From a distance, it looks as if a five-story spaceship had landed to bring New York racing into the 21st Century. The reimagined iteration of Belmont Park has arrived.
“People are getting amped up for it,” New York Racing Association chairman Marc Holliday said. “The whole industry is getting excited for it. To be a part of this new stage of history is very exciting.”
But not everybody is thrilled. Someone with the Twitter handle Jiffy lamented, “I thought the old Belmont was beautiful, but I don’t like the design of the new one. I look at it and think the Martians have landed.”
Arlingtonfan piggybacked on Jiffy’s complaint, posting “It reminds me of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’."
Preserve your memories, traditionalists, because the future is now, and there’s no going back. On Friday, the new Belmont Park will open for the fall meeting, featuring the 108th running of the $1 million Jockey Club Gold Cup (G1). It’s a “Win and You’re In” for the Oct. 31 Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1), won last year by Japan’s Forever Young, also the marquee attraction for the 1¼-mile Gold Cup.
The defection of 2025 Horse of the Year Sovereignty (foot abscess) canceled a duel of superstars, but for once a new place, not a million-dollar race, will be what brings in the fans.
Attendance on Day 1 will be limited to 6,000 because the $455 million facility is still a work in progress, with a few hundred construction workers on site daily. Only the first two floors will be open to the public on opening day, when fans will spend more time gawking at the unfamiliar sights than studying The Racing Form. Among them are a glass-enclosed grandstand, an expanded “Backyard” paddock and walking ring, and four newly constructed racing surfaces – a dirt track, two widened grass courses, plus a mile synthetic oval inside all three.
Holdovers from the old paddock are the statue of Secretariat and the ancient Japanese white pine tree. Gone are the red brick walls with their arches and climbing ivy, which longtime Belmont patrons will miss.
The building is so visually imposing that it’s hard to realize that at 275,000 square feet it’s one-third the size of the one it replaced, which stretched almost a quarter of a mile. There’s a six-story videoboard in the 45-acre infield that will accommodate thousands and greatly increase crowds for the Belmont Stakes and the Breeders’ Cup, which will return to New York next year for the first time since 2005. Although the main track is 12 feet narrower (it has a limestone base instead of clay), the stretch is 130 feet longer.
Then there are all the amenities that contemporary fans demand. On the first floor, where most people will hang out, there’s a food court, a simulcast center, and a sports bar with a Secretariat theme. There are outdoor box seats on the second floor, luxury boxes on the third floor, and 32 Champion suites on the fourth floor. Way up on the fifth floor is the Sky Terrace indoor dining room. Sounds like everything any racegoer could want, except for ivy and brick walls.
With Aqueduct gone forever, New York racing will be conducted at Belmont except for the Saratoga meeting from late June or early July through Labor Day. The all-weather Tapeta surface will be used exclusively from December to late March or early April.
Change is strange, and the older you are, the harder it is to deal with. Yet transformation was overdue for a cavernous building that long ago outlived its usefulness. Except for Belmont Stakes Day, most of its seats were unoccupied. No longer did crowds of 20,000 or more show up at a place that was remodeled from 1963-1968. It was said that if you fired a cannon from one end of the first floor to the other end, you wouldn’t hit anybody.
As NYRA president and CEO David O’Rourke said: “The old facility was built for a different era.” Way back in the Sixties, no cigar-chomping horseplayer could have envisioned a racetrack like this one.
As NYRA chairman Holliday said: “The new Belmont Park will be a thoroughly modern racing and entertainment facility that will take its place on the global stage among iconic venues like Ascot, Longchamp and the Curragh, a venue that will appeal to horse racing enthusiasts and attract a new generation of fans.”
Big dreams, and let’s hope he’s right.
Ed McNamara is an award-winning racing writer who has covered the sport since 1981 for The Bergen (N.J.) Record, Newsday, ESPN, Thorocap, and USRacing. He is the author of Cajun Racing: From the Bush Tracks to the Triple Crown and Racing Around the World, and a contributor to The Most Glorious Crown and The Racetracks of America. He has also written for racing publications in France and Italy.
