A nose. That’s all that separated Real Quiet from racing immortality. He was beaten by the smallest of margins in the 1998 Belmont Stakes, a grueling race that has done in the Triple Crown attempts of six horses in the past 11 years.
Nobody knows better than Bob Baffert, the only trainer to lose the Belmont three times with horses that won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, what the final 1½ miles on the Triple Crown trail can do to a horse, trainer and jockey.
“When you get beat by an inch like that, it’s easy to say, ‘Did he do this, did he do that?’” Baffert said. “You got 1½ miles and you get beat by an inch, what are the chances of that?”
The three weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont can be agonizing for the human connections around a horse.
“Things can happen,” Baffert said. “You’re trying to read your horse, trying to keep him happy. Will he get the 1½ miles, will he get the pace, the track? There’s so many little things.”
Six times in the past 11 years, horses have come to the Belmont with a chance to match Affirmed’s 1978 feat. None succeeded. Now it’s Big Brown’s turn to try.
“He’s a superior race horse,” Baffert said about Big Brown. “He’s handy, he has speed, he’s tactical, he can stay out of trouble, he breaks well. I think the horse is the real deal.”
Baffert thought that about Real Quiet 10 years ago. The colt owned a five-length lead with a quarter-mile left in the Belmont. Victory Gallop, second in the Derby and the Preakness, moved up on Real Quiet and jockey Kent Desormeaux, who rides Big Brown. The horses crossed the wire inches apart, but Victory Gallop won by a nose in a photo finish. A stride past the finish line, Real Quiet had regained the lead.
“I thought he won it,” Baffert said. “Now Kent gets a mulligan and he gets to do it again.”
In 1997, Baffert watched from the stands as Silver Charm fought off Free House for the lead with a quarter-mile to go and appeared to have clear sailing to the wire.
Then Touch Gold made a move on the far outside. Jockey Gary Stevens didn’t see his rival and Silver Charm was beaten by three-quarters of a length.
As soon as the gates sprang open in the 2002 Belmont and War Emblem nearly fell to his knees, Baffert knew he and his horse were doomed.
The winner was 70-1 shot Sarava. War Emblem straggled across in eighth, beaten by 19½ lengths.
“He was so one-dimensional and such an irritable horse as it was, as soon as he was behind horses, I had to sit there for 2½ minutes waiting for the race to be over,” Baffert recalled.
Smarty Jones was the last colt to make a Triple Crown try in 2004. He came into the race on the track with its deep, sandy dirt surface undefeated at 9-0. Big Brown is perfect, too, at 5-0.
Nicknamed “The Test of the Champion,” the Belmont is uncharted territory for 3-year-olds who have never run that far in their lives and likely won’t again.
“They don’t have any way to prep for it and they don’t have any use for it afterward,” said John Servis, who trained Smarty Jones. “It’s an odd race in this time of their careers.”
The Triple Crown is run on a compressed schedule, with the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont just five weeks apart. Each race varies in distance and the fields are crowded, with 20 horses typically contesting the Derby.
The Belmont is a race of strategy, with jockeys making split-second decisions on pace, placement and when to start their final run to the wire. Go too soon and a young colt could be gassed for the 1,097-foot stretch run. Wait too long and risk letting the lead horses get away.
Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith is 0-for-11 in the Belmont. He saw Big Brown up close while riding Gayego in this year’s Derby and Preakness.
“It’s certainly a race that can fool you,” he said. “A horse that wins the Belmont seems to be up close to the pace or on it. They got that rhythm and they fall into it.”
In 2004, Smarty Jones may have moved too soon. The small black colt had trouble relaxing with horses on either side of him. So jockey Stewart Elliott guided him into the lead entering the backstretch with a mile remaining.
“The last thing you want to do at Belmont is move too soon,” Servis said. “If you start to make your move at the (stretch) turn, that wire isn’t at the eighth-pole.”
Around the far turn, Smarty Jones led by nearly four lengths before Birdstone came flying past him in the stretch and left Smarty with a one-length defeat.
“I saw Birdstone making a big run and I hoped he couldn’t sustain it,” Servis said.
The trainer recalled that the late owner Roy Chapman was incensed by the tactics used in the race.
“I said it two weeks before the Belmont in an interview, ‘The one thing about the Belmont is it’s now not just a horse race. It’s what do we have to do to beat Smarty Jones?’” Servis said. “That’s just the way the Belmont is run. It all comes down to beating that horse. There’s a lot of strategy.”
Servis said the biggest pressure in the Belmont is on the jockeys.
“The best thing you could tell your jockey is if you’re comfortable where you’re at and you have the horses in front of you measured, keep an eye on the horses behind you and don’t let him run until you get to the quarter-pole,” he said.
Like Smarty Jones, Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Charismatic was taken out of his routine of stalking the leader and then making one big run. In the 1999 race, the colt chased suicidal fractions set by filly Silverbulletday from the clubhouse turn until less than a half-mile remained.
“(Jockey) Chris Antley completely took us out of what we do best,” trainer D. Wayne Lukas said. “I don’t know what happened to Chris because he had rode flawlessly in the first two. They make judgment calls.
“Even though some very high-profile riders have ridden at Belmont consistently, that race seems to be a mental barrier for a lot of them.”
The Belmont tripped up Funny Cide in 2003, when the gelding couldn’t handle a muddy track and finished third, five lengths behind Empire Maker.
“It was a sea of slop and he just doesn’t like muddy tracks,” recalled trainer Barclay Tagg, who will saddle Tale of Ekati in this year’s race.
He doesn’t believe there’s anything in particular about the Belmont, rather it’s the tight schedule of winter prep races followed by the Triple Crown series that does in potential history-makers.
“The horses are either overstressed or overworked by then,” Tagg said. “I’m not saying they should change it. If they change it, it’ll be a blemish for all the other horses that went through it and did win it.
“It’s not put up there so people can win it, it’s put there because it’s tough.”
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