If Big Brown wins the Belmont and makes it a "Brown Crown," many in the industry will breathe a collective sigh of relief.  "It's about time," they'll say.  "Racing needs a hero." What better tale could be told than that of a 12^th winner of the Triple Crown? And after 30 long years!  Books will be penned, scores of mares will be nominated to his first season at Three Chimneys (whatever the cost!), and he'll be heralded as one of the immortals.

But I believe there's a better story in the offing.  It might not be as sexy as a sweep of the classics, or as easy to grasp for those who don't follow the sport regularly. While Casino Drive (pedigree) can't take the Triple Crown, he can do something no horse has ever done: follow in the footsteps of two siblings in the 12-furlong test of champions.

Better Than Honour (pedigree) may well become the first mare to produce a Belmont winner three years in a row. If any doubts remain that Jazil (on SRO) was a fluke, they should be put to rest right now. This mare, herself a graded winner and multiple grade I placed runner who never finished out of the money, produced the Shadwell Farm stud from the Mr. Prospector horse Seeking the Gold (on SRO), and followed up a year later with the A.P. Indy (on SRO)-sired champion filly Rags to Riches, whose Belmont win was the first for a distaffer in more than a century.

And here comes Casino Drive. The Peter Pan (gr. II) winner has been pointed towards the Belmont pretty much for the past two years. By Mineshaft (on SRO), Casino Drive gets a dose of influence from both Jazil's sire line (Mineshaft's broodmare sire is Mr. Prospector himself) and from Rags to Riches' sire line (Mineshaft is a son of Rags' sire A.P. Indy). 

Combine that with Better Than Honour's royal breeding, and you've got a horse that just might be unbeatable. I've already commented on Deputy Minister as a broodmare sire (as he is in Casino Drive's case), and it appears that this daughter is going to launch his broodmare sire stats into the stratosphere.

If you're a pedigree fan looking for an equine hero, look no further than Better Than Honour.  And on Belmont Day, you just might hit the jackpot with Casino Drive.

A few minutes ago, I posted some notes about Saturday's Kentucky Derby and name my favorites. 

I'd like to know who you think should win it, based solely on pedigree.  Check out this week's poll.

BloodHorse.com experiences a predictable and understandable bump in traffic in the days leading up to the Kentucky Derby.*  This year, fans would need to set aside a whole day to see all of the content available on the Web site. I've mentioned my friend Jason Shandler's Triple Crown Talk blog and the Triple Crown Mania home page before; now I want to point out a couple of brand new, can't-miss features. 

• Derby 134 Contenders: Pedigree Profiles is a free download that gives pedigree fans (pedigree fans ... pedigree fans ... that's why you're here, right?!?) something to do for the next few hours. It brings together, in one "white paper" document, expert pedigree analysis (by Alan Porter and Avalyn Hunter) for each of the 20 horses in the race. As it says in my headline, one of these horses is guaranteed to win!

Some of my responsibilities here at The Blood-Horse are to edit pedigree analysis articles, prepare statistics for research studies, and validate the data that we publish in a multitude of print and electronic offerings. Not surprisingly, the references and databases available here are about the most inclusive archives of Thoroughbred breeding and racing anywhere.

In other words, I get paid to play with all the fun stuff.

And the other feature that I'd like to hype today includes a lot of fun stuff.  I enjoyed fact-checking this one!

• Big Brown and the Domino Factor by Thoroughbred historian Floyd Oliver draws a brilliant parallel between this year's Derby favorite and the brilliant son of Himyar. I took special pleasure reading through this article, not only because it's fascinating, but because it married together a couple of thoughts from my previous posts.  (See last month's Inbreeding, and Why Big Brown's Looking Good Beyond May 3 and Rare Sire Lines: Domino from mid-March.)

And since we're on the subject of horses in the big race, I'll share my picks: 

• Anak Nakal (pedigree). I discussed him briefly in my Big Brown post (here). At the time, he was iffy on even being in the field of 20. I worry about his ability to run in company and to get the distance, but any horse with multiple crosses of Dr. Fager is fine by me!
• Colonel John (pedigree). His sire Tiznow (on SRO) is going to be one of the biggest pedigree influences for the next 25 years. And Turkoman as a broodmare sire is a force to be reckoned with.
• Big Brown (pedigree). I explained why I like his pedigree in my earlier post.  I'm going to back off slightly now that he's in post 20. A few more feet and he'd be off the Churchill Downs property.

You won't want to bet on them, though -- my handicapping skills are ... um ... a bit ahead of their time.  Which is to say, I tend to bet on horses that lose horribly when I have money on them, but who then go on to win all their future races when I'm not in on the action.  Go figure.

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* I started to type "Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (gr. I)" out of habit. I've been doing a lot of editing recently....