Winners go great lengths at Belmont

It is in the head of every trainer who enters a horse in the Belmont Stakes, and every jockey who scores a mount.

Not so much, can my horse win the race? But can my horse get the distance?

Horsemen like to say that where the Kentucky Derby ends is where the Belmont Stakes only begins.

When they cross the finish line in Louisville, they’re just reaching the quarter-pole in Elmont, and a lot of horses who look like champions after 10 furlongs turn into dog meat after 12.

That is what sets the Belmont Stakes apart and makes the race, for many fans, the most compelling of the three Triple Crown races. Super horses like Secretariat come along once in a generation, but that sweeping 1 1/2 -mile oval – Big Sandy – is there year after year.

It’s the equivalent of the bygone 15-round prizefight, a distance that separates the merely good from the great.

Which of the 10 runners in today’s Belmont, No. 141 if you’re keeping track, will be able to fool its ultimate truth machine, the grueling lie detector test administered in that endless run from the head of the stretch to the wire?

Will it be Charitable Man, a speedball who may be able to get loose on the lead and cruise to victory, as many Belmont winners have done since the distance was increased from 1 3/8 miles in 1926?

Or will it be Mine That Bird, the gutsy gelding who seemingly doesn’t even pay attention until the field has run a mile in front of him?

Or one of the lesser horses, the underachievers like Dunkirk and Chocolate Candy, or the semi-fast, like Miner’s Escape?

“Shoot, they can all get a mile and a half,” said D. Wayne Lukas, who is trying to win his fifth Belmont with Flying Private, dead last in the Derby, and Luv Gov, who ran eighth in the Preakness. “It just takes some of them a little longer than others.”

Then he got serious. “It takes a certain kind of a horse,” he said. “There’s a great big gut check at the quarter pole here. It isn’t a come-from-behind race at all. It’s a race where you have to be in position to win. It’s like the Indy 500. You gotta be close to the pace, but how much fuel did you use to get there?”

Lukas’ assessment seems to eliminate Mine That Bird, who ridden by Calvin Borel wended its way through traffic to win the Derby after falling more than 30 lengths off the pace, and fell short in the Preakness under a lesser ride by Mike Smith.

Borel is back for the Belmont but as Bird’s trainer, Chip Woolley, acknowledges, “We’re going to have to let him run his race, and if they start slowing the fractions down, he’ll be much closer to the pace than he was in Kentucky or Pimlico. But does he have another quarter mile left in him? That’s gonna be the question.”

As always, the toughest opponent for any horse in the Belmont is the racetrack itself.