Tough luck if you’re looking for historical trends and data points to help you pick a winner in Saturday’s Belmont Stakes. Just about everything about the last leg of the Triple Crown will be different this year.
Because of a massive renovation project, the Belmont isn’t being held at its traditional Long Island home at Belmont Park. There for more than a century, it’s been run at the marathon 1 ½-mile distance around what is the largest racing oval in America, featuring almost comically wide turns and a deep, peculiar surface that not all horses take to.
But this year, the Belmont has moved three hours north to Saratoga Race Course. The surface is different, the turns are tighter, and the oval is smaller. With Saratoga’s track configuration, a 1 ½-mile race just won’t work, so the distance has been pared back to 1 ¼ miles, the same as the Kentucky Derby.
In other words, what’s worked for horses in past Belmont races may not work at all this year.
All of that said, Saturday’s edition has drawn an enticing group of runners, including the winners of both the Derby and the Preakness along with the Derby runner-up:
So let’s make our way through this field and see what clues we can find. We’ll start by focusing on what — at least on paper — look like the four main contenders:
The Heavy Favorite
That would be Sierra Leone, whose credentials more than warrant his 9-5 morning line odds. Five weeks ago in the Kentucky Derby, he came charging from way back — his signature style — and finished within a nose of winning it. Most impressive about Sierra Leone is his utter consistency. This will be the sixth race he’s run in his career; all but one has been at the graded stakes level, and he’s literally inches from being undefeated:
The knock on Sierra Leone is a lack of discipline late in races. This was on full display in the Derby, when he veered inward during the stretch drive and repeatedly made contact with another horse, Forever Young. This extended jostling may have cost both horses a chance to win the race, and it wasn’t the first time Sierra Leone caused trouble like this.
To address the issue, trainer Chad Brown has made an equipment change and switched riders to Flavien Prat. If this can get Sierra Leone to run in a straight path when it matters most, he’ll be hard to stop Saturday.
The Derby Champ
Mystik Dan missed his chance at the Triple Crown with a second-place finish in the Preakness, but he still ran a strong race that proved his 18-1 victory in the Kentucky Derby was no fluke. And with a Belmont win, he’d still capture two-thirds of the Triple Crown.
History doesn’t offer him much hope here: Only 11 times has a Derby winner been defeated in the Preakness and then bounced back to win the Belmont Stakes. And it’s only happened twice in 40 years (Swale in 1984; Thunder Gulch in 1995).
But, again, what does history really matter this year, given how different it will be from a traditional Belmont? In fact, no horse may stand to benefit more from the reduced distance at Saratoga than Mystik Dan.
Recall that in his Derby win, Mystik Dan and his rider Brian Hernandez made a bold move along the rail and zipped to a three-length lead as the stretch run began. It looked like he’d win easily. But he tired and slowed down; the distance was getting to him. Of course, he did hold on to win — barely. But it sure seemed that the 1 ¼-mile Derby was the absolute limit of what he could handle. A traditional 1 ½-mile Belmont would probably be too much for Mystik Dan. But 1 ¼ miles may just do the trick.
The Preakness Winner
Like Mystik Dan in the Derby, Seize the Grey was a surprise winner in the Preakness. And like Mystik Dan, it doesn’t seem like it was a fluke. If anything, Seize the Grey seems like a 3-year-old who is suddenly developing into an elite runner.
Coming into the Preakness, he had just won a major stakes race — the Pat Day Mile — two weeks earlier on the Kentucky Derby undercard. And in the Preakness, he went gate to wire at the longest distance he’d ever attempted, 1 3/16 miles, finishing with plenty of energy. That bodes well for his chances of handling this year’s Belmont distance, which is just one-sixteenth of a mile longer.
Then there’s Saturday’s forecast, which looks ominously damp. For Seize the Grey, this may be very good news. After all, the Preakness was run after heavy rain on a muddy racetrack. And of the Belmont field, Seize the Grey has run and won the most races on a wet surface:
The Wild Card
Mindframe has run a grand total of two races, none in waters even remotely this deep, and yet he’s listed as the 7/2 second choice on the morning line.
Numbers explain the hype easily. Not only has Mindframe won both of his races, he won them in crushing style — a nearly 14-length romp in his first-ever race followed by a 7 ½-length score his next time out.
And there’s the analytics. The Beyer Speed Figures use a formula that assigns a number value to every race that every horse runs, allowing for comparisons between horses who have run at different tracks under different conditions; the higher the number, the better the performance. And here’s how the Belmont field stacks up on Beyers:
Per analytics, no one has run a faster race than Mindframe. So if he’s already put up numbers that top this field and he’s only run twice, it’s easy to conclude there’s still incredible upside for this relative newcomer.
The catch: That 103 rating came at a sprint distance (seven-eighths of a mile) against maidens (horses that have not previously won a race); and of the seven other horses who ran that day and have raced again since, only one has posted a win. And while the competition was tougher in his second race, Mindframe is the only horse in the Belmont who has never competed in a stakes race; every other runner has competed in at least two graded stakes, the highest tier in the sport.
The Rest
It’s probably too dismissive to group the remaining six horses into one category like this. Long shots won the first two Triple Crown races this year, and there’s no reason it couldn’t happen a third time on Saturday. Still, they all have something to prove if they’re going to contend in this race.
Three of them last ran in the Kentucky Derby:
- Resilience (sixth place)
- Honor Marie (eighth place)
- Dornoch (10th place)
Resilience’s Derby showing was the most promising of this trio. He was essentially lateral with Mystik Dan as the pack left the final turn for the home stretch, but unlike Mystik Dan, who clung to the rail on the inside, Resilience was extremely wide and lost momentum. It’s a question whether this distance is too far for him (his trainer, Bill Mott seemed to think so before reconsidering), but he fared better than expected in Louisville.
Honor Marie has the excuse of getting jammed by the horses on either side of him while leaving the starting gate. His deep-closing style is similar to Sierra Leone’s, although both times they’ve run together Sierra Leone has easily gotten the best of him. Dornoch, meanwhile, actually beat Sierra Leone in a race late last year, when they were both 2-year-olds. The hope back then was that Dornoch would continue to develop and only get better at three. But his Beyer ratings have only regressed this year.
That leaves us with the three other competitors.
Antiquarian contested one Kentucky Derby prep race, the Louisiana Derby on March 23; on that day, he broke through the starting gate before the race and had to be walked back around and reloaded — almost never a good sign. And if you draw a line through that race, you’re left with three other races that Antiquarian has run in — two wins and a very narrow second-place finish.
The most recent of those wins came in last month’s Peter Pan Stakes, when Antiquarian survived a stretch battle with The Wine Steward, who comes to the Belmont never having finished worse than second place in six starts. Two of his wins, though, came in races restricted to horses who were bred in New York. And his trainer, Michael Maker, is 0-13 in Triple Crown races.
And that brings us to the longest of long shots: Protective. He is still a maiden, winless in four career starts, though competitive in all of them. He finished third behind Antiquarian and The Wine Steward in last month’s Peter Pan. And he’s trained by Todd Pletcher, who has won the Belmont four times. We started this preview noting the limited utility of history in analyzing this year’s race. But no matter the setting or distance, what Protective is trying to pull off would be historic: The record books for Triple Crown races date back to the 19th century and only 11 times has a maiden won one of them, with the most recent coming 91 years ago.
My pick to win the Belmont Stakes is…
Call it a failure of imagination, but it’s only too easy to see Sierra Leone sitting far back on Saturday, so much that you start to think he’s leaving himself too much to do. Then he revs his engine and comes barreling down the middle of the track to pass everyone and head straight to the winner’s circle.
So my head says Sierra Leone.
But I’ve also got a nasty tendency of rationalizing my way into going with my heart. In the Derby and the Preakness, this backfired miserably (and predictably). But sometimes — OK, rarely — it works. And in Seize the Grey, I see a speedy, versatile horse who’s getting better and whose best we may not have yet seen. And I see what would be simply an amazing story, trainer D. Wayne Lukas taking two legs of the Triple Crown at 88 years old. By the time the horses reach the track and “New York, New York” starts playing on Saturday afternoon, I have a feeling my heart will have won out over my head yet again.
