THE BELMONT STAKES

The Belmont Stakes is a race of a mile and a half for three-year-olds, run at Belmont Park, on the edge of New York City, five weeks after the Kentucky Derby. It is the last leg of the Triple Crown, the longest and the oldest: it was first run in 1867, eight years before the Derby.

The Triple Crown is settled here. Between 1979 and 2014, twelve horses ran in it with the first two legs won, and all twelve were beaten.

Jerome Park

Leonard Jerome was a stock speculator, known as the King of Wall Street, and the grandfather of Winston Churchill. In 1866, with his brothers and August Belmont, a banker sent to New York by the Rothschilds, he opened a racecourse north of the city, in what is now the Bronx, and gave it his own name. Belmont was the first president of its jockey club.

The next June a race for three-year-olds, named for Belmont, was run there over a mile and five-eighths. Four ran, and a filly, Ruthless, won by a head. Only two fillies have won it since: Tanya in 1905 and Rags to Riches in 2007.

The race outlived the racecourse, which is now a reservoir. It moved to Morris Park in 1890, and in 1905 to Belmont Park, on Long Island, which Belmont’s son, August Belmont Jr., opened that spring.

The son gave the race its trophy: a silver bowl by Tiffany, made in memory of his father, with a figure of Fenian, his father’s winner of 1869, on the lid. The family gave it to the race for good in 1926, and the winner’s owner takes home a small copy.

The Test

In all but four years since 1926 it has been run over a mile and a half, once round Belmont Park’s main track, the largest in American racing, which is known as Big Sandy.

It is called the Test of the Champion. For a horse that has run in the Derby and the Preakness, it is a third race in five weeks, and a quarter of a mile further than the Derby.

Secretariat won it in 1973 by thirty-one lengths, in two minutes twenty-four seconds, and no horse has run a mile and a half on dirt faster since. He was the first to win the Triple Crown for twenty-five years.

After Affirmed, in 1978, nobody won it for thirty-seven years. American Pharoah ended the wait in 2015, and Justify won it again three years later.

The winner is covered in a blanket of some seven hundred white carnations. Before the race New York, New York is sung, as it has been every year but one since 1997.

What to Know

It is run on the Saturday of a festival of several days’ racing.

A lounge suit, and a hat.

The seats to have are above the finish, in the new grandstand.

The Long Island Rail Road stops at Elmont-UBS Arena, beside the track. Manhattan is where to stay.

From 2024 to 2026 the race was run at Saratoga, over a mile and a quarter, while Belmont Park was rebuilt. The new Belmont Park opened on 18 September 2026, and the race returns to it in June 2027. The New York Racing Association, which runs it, has said it will consider keeping the shorter distance.

In 2026 Golden Tempo won it for Cherie DeVaux, five weeks after she had become the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner.

The mistake is to stay in one’s seat until the race. The runners are walked in the paddock first, under a white pine that was kept when everything around it was rebuilt, beside a statue of Secretariat.

The Court

The Belmont Stakes is not the Court’s own. Boxes and seats above the finish are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Manhattan, and the table afterward. A member who took the Derby and the Preakness can have the Belmont arranged with them, and see the Triple Crown through.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.