The 146th running of the Belmont Stakes is this Saturday and thousands of fans will show up donning elaborate hats to watch California Chrome go for the Triple Crown.
Even if you’re watching from home, prepare yourself for a day of horse racing with these 15 bits of trivia you might not know about the oldest of the Triple Crown races.
- Winners of the Belmont Stakes take home a silver-bowl trophy from Tiffany. It’s 18 inches tall, 15 inches wide and 14 inches at the base. The lid on top contains a silver figure of Fenian, winner of the third running of the race in 1869.
- Color matters: Bay colored horses (reddish brown) have been the most successful, with 51 wins, chestnut colored horses have 50 wins and brown horses come in third with 29.
- The blanket of white carnations worn by the winning horse takes 10 hours to put together and contains 300 to 400 carnations glued to a green velveteen spread. The flowers are shipped in from California or Colombia.
- Only four horses ran the first race on June 19, 1867. Ruthless, owned by Francis Morris and ridden by jockey Gilpatrick, won the mile and five furlong race in 3:05.
- An antigambling law in New York forced the park to close for two years in 1911 and 1912.
- Up until 1921, the horses ran clockwise at the stakes, like in England. Since then it’s been run counterclockwise, which is the American tradition.
- Belmont’s largest crowd of 120,139 came in 2004, when Smarty Jones made an unsuccessful run for the Triple Crown.
- Horse racing isn’t without its detractors: Last year, actor James Cromwell (“Babe,” “Boardwalk Empire”) wanted the park to commemorate 35 horses who have died training or racing there since 2012. “Horseracing is the only sport in America with a regular, predictable death toll, and New York has been heavily criticized recently for the staggering number of breakdowns and deaths on its tracks,” the actor wrote.
- The record for the largest margin of victory in race history was set in 1973 by Secretariat, who won by 31 lengths.
- Seven women have trained Belmont Stakes runners. The first was Sarah Lundy, whose Minstrel Star finished 11th in 1984.
- The trainer with the most wins is James Rowe, with eight. His first win was George Kinney in 1883; his last, Prince Eugene in 1913.
- The first purse for winning the race was $2,500. The 1992 Belmont was the richest, with a total purse of $1,764,800.
- 1920 Belmont winner Man o’ War sired three horses who also won the race: American Flag (1925), Crusader (1926) and Triple Crown winner War Admiral (1937).
- The Belmont is run on the largest dirt track in North America, Belmont Park, measuring 1.5 miles around.
- Of the three Triple Crown races, the Belmont is the oldest. It predates the Preakness by six years and the Kentucky Derby by eight.