writes for the San Antonio Express-News

In 1999, ESPN ran a series of specials counting down the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century. Its choice for No. 35 was the great 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat.

This angered many who believed that a horse didn't belong on the list. Those who were probably most upset were fans of the athletes who came in behind him, including Oscar Robertson at No. 36 and Mickey Mantle at No. 37.

I had no problem with it. Secretariat, red and magnificent, barreling down the stretch at Belmont and winning by 31 lengths, was the most eye-popping, heart-stopping athletic performance I've seen.

When Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner and emerging super-horse, fractured a leg in the Preakness, he became the nation's pet and the foremost celebrity animal in the world as news outlets provided round-the-clock updates on his struggle to live.

The Preakness stakes is Saturday, but the death of the filly Eight Belles at the end of the Kentucky Derby still lingers and saddens. There will be worse tragedies to strike, and the death of a racehorse doesn't mean a thing to a family struggling with paychecks that buy less and health-care costs that consume more.

Still, there is something poignant about the one filly in horse racing's most famous contest running a superb second to the favorite, Big Brown, and never making it off the track alive.

Thoroughbreds are magnificent creatures, hurtling 1,200 muscled pounds around tracks at 40 m.p.h. Yet they do it on spindly, fragile-looking legs. The Derby race reminds just how fragile they are.

After the race, Eight Belles' grieving trainer, Larry Jones, said: "These things are our family. They've given us everything they have. We've given everything we have. They put their lives on the line, and she was glad to do it."

W.C. Heinz, who died earlier this year at age 93, was one of the two or three greatest American sportswriters ever.

Sixty years ago, he wrote one of the finest pieces of sports journalism with his column, "Death of a Racehorse," about a promising horse named Air Lift, the son of a Kentucky Derby winner and the brother of a Triple Crown winner, who was making his first start.

On the first turn, Air Lift broke his leg. With detailed but restrained emotion, Heinz described both the decision to put the horse out of his misery and the actual shooting of the horse, a solemn act that broke the hearts of those present.

His last sentence reads: "Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault."

Such is the life, and death, of an American racehorse.

at cclack@express-news.net.