One-of-a-kind: American Pharoah set to race for the last time

As the great horse galloped through the crisp Kentucky air, striding beautifully as always, the crowd ringing the training track at Keeneland Race Course Thursday morning feverishly recorded the moment.

Cell phones. Tablets. TV cameras. Still cameras. A few old fossils simply stored the image in their minds with the naked eye.

It was a moment to savor: the shiny bay colt moving with easy speed on a loping breeze, through long shadows and slanting sunlight, one of the very last times he'll be seen on a track.

American Pharoah's time as a racehorse – as the racehorse of a lifetime for those who have owned, trained and ridden him – is almost over.

"I try not to think about it," exercise rider Jorge Alvarez said Thursday, after climbing off Pharoah's back for the penultimate time.

If Bob Baffert and Ahmed Zayat could turn the hourglass over and borrow more time, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Who wouldn't want a little longer with the best athlete they'd ever been around? But retirement looms for the 2015 Triple Crown winner, starting Sunday. A stall at nearby Ashford Stud, the American bluegrass division of the Irish breeding giant Coolmore Stud, awaits.

So they try to focus on American Pharoah's last racing task – the Breeders' Cup Classic here Saturday – and try to keep the growing wistfulness from overwhelming them.

"It's emotional for me," said Baffert, Pharoah's trainer. " … My wife wants to kidnap him and take him back to California."

Baffert has had a brilliant career, one of the greatest in the history of the sport, but this has been the apex. He has guided American Pharoah to eight wins in 10 starts, becoming just the 12th horse to complete the Triple Crown and the first since 1978, a gap that had many in the sport proclaiming it could never be done again.

Until Pharoah did it. His gate-to-wire victory in the Belmont is arguably the most stirring sporting achievement to date in 2015.

"In any sport you want to see something spectacular," Baffert said. "And he delivered."

Now Saturday he will try to deliver one last time, becoming the first horse to win the so-called Grand Slam: the Triple Crown plus the Breeders' Cup Classic. He will take on older horses for the first time in this one, a formidable task for a 3-year-old but one that got appreciably easier Thursday with the unexpected scratch of 5-year-old mare Beholder. American Pharoah now is the 4-5 favorite in the $5 million race.

Then it's off to a princely, pampered second career as a stallion. And life becomes a little more normal – and less thrilling – for Baffert and Zayat.

For time immemorial, horsemen have said the next crop of 2-year-olds keeps them young. It's the seductive, addictive power of hope – the next crop of babies could contain the next special one. They're always looking for that glimmer of greatness in a young horse that could fulfill their wildest dreams, of winning the Derby and beyond.

It's the same narcotic that keeps baseball scouts scouring the Dominican Republic and track coaches combing the streets of Jamaica and football coaches vigilant in South Florida. Who can find the new superstar?

Baffert has a full barn of 2-year-olds at Santa Anita in Southern California that he is coaching toward the classics in 2016. Zayat owns plenty of 2-year-olds himself, interspersed with various trainers nationwide. Many of those young horses have the breeding and potential that dares a man to dream.

But how seductive can the dream be now, when you've had the best you'll ever get? How do you enjoy the next group, knowing they won't measure up to what you've already had? How does the fantasy of finding another Triple Crown winner coexist with the rational knowledge that it will never get any better than 2015?

"You can't compare them [the next wave of young horses he's training] to [American Pharoah]," Baffert said. "He's sort of once in a lifetime."

Said Zayat: "There will only be one Pharoah in my life. He's just bigger than life. We owe a lot to him. He doesn't owe us anything. As much as we get excited about 2-year-olds in our barns – and we have a nice crop – it's just different."

Bob Bowman will continue coaching swimmers after Michael Phelps retires, and he will never stop looking for The Next Phelps. But he won't find him.

David Cutcliffe has kept coaching college football for 20 years after Peyton Manning left Tennessee. But he's never had another Peyton.

Bob Baffert will keep training horses and Ahmed Zayat will keep buying them. But they won't see one with this kind of stride, this combination of speed and stamina. They won't have another who takes them to the dizzying heights American Pharoah did in the spring of 2015 – in Louisville, in Baltimore, in New York.

That's why even a $5 million race – the richest in North America – is less about winning than Pharoah simply making a graceful exit from competition. As Zayat has said, the colt doesn't owe him anything. His place in history would be enhanced with a Grand Slam, but it's already secure.

And that's why the wistfulness is hard to tamp down as the days having American Pharoah in the barn dwindle. Win or lose Saturday, the humans who have cared for the great horse know they won't be back this way again.