(RNN) – Justify has one more race to win to achieve immortality.
He also has a quarter-mile longer to run than he ever has before.
The Belmont Stakes are Saturday in Elmont, NY, and it could be the stiffest test yet for horse racing’s breakout star of 2018, who ran his first race only in February.
To this point, Justify has shown great resilience, winning the first two legs of the Triple Crown in soggy, and then soggier, conditions.
With rain and mud a strong possibility again, in New York on Saturday, the question then is which Justify will we see?
At the Kentucky Derby, Justify made fairly easy work of a muddy, but not especially sloppy track. And his second win, back in March, came on a similarly soft Santa Anita course.
On a downright boggy Pimlico track at last month’s Preakness, it was a little less forgiving.
Justify ran a strong race about 90 percent of the way, but dragged some down the final stretch. If the race was a couple furlongs (1/8th mile), well, longer, he surely would have been caught.
As it happens, the Belmont is a couple furlongs longer (two and a half, to be exact). It’s a couple furlongs longer, also, than the Derby, which to this point is the longest race that Justify has run.
Bob Baffert, his prolific trainer, isn’t expressing any concern, though.
“If you’re a superior horse, you can do it,” Baffert told the AP a few weeks ago. “It’s a weird, quirky race, but I don’t see why though he wouldn’t handle it.”
He did allow to the AP that wet tracks “take a little bit out of them.”
“It can be tough,” he said, but after the Preakness, Justify “wasn’t as tired as we thought he was.”
For what it's worth, Accuweather meteorologist Brian Thompson said on Friday that "Belmont has a sandy consistency to the track and drains very well."
"In order for sloppy conditions to occur for the 2018 Belmont Stakes, it would have to pour right before or during the race," he said.
Perhaps the most intriguing challenger will be the horse who was on Justify's heels at the end of the Preakness, Bravazo.
The early odds have Justify as a heavy favorite at 5-7. Bravazo is 7-1.
But his trainer, Wayne Lukas, told the AP that he’s “a tough little horse.”
“We’ll take him on and see what happens,” he said.
By the odds, Hofburg is the most serious challenger, at 9-2. He’s won one of the four races he’s run, and came second in the Florida Derby in March. At the Kentucky Derby, he was seventh.
Vino Rosso, who finished ninth in the Derby, is in the mix at 8-1. If you’re looking for a spoiler, 21-1 Gronkowski (yes, like the football player) comes into the Belmont on a four-race winning streak, as well.
One thing perhaps going against Justify, and for some challengers, is freshness – or lack thereof. Besides Justify, only Bravazo and Tenfold (10-1) ran the grueling Preakness.
The rest of the 10-horse field have all had a month’s rest.
And Justify will be starting out of the No. 1 gate, next to the rail, a position Baffert notoriously hates.
If Justify can pull it off, he’ll be the second Triple Crown winner since 1978, after another Baffert horse – American Pharoah – broke a longstanding drought in 2015.
The Belmont is something of a Triple Crown bone yard. There have been 23 horses to win the first two legs, only to wilt under the demands of the 1 1/2-mile third. Just 12 horses have completed the trifecta.
“You have to prepare yourself for disappointment,” Baffert admitted to USA Today.
But, he told the AP, “When I worked him after the Preakness, American Pharoah, when he would breathe, he was like he was a machine.”
And Justify?
“This horse is getting there.”
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