THERE is no place for seeing illusions like the racetrack.

Every day, more mirages pop up in the pages of the Daily Racing Form than in the Gobi Desert.

And every day, most of them turn back into sand in less than the time it takes to run the race.

Fusaichi Pegasus, the oasis that would save thoroughbred racing, turned back into sand on Saturday, before the shocked eyes of 98,304 people at Pimlico.

In less than two minutes, he had gone from the next superhorse to just another beaten favorite, a phenomenon that oc-

curs, oh, seven out of every 10 times they open the starting gate.

In fact, he not only finished the Preakness 33/4 lengths behind Red Bullet, but a mere desperate head in front of Impeachment, a colt who can still qualify for non-winners of two.

So what went wrong?

Nothing.

Except the way a lot of us looked at Fusaichi Pegasus.

You see, there were two ways to interpret his performance in the Kentucky Derby.

Some looked at FuPeg’s 11/2-length victory over Aptitude and saw a dominant, confident, superior animal who barely needed encouragement to blow past 18 of the sport’s top three-year-olds so therefore would do the same in the final two legs of the Triple Crown.

Others saw a talented horse who had everything his own way on Derby Day, from the pace to the trip to the masterful ride of Kent Desormeaux.

There is a truism in athletics that says no one is ever as good as he or she looks on their best day or as bad as they look on their worst.

Clearly, FuPeg’s Derby was a classic example of the former.

But since wishful thinking is the state religion of the racetrack, no one wanted to see anything that contradicted the pretty picture of the first Triple Crown winner in 22 years.

The racing industry, saddled with a sport too difficult for most of the dumbed-down sporting public to master or even attempt to understand, was so desperate to find itself a savior that it had anointed FuPeg off the basis of a performance that, in light of his collapse in the Preakness, merits some re-evaluation.

And most of the public handicappers in town and on television fell right in line, either out of suggestibility, mass hypnotism, or simply the fear that they would be the objects of ridicule if and when FuPeg proved himself to be what the industry so badly needed him to be.

Today, they are the ones who look ridiculous, and none more so than the NYRA, which distributed a press release in the Pimlico press box a few hours before the Preakness announcing a gala news conference tomorrow at Gallagher’s to begin the hype for what was expected to be a Very Special Belmont Stakes.

Included among the guest speakers was to be one Ms. Crystyne Lategano, who now might have to answer questions

about fillies, not colts. And now, the Belmont Stakes will just be the feature race on June 10 and the NYRA will be lucky if it draws 25,000 to the track.

In hindsight, the most accurate vision of all when evaluating a horse race, there were problems with Fusaichi Pegasus that were right out in the open, if anyone had cared to take a hard look at them.

Why, for instance, did this apparently most sound of colts run the Derby and Preakness with front leg bandages, like some cripple in a maiden claimer?

Why was trainer Neil Drysdale so intent on shielding him from the press and public on Preakness Week, and why did he forgo the Derby winner’s traditional privilege of being stabled in Stall 42 of Pimlico’s Stakes Barn in favor of a remote, nearly inaccessible barn on the other side of the racetrack?

Why didn’t Fusao Sekiguchi, FuPeg’s flamboyant and somewhat egocentric owner, make the trip to Baltimore?

Did they all know something that a lot of us should have gotten wise to?

In retrospect, something Kent Desormeaux said after FuPeg’s Derby win seems oddly revelatory: “Some horses respond to verbal commands better than to a beating.”

Was he telling us that the “hand ride” he gave FuPeg in that stretch drive was not so much an indication of the horse’s superiority, but in fact, the only way his horse could be effectively ridden?

And Joe Orseno, the trainer of Red Bullet, hinted that the would-be superhorse’s Achilles heel might well be his dislike of being “eyeballed” by another horse, the way a faint-hearted boxer will fold up against a less-talented opponent who simply refuses to quit.

In FuPeg’s previous five victories, he pretty much took command in the stretch and wasn’t challenged.

In the two races he lost, he was asked to duel in the stretch and proved incapable or unwilling. The comment on his first race, in which he finished second to David Copperfield last December at Hollywood Park, is telling: “Outgamed.”

Truly great horses do not get “outgamed” in the stretch, nor do they have trouble “handling the racetrack.”

The reality of horseracing is that, with the exception of the legitimately superior, there is so little to separate horses of the same age and class that the race does not always go to the swiftest, but to the luckiest, to the one that gets the best ride and

the smoothest trip.

Fusiachi Pegasus got all of that at Churchill Downs.

Red Bullet got it all at Pimlico.

Both are very good horses. Neither of them is, as yet, a great one.

Not even the one an entire industry hung the tag on without realizing that the oasis it was seeing was made only of horseflesh, blood, and sand.