This week’s cover of Sports Illustrated commemorates the historic Triple Crown win by American Pharaoh, whose victory at the Belmont Stakes on Saturday earned the first Triple Crown title in 37 years. The cover image features a shot by SI’s deputy picture editor Erick Rasco, in which he managed to use a pole cam to get above a sea of fans that had begun to stand on chairs and benches, smartphones in hand, to capture a truly unique image from the fans’ perspective. SI senior writer Tim Layden writes in this week’s cover story, “With a Blazing Belmont, American Pharoah made the end of a 37-year drought even sweeter than we hoped.”
Sports Illustrated’s managing editor Chris Stone says of the new cover: “The race was, first, about American Pharaoh winning the first Triple Crown in 37 years, but it also about a horse making people care about a sport in a way they haven’t in a long time. Not the trainers or the jockeys or stable workers who live and sweat it every day, but the people in that photo with their arms raised, their smartphones poised, in full throat. On an amazing sports weekend, horse racing was back at its center because of the extraordinary horse first, but also because of all the people who found themselves emotionally invested in that story—at least for a little while.”
More from Tim Layden’s cover feature: “The moment unfolded as if from another time, asking a sport to keep hanging on to faith that had been lost in too many disappointments, too many euphoric buildups that had crashed in failure and sent its fans sulking into the darkness, unfulfilled. Horse racing was stuck on the same, yellowed page: So many times the Triple Crown had seemed at hand and so many times cruel reality had dropped a hammer at old Belmont Park, leaving a generation and more with no legend of its own to pass along, just musty recollections that grew more distant by the year….. At 6:52 last Saturday night [American Pharoah] won the 147th running of the Belmont Stakes and became the 12th horse to sweep racing’s Triple Crown…. With every stride the Belmont grandstand quaked, engulfed by a primal roar of exorcism, desperation given sound…. It was yet another June evening at Belmont Park, yet another horse running for the Triple Crown, yet another reach at history. Only this time was so different, a prayer answered in the gloaming. This time the horse was right. Now the wait is done.”
Winning Jockey Victor Espinoza tells Sports Illustrated of the race: “I think, in that first turn, that was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”
Layden reports that Kiaran McLaughlin, who trains Frosted (the horse that came in second), pushed his way toward American Pharoah trainer Bob Baffert at the end of the race and said: “I wanted to win the race…. But in the last eighth of a mile, my whole family and I were cheering for American Pharoah.’’
Read Tim Layden’s full report on SI.com: http://on.si.com/1dVtpXI
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