Belmont Stakes
annual horse race in New York
The Belmont Stakes is an American Grade I stakes race for three-year-old Thoroughbreds run at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York. It is run over the worldwide classic distance of 1+1⁄2 miles (12 furlongs; 2,414 metres). Colts and geldings carry a weight of 126 pounds (57 kg); fillies carry 121 pounds (55 kg). The race, nicknamed "The Test of the Champion", "The Test of Champions" and "The Run for the Carnations", is the traditional third and final leg of the Triple Crown and will be the second race in the Thoroughbred Championship Series. It is usually held on the first or second Saturday in June, five weeks after the Kentucky Derby and three weeks after the Preakness Stakes. The 1973 Belmont Stakes and Triple Crown winner Secretariat holds the track record (which is also a world record on dirt) of 2:24.
The race covers one full lap of Belmont Park, known as "The Championship Track" because nearly every major American champion in racing history has competed on the racetrack. Belmont Park, with its large, wide, sweeping turns and long homestretch, is considered one of the fairest racetracks in America. Despite the distance, the race tends to favor horses with tactical speed: relatively few winners close from far behind the early leaders.
The attendance at the Belmont Stakes is among the American thoroughbred racing top-attended events.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q612758. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Belmont Stakes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.