It's Belmont Week!
I almost forgot that the Belmont Stakes is this weekend! Now sure, without the Kentucky Derby or Preakness winners, it's kind of a crappy race. But, it's still a major horse race on TV, and to me, that's just like pizza and sex.
Anyway, to kick off Belmont week here are five great Belmont Stakes.
First, let's get rid of the obvious. This is Secretariat's other worldly Belmont victory. This is an alternate view and I love it up until the stretch run because it gives a great view of the incredible interior fractions Secretariat ran in order to utterly crush the hapless Sham. It's true horse power.
Next up is Rags To Riches' historic 2007 Belmont Stakes. She's such a tough filly. It's pretty amazing to realize that she and Zenyatta come from the same crop. Too bad their careers didn't overlap.
Now here's the classic 1978 Belmont Stakes pitting Affirmed and Alydar. Common wisdom said that Affirmed might be beat if a horse could just look him in the eye. The problem was that Affirmed was so fast that only an extraordinary horse could match strides with him. In his Belmont, his great rival Alydar finally got a head in front of him. "Test these two to the wire" to see how Affirmed responded.
Real Quiet's 1998 Belmont is memorable for the sheer, breathtaking drama of his Triple Crown try and for Tom Durkin's great call. The last 15 or so seconds of the race are unforgettable.
Finally, a personal favorite, the 1989 Belmont Stakes. Sunday Silence was going for the Triple Crown and Easy Goer was going for vindication. Sweet, sweet vindication.
Posted by kris at June 1, 2010 10:03 PM
The trackback entry for this page is : http://www.inthehat.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1864
| Trackback Entries |
Comments
| # June 1st, 2010 10:08 PM kris |
| The Easy Goer/Sunday Silence clip features the Marshall Cassidy call at the track, rather than Dave Johnson on TV. It's hilarious in that I've never heard Cassidy either so animated or so biased. He's just as delighted with what happened as I was. The only other call that compares is Tom Durkin's call of Smarty Jones' Belmont which he admits he was desperately rooting for Smarty to win. You can tell:
|