Justin N. Lane
The Belmont Stakes will again be run at Saratoga next year while renovations continue at Belmont Park.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Rain impacted Sunday’s card, but it hardly put a damper on the first Belmont Stakes Racing Festival held at Saratoga Race Course.
All-sources handle for the four days of racing was $197,426,085, a 9.8-percent increase over the previous Festival high of $179,779,835 recorded in 2018 at Belmont Park when Justify was going for - and completed - the Triple Crown. This year’s figure was a 23.6 percent increase over last year’s handle for a non-Triple Crown year when the all-sources handle was $159,609,616. There were only three racing programs held last year at Belmont as the Thursday card was canceled due to smog from Canadian wildfires.
Sunday’s handle of $14,426,678 - down from last year’s figure of $15,237,761 - likely would have been higher had not rain forced all five scheduled turf races to the dirt and made for 53 scratches as well as the cancellation of a Grade 1 steeplechase stakes.
The all-sources handle on Saturday’s 14-race Belmont Stakes program was $125,748,941, an increase of more than 6.3 percent from the previous non-Triple Crown record of $118,283,455 in 2023, when there were 13 races run.
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“We set some records on wagering, everyone had a great time, we had a solid 50,000 people here yesterday, energy was amazing, the town was pleased,” NYRA president and CEO Dave O’Rourke said. “I think it was a success and something we can build on into next year.”
The Belmont Stakes Racing Festival was held in Saratoga this year and will be held here again next year - presumably June 5-8 - because of the renovations taking place at Belmont Park. The current grandstand is in the process of being demolished and the 1 1/2-mile dirt main track and two turf courses are also being redone. A one-mile synthetic surface is also being installed for use during the winter and for off-the-turf races.
Though the new building is not expected to be fully functional by the spring of 2026, enough of the renovations will be done where NYRA plans to return the Belmont Stakes to Belmont Park that spring and restore it to its usual 1 1/2-mile distance. This year’s race was held at 1 1/4 miles.
“The Belmont is a mile and a half,” O’Rourke said. “That track will be done in a couple of years and we’ll be back to a mile and a half.”
O’Rourke noted that lines and wait times for the bathrooms and concessions on Belmont Day were longer than he would have liked, and hopes to do some things during the upcoming summer meet that begins July 11 to help rectify that situation.
“Some bathrooms have been redone, maybe capacity was brought down,” O’Rourke said. “That’s a relatively easy fix that we could tackle probably by doing some stuff for the bigger events over the summer just to kind of stage how we want to do it for next year.”
O’Rourke added that he is not inclined to raise the 50,000-attendance cap even if there is a Triple Crown on the line next summer.
“We want to get it perfect with 50,000, so I don’t think we’re going to increase that capacity even with a Triple Crown on the line, we want to nail it perfect,” O’Rourke said. “Concessions, specifically, I think it went well but we want to get it better. We want to bring down the wait times.”
Racing on this circuit is slated to return to Aqueduct on Friday for another four weeks before the regular 40-day Saratoga meet opens on July 11.
O’Rourke said the success of these four days will inevitably lead to questions about extending the Saratoga meet, at least for next year when again there will be a four-week gap between the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga and the opening of the regular Saratoga meet.
“We have a bunch of meetings this summer and stuff like that will come up and it’ll be discussed I’m sure, because there is some logic to that,” O’Rourke said. “You start touching other things and there’s a cascade effect. We’re guests here, in a sense. Even if things look good on paper, you got to float them around. There are a lot of stakeholders involved.”
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