That is the sound in horse racing today, when everyone was anticipating the roars of history.  But no history. No renaissance. No party to commemorate the glorious end of a 34-year drought. Only the debris from unfulfilled hope and hype; a reminder of how very fragile this sport can be, and how very hard a Triple Crown has become.  No legendary run by I'll Have Another, who was pulled from the Belmont and retired Friday with the suddenness of a summer thunderstorm lightning strike. Something about a swollen left front tendon. And nearly as fast as you could load the field in the starting gate, a career was over. I'll Have Another will have no more races.  Turns out, his road to the Triple Crown was a dead end.  "History," owner J. Paul Reddam said at a press conference, "is going to have to wait for another day."  It could have been much worse. Horse racing has seen darker days. "It is a bummer," trainer Doug O'Neill said, "but far from tragic." But so much for the big day at the Belmont, which just became the What Might Have Been Stakes.  Someone will win, and the camp of the champion will seem happy enough, but all everyone else will talk about is the one who wasn't there.  So many things have gone wrong in horse racing. Maybe that's because so many things can. A tattered image. Faded popularity. Bad luck, bad management, bad fate, bad endings. Barbaro.  The modern sport landscape might have a place for it, or might not. A Triple Crown winner would not have fixed everything, and maybe not fixed anything. But it wouldn't have hurt.  "A freakish thing," O'Neill said of what happened. Horse racing doesn't need any more freakish things.  One who understands that is the last jockey to ride a Triple Crown, Steve Cauthen with Affirmed in 1978.  "It's just terrible luck. I was shocked,'' Cauthen said over the phone. "It's like anticipating a Frazier-Ali fight, and one of them goes down and you've got to cancel. Unfortunately for him it may be canceled for good. It's a bad, bad break for everybody.''  Had I'll Have Another been beaten down the stretch early Saturday evening, it would have been frustrating for racing, but not devastating. That's just the way competition goes. Every sport must make room for failure.  Not after three weeks of buildup, the trainer on television, the jockey visiting the top of the Empire State Building, the horse ready and willing, supposedly. This was the first race he had ever been favored, and he was a big one.  What an irresistible Cinderella story, to sweep to the Triple Crown, literally, from the back of the pack. Born in modesty, now destined to go where so few horses have gone.  And then … some tenderness, some swelling, a visit from the vet — and all was gone. One day: How great is he? The next day: How bad is he?  One day, he was preparing to be the first Triple Crown winner since 1978. The next, he was the first Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner not to start the Belmont since 1936.  Well, that's history, all right. Just not the kind they had in mind.  Reddam said I'll Have Another could have gone in the Belmont, but caution ruled. Indeed. Had something catastrophic happened, racing would have been in even a worse place than it is now. They would have needed a whisk broom to pick it up.  Plus, there is a lush future ahead for the horse at stud. By then, I'll Have Another will carry a whole new meaning.  So there will be no echo of Affirmed. The perils of the sport have claimed another batch of best-laid plans. There are reasons it has been 34 years since the last Triple Crown winner. Maybe it is too much to ask.  What racing hoped for was a Secretariat finale — a mighty and unforgettable Belmont show of strength and will and speed, just like we saw in the Hollywood version.  But Friday gave the sport something else: A depressing suggestion that now, Triple Crown winners happen only in the movies.
Belmont just became a side show. A doughnut of an event, because now there is a big hole in the middle of it.