Belmont Stakes festival at Saratoga features six Grade 1 races Saturday

Saratoga’s Belmont Stakes card was built for bettors who wanted more than one headline. The Met Mile, the Manhattan, the Woody Stephens and the rest of the graded slate turned the Belmont festival into an all-day pressure test, with six Grade 1 races on Saturday and future implications in nearly every division.

The five-day Belmont Stakes Racing Festival ran at Saratoga Race Course from Wednesday, June 3 through Sunday, June 7, and NYRA put 25 stakes worth $11,075,000 on the schedule. Belmont Stakes Day alone featured six Grade 1 races, with the 158th Belmont Stakes run at 1 1/4 miles at Saratoga because Belmont Park was under reconstruction. NYRA said the new Belmont Park was set to reopen on Friday, September 18, 2026, with the Belmont Stakes returning there in 2027. Post time for the Belmont was 7:04 p.m. ET, but the day’s real betting pulse started long before that.

The Metropolitan Handicap was the race that most obviously could change the shape of the summer. Set as race 11 of 14 with a 5:32 p.m. EDT post, the one-mile handicap came out of the Wilson Chute and carried a Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile berth to the winner. Nysos went in as the 9-5 morning-line favorite after winning last year’s Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile at Del Mar, and the seven-horse field also included Journalism, Antiquarian and Saudi Crown, four Grade 1 winners whose combined record stood at 27 victories and $13.95 million in earnings. Journalism drew the opposite end of the gate from Nysos, which made the race as much about trip and pace as raw class.

That same tension ran through the rest of the undercard. The $1 million Manhattan, the Just A Game, the Woody Stephens and the Jaipur all carried Grade 1 weight, while the True North added a sharp sprint test to the mix. For fillies and mares, the Acorn and the Ogden Phipps offered division-shaping opportunities, and the Belmont Gold Cup, Intercontinental, Pennine Ridge and Jersey Girl deepened the card even further. This was not a supporting cast built to fill space; it was a sequence of races with Breeders’ Cup implications, graded stakes prestige and plenty of betting leverage.

The commercial result matched the sporting stage. NYRA said Belmont Stakes Day generated more than $116 million in all-sources handle, a reminder that when Saratoga loads a card with this much quality, fans and horseplayers do not need a single race to carry the day.