Another Triple Crown season will come to an end Saturday with the running of the 1 1/2-mile Belmont Stakes, and so too will another season of Daily Racing Form’s Triple Crown clocker’s reports.The following are the impressions left by the 14 starters in this year’s Belmont Stakes from observations made both in New York and during last week’s brief visit to Churchill Downs.
On Saturday at Belmont Park, a new-look Irsaal, recently gelded and running with Lasix, will try to take another step forward when he competes in the $150,000 Easy Goer, a listed stakes race that drew eight other 3-year-olds, including at least three – Always in a Tiz, Micromanage, and Power Broker – who at some point in recent weeks were under consideration for the Belmont Stakes.
Freedom Child has regrouped to become a major threat in Saturday's Belmont Stakes after a disastrous run in the Wood Memorial ended his hopes of running in the Kentucky Derby.
The story of this year’s Triple Crown opened with a rousing Kentucky Derby victory by Orb followed by an upset in the Preakness by Oxbow. The final act awaits on Saturday, not far from the neon lights of Broadway, in the 145th Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park.
He was the original jet-setter in racing. “Wayne off the plane” was the cry when trainer D. Wayne Lukas would fly his horses across the country to knock off Grade 1 stakes. Now, he’s grounded, Lukas preferring to hit the road with, as he puts it, “my friends George and Willie.”
As a native New Yorker who has been attending races at Aqueduct and Belmont for nearly three decades, owner Mike Repole has made no bones about his desire to win the Belmont Stakes.
The pace made the race in both the Ketucky Derby and Preakness, though how the pace was made was counter to conventional thinking.
If any race should be judged on its own terms it's the Belmont Stakes. Jay Hovdey offers his five favorite Belmonts that did not have a Triple Crown on the line.
Trainer Dallas Stewart is in the Triple Crown discussion again, this time with Kentucky Derby runner-up Golden Soul, whom he believes is coming into Saturday's Belmont Stakes in terrific shape. “I don’t see anything I don’t like about this,” Stewart said early this week, before leaving his Churchill Downs base for Belmont Park in New York.
Those trainers looking for an honest pace in Saturday’s Belmont Stakes may have found themselves a new ally in Ken McPeek, who said he plans to have jockey Alan Garcia put Frac Daddy on the lead after pulling the rail at Wednesday’s post position draw.
