray color. His grandsire was the legendary Bold Ruler. The pedigree supplied a starting point for expectations, but the later race record, rather than an assumed private prediction, establishes his achievements.
Pedigree discussion should identify the ancestors and generations being compared before describing inbreeding as unusually strong. A shared ancestor does not, by itself, establish a horse’s chance of winning the Derby. Nor can a sale price prove that buyers collectively rejected a pedigree. Compare the individual, the sale circumstances and the eventual racing record as separate pieces of evidence. The family background is part of this biography, but it should not become a retrospective explanation that assumes everyone could foresee either greatness or failure.
The horse sold for a modest sum at auction. His new owners, Hawksworth Farm, paid just $37,000. That is the historical purchase price; an inflation-adjusted comparison needs a stated index and reference year. The price may sound high, but well-bred horses can easily go for twice that if buyers believe they have the potential to become great champions. The Maryland-based farm decided to send the horse to Bud Delp for training.
Spectacular Bid at Two
Some horses take a lot of time to mature and develop. Such was not the case with Spectacular Bid. The horse immediately took to training like the champion he would become. It was decided that the colt would make his debut at Pimlico Racecourse, the home of the Preakness Stakes. On June 30, 1978, Spectacular Bid entered his first race. The results were amazing. His victory was just 2/5 of a second shy of the Pimlico track record. Just a few weeks later he would tie the track record at Pimlico with another strong performance. Horse which make such a splash to begin their careers are almost always placed on a path to compete in major races. This horse was no exception. Delp and company had big plans for the big colt.
A series of stakes races came next. There were wins in the Grade III World’s Playground Stakes, the Grade I Champagne Stakes, and the Grade I Laurel Futurity. Any one of these wins today would be enough to put a horse on the Triple Crown trail. Spectacular Bid also won the Young America Stakes. Everything was looking great. But there was a problem emerging.
Delp had chosen the teenage jockey Ronnie Franklin as Spectacular Bid’s regular rider. Franklin was doing very well on the Maryland circuit, but he had yet to break free from the smaller tracks in Maryland to compete on racing’s biggest stages. His role in the juvenile campaign is clear from the race results, while wider character judgments require dated evidence separate from the horse’s record. A biography can explain the rider’s experience and the later change of mount without treating temperament as a measurable racing variable. For this stage of the story, the useful comparison is the colt’s progression from early races into stakes company and the strength of the performances that followed. Spectacular Bid won seven of his nine races that year. His success was mostly overlooked in favor of Affirmed who was on his way to becoming the third Triple Crown champion of the 1970’s.
The Triple Crown Pursuit
1979 got off to a good start for Spectacular Bid. He had been given the Eclipse Award for Champion Two-Year-Old in 1978. Delp wasted no time and began 1979 in Florida where the prep races for the Kentucky Derby were just beginning to heat up. The horse quickly captured five such events in the early months of the year.
He won the Hutcheson Stakes, the Fountain of Youth Stakes, and the Florida Derby all held at Gulfstream Park. Then he took the Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah Park. It was then on to Kentucky for one final tune-up before the Kentucky Derby. Spectacular Bid arrived at Keeneland to compete in the Blue Grass Stakes which he won.
At the Florida Derby, the impulsiveness of jockey Franklin was starting to appear. With Spectacular Bid clearly in control of the running, Franklin chose to push the horse even harder. When the race was over, Delp scolded the jockey in public. He is reputed to have told Franklin that he could have killed the horse by pushing him so hard. Delp was not a man to be toyed with, but in the aftermath of the blowup he changed his story and attempted to smooth things over in the press.
In May of 1979, Spectacular Bid arrived at the Kentucky Derby as an odds-on favorite. The public had made him 3/5. About 125,000 people showed up in anticipation of what they believed would be yet another Triple Crown run. Three horses had accomplished the feat in the 1970’s and the popularity of horse racing was at an all-time high.
The horse was uncharacteristically nervous in the paddock and post parade before the race. Delp, however, was all cockiness and confidence. As the horse was led around the paddock, Delp yelled at those watching and told them to go make a bet. The race turned out to be anything but a slam dunk. Franklin held Spectacular Bid during the early stages of the race and saved his best run for the stretch. He almost waited too late. The colt came flying in the stretch to pass other horses and win, but the margin of victory was shorter than his fans were used to. Spectacular Bid had won by just 2 ¾ lengths. It was later revealed that his primary rival had suffered a cut leg during the running of the event.
The Preakness Stakes came next with Spectacular Bid once more installed as the favorite. Delp and Franklin were even more confident this time around. They were, after all returning to their home circuit. When the gates opened, the horse was bumped by other horses and got off to a bad start. This did not seem to affect his effort. He recovered to win and posted a faster time in the race than the previous two Triple Crown winners, Seattle Slew and Affirmed.
After the race, Franklin was not shy with the media. He reveled in giving interviews. In most of them he said that Spectacular Bid was “a cinch” to win the Triple Crown and that the horse could not be beaten. What he didn’t know was that the jockeys in the Belmont Park colony were watching with amusement. The colony there was filled with legendary riders like Angel Cordero, Jr. who regularly rode in Triple Crown races. They watched the young jockey from Maryland boast on television and eagerly awaited his arrival in New York for the Belmont Stakes. Their private intentions cannot be established from the eventual race result.
A Spectacular Failure at the Belmont Stakes
Franklin, Delp, and Spectacular Bid arrived in New York to try and win the Triple Crown. Things began to unravel almost from the start. The trouble that would come to define the week began with Franklin and his hot temper.
Three days before the Belmont Stakes, Franklin took a mount on another horse at the track and competed in a race. In the same race was Cordero. Accounts of an altercation with Cordero circulated around the Belmont week. Such incidents should be documented with contemporary reporting before describing the exact exchange, who initiated it or how it affected later racing. They are distinct from the official Belmont result and do not demonstrate that other riders collectively planned to defeat Franklin. The chronology of the horse’s campaign is better anchored by the actual starts, finishes and recovery interval than by imagined dialogue in the jockeys’ room.
When word of the altercation got back to the New York stewards, they handed down a fine to Franklin. It appears that most of the jockeys in the jock’s room sided with Cordero. Welcome to New York, as the saying goes. Ronnie Franklin was learning the hard way that other riders do not always appreciate hubris, especially when it comes from a young rider who is about to compete for racing’s biggest trophy. Delp and his team were upset, to be sure, but Franklin was livid. The reported disagreement belongs to the surrounding narrative, but it does not establish Franklin’s private intentions in the Belmont. A race account should distinguish the observable ride from a psychological explanation constructed afterward.
Meanwhile, things weren’t going so well for the horse. In a strange twist of events, Spectacular Bid had taken a back seat in terms of publicity to his jockey. No one seemed to be paying him much attention. This was unfortunate. Someone discarded a large safety pin in the horse’s stall. The horse had stepped on the pin and it had punctured his hoof. There was now an infection in the hoof wall which required a vet to drill into the hoof to relieve the pressure. This type of injury leading up to a big race is never good, but Delp was undeterred. He claimed that Spectacular Bid was not lame and entered him to run in the race.
In the Belmont, Franklin rode aggressively early and Spectacular Bid reached the stretch with a clear lead. That observable race sequence can be described without attributing revenge or imagining what other riders privately thought. Pace and distance are relevant to reviewing the performance, but they do not allow a precise reconstruction of what would have happened under a different ride. The safety-pin incident is another part of the account, not an independently measured explanation for every length lost. The useful questions are where the horse raced, when rivals challenged and how the field finished. A changed ride would create a different race rather than a guaranteed alternate outcome.
As the horses entered the long stretch run at Belmont Park, Spectacular Bid was growing tired. The heavy pace had taken a lot out of him. Franklin was helpless to watch as the horse was passed by Coastal. Franklin tried hard to hold on to second place. He was passed again by Golden Act. The best that the horse could manage was a third-place finish which left Delp and others to eat their words. Delp was especially sour. When asked by reporters about the defeat, he angrily proclaimed that his horse was just not suited for the distance of the race. He finally admitted that the best horse won that day, but it was obvious that Delp was embarrassed by the defeat.
The riding partnership changed after the Belmont. Bill Shoemaker took over for the August return at Delaware Park and rode Spectacular Bid through most of his remaining career. Keep the change of rider alongside the recovery interval and the races that followed rather than using personal criticism as an explanation for every result. The later record supplies concrete evidence of what the horse achieved with Shoemaker; it cannot establish how every race would have unfolded with a different jockey. This distinction preserves the racing story while avoiding a verdict about private spending or emotional motives that the race record cannot support.
Spectacular Bid Soldiers On
Even though his attempt to win the Triple Crown had ended in poor fashion, there was no reason to think that Spectacular Bid could not return to the races at four if Delp chose to race him. The trainer was still handling the horse and enjoyed the complete faith of the owners.
Shoemaker’s appointment begins the next racing chapter. Spectacular Bid returned at Delaware Park in August 1979, not at the beginning of his four-year-old campaign. He later won the Marlboro Cup and finished second to Affirmed in the Jockey Club Gold Cup before ending the season with a Meadowlands Cup victory. The sequence matters: the horse had demonstrated a successful comeback before the unbeaten 1980 season began.
The older-horse campaign opened in California with the Santa Anita Strub Series. Reading those races separately from the Delaware allowance avoids giving the impression that his final season consisted primarily of easy comeback assignments. His 1980 record is the strongest answer to a biography organized entirely around the Belmont setback, because it contains repeated performances at different tracks and distances. It is also a reason to retain the later races in the narrative rather than turning the rider change into a simple before-and-after experiment.
Spectacular Bid’s Near-Miss and Its Betting Legacy
Spectacular Bid’s failure to complete the Triple Crown in 1979 — following a safety-pin injury discovered on Belmont morning — remains one of racing’s most poignant near-misses and one of the most discussed “what if” scenarios in American racing history. The horse was considered by many observers to be superior to the Triple Crown winners of the era, and his dominant subsequent performances after the Belmont confirmed that his ability was genuinely exceptional. The reported injury was the kind of random, unforeseeable event that underscores why even the most thorough handicapping cannot account for every variable that determines a race’s outcome.
For bettors, the Spectacular Bid story serves as a reminder of the importance of distinguishing between process failure and outcome failure. The race result cannot prove that every bet on the favorite was well priced or poorly judged. That requires the information available at the time, the odds and a probability assessment. A strong prior record can support favoritism while still leaving several ways to lose. The safety-pin account does not quantify the injury’s effect or prove an alternate outcome. Maintaining the distinction between decisions that were correct given available information and outcomes that went wrong due to factors outside the analytical framework is essential for psychological resilience in long-term betting. For more on great American racehorses, our article on the 12 greatest race horses of all time covers Spectacular Bid’s era. And our guide to Secretariat covers the greatest Triple Crown winner of his generation.
Spectacular Bid at Stud
The four-year-old colt was entered in one final race in September of 1980. It was the Woodward Stakes at Belmont Park. No other horses decided to challenge Spectacular Bid that day. In a rare walkover, a race where a horse runs alone against no competition, The Woodward walkover was a separate event from the 1½-mile Belmont Stakes. A solo completion should not be treated as proof that he would have won the earlier classic under different circumstances. The final race belongs in the chronology as a walkover, not as a directly comparable test against the Belmont field.
There were plans to race once more in the Jockey Club Gold Cup, but an injury to the horse prompted Bud Delp to announce his retirement. Spectacular Bid was syndicated as a stud for a record at the the time–$22 million.
The horse was sent to Claiborne Farm in Kentucky to stand his stud service. Those who wanted to breed their mares to Spectacular Bid paid $150,000. In the first years of his service, the horse performed exceptionally well. In later years, his output declined and he was sent to a New York farm where his breeding fee was dropped to just $3,500. He never was pensioned. The last year of his life, Spectacular Bid bred ten mares. He died of a heart attack on June 9, 2003 and was buried on the farm.
A sign of how popular this horse was can be seen in the visits and letters he received at the New York farm. Children wrote to the horse as if he were a human being. Others traveled long distances just to get a look at him. Born with a dark, slate gray color, Spectacular Bid became whiter as he aged until his coat was dotted with light gray. He was, in every sense, a grand old man of horse racing.
Spectacular Bid won 26 of 30 races and retired with almost $3 million in earnings. He is remembered fondly today by those fortunate enough to have witnessed him in competition.
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The Season After the Belmont Matters
The National Museum of Racing records nine wins from nine starts for Spectacular Bid in 1980, the season after his Belmont defeat. It also lists Horse of the Year and Champion Older Male honors for that year. The loss in the 1979 Triple Crown sequence was historically important, but it did not define the limit of his racing ability.
Read the three seasons separately: his juvenile record, the 1979 Derby and Preakness campaign, and the unbeaten older-horse year. That chronology provides a fuller account than a single explanation for the Belmont result. A memorable setback can dominate a profile even when later evidence shows a champion sustained elite form.
Spectacular Bid’s Three Seasons
| Year | Starts | Wins | Seconds | Thirds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | 9 | 7 | 1 | 0 |
| 1979 | 12 | 10 | 1 | 1 |
| 1980 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 0 |
| Career | 30 | 26 | 2 | 1 |
The National Museum of Racing record supplies these totals. Read them alongside the chronology: the Belmont defeat belongs to 1979, the Delaware comeback followed that summer, and the unbeaten older-horse season came in 1980.
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