DIGGING THE DIRT

The brilliant Big Brown can join the legends of American horseracing this weekend by becoming the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years. However, his story also reveals the dark side of the sport: the rampant use of steroids, and the terrible toll inflicted on horses by dirt tracks

Wake-up call for the American dream

On the face of it, his claims to greatness would be immaculate. If Big Brown wins the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, he will become the first winner of the American Triple Crown in three decades. He is not merely unbeaten, but untested. He won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes more or less at his leisure. Even champion thoroughbreds, as a rule, leaven their careers with moments of vulnerability. This brawny braggart, Big Brown, seems to be imposing himself on history with incontrovertible clarity. The aggregate margin of his five wins so far is 39 lengths.

Yet his story somehow grows more complex, more challenging, at every turn. As it happens, it is certainly one of redemption - but also one of brazen decadence. Far from delivering American racing from doubt, he is becoming a cipher for its crisis. To many, his Triple Crown would be veneer to the basest metal.

Like every racing fable, Big Brown's has disclosed more about men than horses. Seabiscuit, for instance, became a parable of fortitude in the Depression. His reticent trainer was a relic of the cowboy era, whose methods were a last echo of forgotten horse lore. But Big Brown has introduced a man whose own experience of adversity has engendered a very different kind of defiance. Rick Dutrow is long past caring what people might think of him. And, as such, he does not seem to care what he gives his horses, either.

Dutrow has a litany of fines and suspensions from the racing authorities. Sometimes the trainer has failed drugs tests; more often, it has been his horses. By his own admission, on the 15th day of each month Dutrow administers Winstrol to his horses - the same anabolic steroid that caused Ben Johnson to be stripped of his gold medal at the 1988 Olympics. There is nothing illegal about this. Winstrol is permitted in 28 of the 38 horseracing States, including all three hosting Triple Crown races. But Big Brown, having first excited admiration, and then interest, is now provoking disgust as well.

Outsiders are astonished to discover that trainers routinely administer steroids to horses. And the American sport's internal debate - hitherto a sotto voce dialogue between a minority of anguished crusaders and a majority of ruthless pragmatists - has reached a critical intensity.

Even before learning of this squalid complication, the American public had been revolted by their first encounter with Big Brown. The Kentucky Derby runner-up, a filly named Eight Belles, shattered both ankles as she was being pulled up and was put down on the spot. The vivid tragedy was a sequel of other recent catastrophes, notably Barbaro, who won the race two years previously but broke down in front of the grandstand during the Preakness. Vets abandoned the struggle with Barbaro eight months later. Then, last autumn, the European turf champion, George Washington, suffered irreparable injury on a sloppy track at the Breeders' Cup.

The trainer of Eight Belles, Larry Jones, furiously denied that steroids contributed to her demise. But her tragedy helped to focus attention on the rapacity of breeders and trainers who have, between them, clumsily tilted the exquisite balance of bone and brawn in a thoroughbred. And it also reinforced the case for accelerating the replacement of traditional US dirt courses with safer, synthetic surfaces.

On Saturday, Big Brown could confirm himself perhaps the last of the great dirt performers. This surface is deep and unforgiving and tests horses' legs in the way that running on a sandy beach exerts wear and tear on human joints. Although it can vary from clinging suet to sloppy black soup, it always fails to support hooves in the same way as cushion-sprung artificial surfaces and even allows them to pound through to the hard base below.

But it suits the conformation of horses bred from past dirt champions - now valuable stallions - and powerful vested interests have tried to retard the inevitable revolution. Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, will doubtless be one of the last tracks dug up.

Dirt, of course, will find any weak links in the thoroughbred. And steroids will hide them. Dutrow's blunt, cynical ways have offended many, but others have at least commended his honesty. Anecdotally, the use of steroids in American racing - first thought to have infected the sport in the 1960s - is now endemic. The Phipps racing dynasty scrupulously confines its superbly bred horses to a regime of "hay, oats and water". They made Shug McGaughey one of the world's most successful trainers 15 or 20 years ago, but he has now been left far behind by brash young trainers who turn out winners on an industrial scale. A similar decline has affected other respected horsemen, such as Bill Mott and John Kimmel.