The sport that eats its fans has taken another gulp. The Kentucky Derby winner, Sovereignty, won’t run in Preakness.

The biggest deal in the sport is its Triple Crown. Win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont and you are a legend. Only 13 thoroughbreds in history have done that. This year, after the May 3 Derby, only one horse had a chance to do that: Sovereignty.

But he won’t run at Pimlico on Saturday. His decision-making group, led by trainer Bill Mott, has taken a pass. It said it is pointing the horse “toward the Belmont.”

Give me a break.

If there were any indications of injury coming out of the Derby, the decision would be sensible. Because there are none, it isn’t. Sadly, this decision is certainly not unprecedented, nor particularly controversial. Mostly, it is a clear statement of what the sport is: illogical, undisciplined and tone deaf to the general sports fan.

Can you imagine the Ravens skipping the playoffs to point toward next season? The NFL playoffs are the Holy Grail for its teams. They don’t get in position to hold the big trophy and then blink. Nor would any other sport, because any other sport of major national import would have a commissioner or board of directors or decision-making body to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Horse racing has dozens of power pockets, each running its own little show and caring not a whit about what happens to the others, nor whether what happens to the others matters to the overall good or detriment of the sport. Horse racing has nobody in official charge overall. Nobody. No decision-making person or group with the power to step in and mandate what is good for the sport, its future, its brand and its economics.

There is something called the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which lists as its mission “the increase in popularity, welfare and integrity of the sport.” You can bet the farm that nobody from the NTRA took Bill Mott and his owners aside and demanded, for the good of the sport, that they run Sovereignty in Preakness. That’s not how horse racing operates. Nor does the NTRA have that authority. Any public noise in racing about “for the common good” is a lot of marketing hot air.

Back a decade or so, there was a quiet movement to fix this, and in the middle of this conversation was the name D. Wayne Lukas, who is still around, who trained a horse to victory in last year’s Preakness and is sitting down at the end of the Preakness Stakes barns this year in the same spot he has been seemingly forever.

Lukas will have a horse in the race and an opinion on most everything in his sport, including a Kentucky Derby champion who is sitting out the second leg of the Triple Crown. There was a time when some in racing described Lukas as somebody with the right stuff to be a commissioner of the sport, a Pete Rozelle of the equine world.

It was a short-lived idea. D. Wayne was seen as too prickly, too opinionated, too whatever. Yes, he knew the game better than all the rest, but racing didn’t want to be dictated to. Not then, not now.

So we have Saturday’s 150th running of Preakness, with all the pomp and all the circumstance and none of the real significance that the folks at Pimlico and all over the country deserve.

This is a sport that created the order and continuity of the Derby as the first Saturday in May, Preakness two weeks later and Belmont three weeks after that. Every year now, quickly after a Derby champion is established, the talk begins about whether a 3-year-old thoroughbred should be subjected to three races in five weeks.

Blah, blah, blah. Nothing is ever done to change that, so why not embrace it?

The greatest horses have done it, and their names define greatness. Among them: Citation, Affirmed, War Admiral, the invincible Secretariat. American Pharoah did it 10 years ago; Justify, seven.

Are we now to believe that the greatest thoroughbreds in the world are suddenly turning into the Orioles pitching staff — full of owies and in constant need of rest and recuperation? Can’t we at least try to get a quality start out of Sovereignty?

This is the sport that sent its one true superstar, trainer Bob Baffert, into exile for three years over a drug test that didn’t even produce a performance-enhancing drug, just one that Baffert applied too close to race time.

Pimlico is the place where, in 1938, the great Triple Crown winner War Admiral was defeated in a legendary match race by the fittingly legendary Seabiscuit. Pimlico is history, tradition and greatness. If racing was glued together at all, it would ponder this. It’s not, and it won’t. An organization with no leadership is not an organization at all. It is just a bunch of baby robins in the nest, mouths open, waiting to be fed.

Doesn’t Pimlico, in its last iteration before demolition and the construction of a rebuilt, reconceived and modernized venue, deserve a last great shot from the sport that has used it for greatness and benefited immeasurably from its existence?

Rest assured, on Preakness day, the booze will flow freely, the fans will dress nicely and people will have fun. Also rest assured, a week after the race, 95% of those in attendance for this 150th-year signature race will not remember the name of the winner.

In horse racing, this is called branding.

Bill Dwyre spent 25 years as the sports editor of The Los Angeles Times and covered horse racing as a columnist for another 10. He was voted the David F. Woods award winner in 2011 for best Preakness story.