Recent history suggests inexperience no dealbreaker in Belmont Stakes

ELMONT, N.Y. – Four measly starts.

That’s the entire racing career for both Hofburg and Tenfold, two Belmont Stakes starters with many supporters who believe one of them might derail Justify’s bid to become America’s 13th Triple Crown winner.

One would think the marathon 1 1/2-mile Belmont rewards experience, seasoning, an extensive racing history. It doesn’t.

Since 2002, the Belmont winner has averaged fewer than seven career starts. Horses like Hofburg and Tenfold with fewer than five starts have a strong record during the period, with two wins, two seconds, a third, and three fourths from 18 starts. Of the 10 such horses that finished worse than fourth, six went off at odds of nearly 30-1 or greater.

“If you do your job properly in the morning, I don’t know if you’d call four starts ‘inexperienced,’ ” trainer Christophe Clement said. “It’s your job all the time to be teaching the horses something.”

Clement won the Belmont in 2014 with Tonalist, who came into the race with four starts. Dynever caught a wet track he disliked in the 2003 Belmont and still managed to finish fourth, also while making his fifth start for Clement.

Horses simply race less now than they did 30 years ago, one reason less might be more when it comes to Belmont racing experience. In 1988 the six Belmont starters averaged 12.5 starts; the 11 runners in the 2017 Belmont averaged 6.81 races.

American Pharoah had run seven times when he completed his Triple Crown in 2015. Justify didn’t race at all until Feb. 18 and makes his sixth start Saturday. Justify’s résumé – all those races packed into a short span – looks different than many of the lightly raced horses that have run well in the Belmont.

Tonalist had a four-week break between the Peter Pan Stakes and the Belmont. Summer Bird, the only other Belmont winner with fewer than five starts, had five weeks between the Kentucky Derby and his 2009 Belmont win. Second in that Belmont was Dunkirk, also making his fifth start and racing for the first time since the Derby.

“You’d think experience would be helpful,” said Dunkirk’s trainer, Todd Pletcher. “But I think you can also argue that if they have the natural ability to stay the distance that coming in fresh could be an advantage. For us, it’s no secret we’ve often gone from the Derby to the Belmont and skipped the Preakness.”

Pletcher’s first Belmont starter with fewer than six starts was Purge, who romped in the 2004 Peter Pan but got stomped in the Belmont, finishing a distant ninth. Pletcher attributed that poor performance to a pre-race paddock meltdown, and his next lightly raced Belmont runner was the filly Rags to Riches, who, making her sixth start and first in five weeks, beat Curlin in an epic 2007 showdown.

Rags to Riches provides a great example of the characteristics of a horse being more important than the number of races they’ve logged.

“Primarily, it’s just natural ability. Rags to Riches, she was put on this earth to run in a race like the Belmont,” Pletcher said. “She’s by [Belmont winner] A.P. Indy, a half-sister to a Belmont winner, and just an impressive beautiful galloper with tremendous action. She was just designed for that type of race.”

Clement said Tonalist wasn’t even a natural 1 1/2-mile horse, that his more general gifts won him the last leg of the Triple Crown.

“He was just a talented horse, and being talented you can do things that the horses less talented cannot do,” Clement said. “That’s a great thing. A lot of the ones you think will stay a mile and a half, most of those are the slow ones. A slow mile and a half, that’s not good enough.”

Steve Asmussen trains Tenfold, and he won’t be forgetting Rags to Riches. A neck behind her was the horse he trained, Curlin, edged as the 11-10 favorite three weeks after beating Derby winner Street Sense in the Preakness.

“Even watching the replay, I still can’t believe he got beat,” Asmussen said. “Of my 38,000 starts that’s the one I can’t believe.”

Tenfold, a son of Curlin, finished an encouraging third making his fourth career start in the Preakness. He’s never won more than an allowance race and does not appear to exist on the same plane as his father, but Tenfold might fit the mold of a lightly raced Belmont horse made for the long distance.

“Horses like that are just born, absolutely,” Asmussen said. “We’re not going to make them that. Believe me, there was no vision of the Breeders’ Cup Sprint when I first watched him train. He’s a horse that’s got a good mind that comes with a lot of talent. He had talent last year, but we just physically waited on him because of how he’s built. I can say that his weight’s considerably more on the first of June than it was the first of March.”

Asmussen won the 2016 Belmont with Creator, who had 10 starts going into the race and a totally different come-from-the-clouds style than Tenfold, whose “high cruising speed is his best asset,” Asmussen said.

Hofburg had come-from-behind trips in the Florida Derby, where he was second, and the Kentucky Derby, in which he finished a troubled ninth, but trainer Bill Mott believes his horse also can gallop along at a good pace in a race like the Belmont.

“This horse has some speed,” said Mott, who won the 2010 Belmont with Drosselmeyer, a plodding, grinding type that has regularly won Belmonts lacking a star like Justify. “I don’t think this horse has to go a mile and a half. He can race effectively at nine furlongs.”

A mile-and-a-half, though, should be just fine for Hofburg, whose dam’s sire, Touch Gold, won the 1997 Belmont.

“We did our work this morning and he barely took a long breath,” Mott said Sunday. “When he was a 2-year-old doing two- and three-furlong breezes he was galloping out five furlongs. He showed no signs of being tired, just kept going.”

Mott said Hofburg “is mature beyond his number of races. We sent him to war when we went to the Kentucky Derby. He’s been in a 20-horse field; he does everything right, handled everything the right way.”

Five-times-started Justify might beat Hofburg on Saturday simply because he is a better horse. But Hofburg almost certainly won’t lose the Belmont just because he has raced only four times.