The Belmont Stakes Separates the Good from the Great

That's the case that Andrew Cohen makes at the Atlantic:

The Kentucky Derby gets the glory. The Preakness gets a pass. For my money, it is the Belmont Stakes, the third and final leg of racing's Triple Crown, which almost always sifts out the very good horses from the truly great horses.
And it will be no different this Saturday afternoon, when New York's Belmont Park hosts the 143rd running of the race. The very good Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom will be there (the 2-1 morning line favorite from the 9-hole). And the very good Preakness winner Shackleford will be, too (at 9-2 from the 12-hole). A victory in the Belmont for either of these colts won't just earn his respective connections some serious lettuce, it will also likely guarantee horse-of-the-year honors. Then again, the Eclipse Award could go to the horse which wins Saturday if it isn't either of those two.
For those colts and geldings who race in all three races especially, the Belmont is the most difficult of the three to win. The race is longer than either of the other two-- three-eights of a mile longer than the Preakness. The Belmont is raced five weeks after the Derby and three after the Preakness; a crowded schedule for any horse, much less a 3-year-old who hasn't raced much in his pampered life. And the Belmont field always contains fresh horses who haven't gone to Baltimore and/or Louisville but who have instead trained for Belmont's great distance.

He makes very good points.  As he mentions, 4 horses in the past decade came into the Belmont with a chance to win the Triple Crown, and all failed.  Today marks the 92nd anniversary of Sir Barton becoming the first horse to win the Triple Crown, since then, only ten other horses have accomplished the feat.  The Belmont is almost always the race that makes the difference.  The 1-and-a-half mile race, 5 weeks after going a mile-and-a-quarter at the Kentucky Derby, and 3 weeks after going a mile-and-three-sixteenths at the Preakness, is just brutal.  One other thing I wanted to include from his post is the video of probably the greatest thoroughbred performance of all-time, Secretariat's 31 length victory in 1973: