Rain won’t stop the Preakness parade at Pimlico Saturday

12:55 PM ET

Horseplayers and racing fans turned into weather geeks this week thanks to a weather forecast for Saturday’s Preakness at Pimlico in Baltimore, the second leg of the Triple Crown, that began as merely gloomy, veered into downright awful, and settled on just generally yucky.

As of this writing, the three big free Internet weather services — the National Weather Service, Accuweather, and Weather.com (The Weather Channel) — agree on this:

Exaggerator trains on the track at Pimlico ahead of the Preakness Stakes. Will the weather play a factor on the surface in Saturday’s race? Patrick Smith/Getty Images

It will start raining at Pimlico early in the morning, like, before sunrise, and it will continue to rain pretty much all day. After some dire predictions that called for as much as anywhere between one and two inches of rain, the Big 3 settled on about a half to three-quarters of an inch of total precipitation.

That might not sound too bad, but it is plenty enough to do damage. It will almost certainly force the main track to be sealed, which means there will be some standing water on the packed down dirt surface, and puts many of Saturday’s turf races at Pimlico, several of them stakes events, in jeopardy of being switched off their intended surface and onto a wet main track.

And if that wasn’t enough, temperatures are expected to fall shy of 60 degrees, well below normal for this time of year. So, it will be wet, AND chilly. Lovely.

There will be those who will say that we horseplayers and fans have no right to complain. Thoroughbred racing is a sport played outdoors, and we should know we are subject to the vagaries of the weather. This is true. But …

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