2025 Preakness: Kentucky Derby Winner Sovereignty to Skip Preakness Stakes

Key Insights:

• Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty will skip the 2025 Preakness Stakes, meaning there will not be a Triple Crown winner for seven years and counting.
• Trainer Bill Mott is planning to still run Sovereignty in the Belmont Stakes since the horse exited the Derby in good condition.
• Since 2019, four horses including Sovereignty have skipped the Preakness, specifically because of a shift toward modern spacing and rest-focused training strategies.

There will not be a Triple Crown champion in 2025. Bill Mott informed Pimlico Race Course on Tuesday that he would not enter Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty in the Preakness Stakes on Saturday, May 17. Instead of putting him through the two-week turnaround, Mott would point toward the Belmont Stakes with Sovereignty.

It means, for the seventh consecutive year, there will be no Triple Crown winner. The decision to skip the Preakness Stakes with a horse who, by all accounts, came out of the Kentucky Derby well is capturing the attention of the horse racing world. However, the choice is far from unprecedented.

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Bill Mott Has Skipped the Preakness with a Kentucky Derby Winner Before

Trainer Bill Mott has won the Kentucky Derby once before: with Country House in 2019. He opted not to pursue the Triple Crown with him either, choosing not to run him back in the Preakness Stakes.

Mott explained that Country House came out of the 2019 Kentucky Derby with a cough, meaning there was not enough time for him to recover and be ready for a race just two weeks later. He had planned to return Country House for a summer campaign, but instead the horse came down with some inflammation in his front fetlock ligaments, then an infection, and then laminitis.

Country House recovered from those issues after treatment and turnout, but was retired to stud instead of returning to training. He stands at Darby Dan Farm. His first crop is three years old, and his best runners so far include the stakes winner Bridle a Butterfly as well as Grade 3-placed Epitaph.

Reason for Sovereignty Skipping the Preakness

Despite it being the same trainer, the trajectories of Country House and Sovereignty into the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs could not have been more different.

Country House was a 65-1 long shot who was ignored by the public after disappointing in Kentucky Derby preps, and won the Kentucky Derby because he ran a good second, but was placed first after Maximum Security was disqualified for interference.

Sovereignty, on the other hand, came into the run for the roses off of a good second in the Florida Derby (G1) and a win in the Fountain of Youth (G2). Bettors respected him to the tune of just under 8-1 odds, and he won by a confident 1 ½-length margin over Journalism under jockey Junior Alvarado.

How the horses came out of the Kentucky Derby are different, too. Country House came out of the Kentucky Derby with a cough, but Bill Mott informed the NYRA news office that Sovereignty has “good energy” shipping back up to New York after the Run for the Roses. Instead of running Sovereignty in all three races of the Triple Crown season, Mott is pointing the horse toward the Belmont Stakes, five weeks after the first Saturday in May.

History of Kentucky Derby Winners Skipping the Preakness

Country House skipping the Preakness Stakes made big news because, going into the 2019 season, the rule of thumb was that trainers didn’t skip the second jewel of the Triple Crown with their Kentucky Derby winners.

There had been plenty of talk across recent decades about whether the races were so close together that the feat was impossible, since there was no Triple Crown winner between Affirmed in 1978 and American Pharoah in 2015. But, connections tried if they won the Kentucky Derby—the last horse before Country House to win the roses and then skip the Preakness was Grindstone in 1996, who came out of the Kentucky Derby with bone chips in his knees and needed treatment.

Early History of the Triple Crown

It hadn’t always been that way. In the early days of the Kentucky Derby, before the Triple Crown races were considered as a unified series, it was not seen as obligatory to run in both. Sometimes the Kentucky Derby was run after the Preakness, and in 1917 and 1922 the races were even on the same day. Even only considering years when the Preakness was run after the Kentucky Derby, between 1875 and 1959, 47 Kentucky Derby winners did not go to the Preakness.

The Preakness as de Rigueur Is a More Recent Trend

However, since 1959, only seven Derby winners have skipped the Preakness Stakes. Every Kentucky Derby winner from 1960 through 1981 ran in the Preakness. Between 1982 and 2018, only Gato Del Sol (1982), Spend a Buck (1985), and Grindstone (1996) skipped the second leg of the Triple Crown.

But, Sovereignty is the fourth horse since 2019 to skip the Preakness. Top horses space races out further than they did in recent decades, and recent years suggest that adhering to these training methods is weighing more heavily than a desire to win a Triple Crown. In addition to Country House and Sovereignty, Mandaloun (2021) and Rich Strike (2022) both skipped the second jewel of the Triple Crown.

Mandaloun was an uncommon case: he was still considered the second-place finisher at the time, as it was just coming out that Bob Baffert trainee Medina Spirit had a positive drug test after the Kentucky Derby, and it took years of testing and litigation before it was made final to disqualify Medina Spirit and put Mandaloun up.

However, the case of long shot Rich Strike was more along the lines of Sovereignty. Though Rich Strike was an outsider off the also-eligible list, not a major market player, indications were that he came out of the Kentucky Derby well. However, trainer Eric Reed decided the Belmont Stakes would suit him better, and pointed him to the race five weeks later. He would go on to finish sixth behind Mo Donegal in the Belmont Stakes.

New Shooters and Preakness Success

In parallel with this renewed trend of horses winning the Kentucky Derby and then skipping the Preakness, horses who did not run in the Kentucky Derby are shining in the Preakness in recent years.

The last two Kentucky Derby winners to win the Preakness have been the last two Triple Crown winners, American Pharoah (2015) and Justify (2018). Only one Kentucky Derby entrant has won the Preakness since Justify: in 2019, War of Will bounced back from a troubled trip in Louisville, KY, to win at Pimlico Race Course.

Since then, no Kentucky Derby runner has won the Preakness. Some have run well: Mystik Dan (2023) finished second to Seize the Grey, and Mage (2023) was third to National Treasure.

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