History
Belmont is known as "The Championship Track" because almost every major champion in racing history since the early 20th century has competed on the racecourse — including each of the 11 Triple Crown winners. Along with Saratoga Race Course, Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Churchill Downs in Louisville, and Del Mar and Santa Anita racecourses in California, Belmont is considered one of the elite racetracks in the sport.
The largest crowd was in 2004 when 120,139 witnessed the Belmont Stakes as Smarty Jones was seeking the Triple Crown but was upset by Birdstone.
Belmont Park is operated by the non-profit New York Racing Association, as are Aqueduct and Saratoga Race Course. The group was formed in 1955 as the Greater New York Association to assume the assets of the individual associations that ran Belmont, Aqueduct, Saratoga Race Course, and the now-defunct Jamaica Racetrack (the Rochdale Village housing development now occupies the site of Jamaica).
Read more about this topic: Belmont Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)