When Luis Saez first rode Dornoch at Saratoga Racecourse in 2023, he told trainer Danny Gargan, “You have the Derby winner.”

While that did not come true, Dornoch did make good on that optimism by winning the first Belmont Stakes at Saratoga, New York, hugging the rail and holding off Mindframe to spring a major upset in the Triple Crown finale at odds of 17-1.

The horse co-owned by World Series champion Jayson Werth won the Belmont five weeks after a troubled trip led to a 10th-place finish in the Kentucky Derby.

This time, Dornoch sat off leader Seize The Grey, passed the Preakness winner down the stretch and held on for a half-length victory.

“I would put it right up there with winning on the biggest stage. Horse racing is the most underrated sport in the world, bar none,” said Werth, who won Major League Baseball’s championship with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008.
“It’s the biggest game: You get the Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont. We just won the Belmont. This is as good as it gets in horse racing. It’s as good as it gets in sports,” Werth said.

It’s the first win in any Triple Crown race for Gargan and the second in the Belmont for Saez, who said he never lost faith in Dornoch.

“He’s one of the top three-year-olds in the country, and we’ve always thought it,” Gargan said. “We let him run his race, and he won. If he gets to run, he’s always going to be tough to beat.”

It’s the sixth consecutive year a different horse won each of the three Triple Crown races. Sierra Leone, the Derby runner-up who went off as the favorite, was third, and Honor Marie fourth.

Dornoch paid $37.40 to win, $17.60 to place, and $8.10 to show.
Todd Pletcher-trained Mindframe paid $6.80 to place and $4.20 to show and Sierra Leone paid $2.60 to show after a jumbled start and more directional problems.

There were no such issues for Dornoch, who triumphed at the track known as the graveyard of favorites for its penchant for upsets.

“No one believed in this horse,” Gargan said. “It’s speechless. He’s such a talented horse.”

Despite there not being a Triple Crown on the line, it’s a historic Belmont because the race was run at Saratoga for the first time in the venue’s 161-year history.

It returns next year while Belmont Park undergoes a massive, $455 million reconstruction with the plan for the Triple Crown race to go back to the New York track in 2026.

Having it at Saratoga necessitated shortening the race to 1-1/4-mile from the usual “test of the champion” 1-1/2-mile distance that has been a hallmark of the Belmont for nearly a century.

The temporary change contributed to getting more quality horses into the field who previously ran in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, or both. At 1-1/4-mile distance, Dornoch crossed the wire in a time of 2:01.64.

Gargan doesn’t think if the race were at the usual distance the result would’ve been any different.

“I don’t think anybody was getting to him,” Gargan said. “I’d have to watch it again. I kind of got excited jumping around there when he got clear. I didn’t see anybody really making a bold move.”
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In his greatest imagination, Dad would have never believed how ranch hay processing could change in half a century.
Back then, Dad left his grocery store butcher job about noon and headed to the hay field.
A fairly-new John Deere 1020 tractor was hooked to a seven-foot sickle mower for cutting the grass field. By the next afternoon, the grass had dried enough for hay, so Dad raked it into windrows with the fairly-new side-delivery rake.
The well-used John Deere 15T twine square baler was hooked to the only tractor on the ranch. When Dad started baling the hay, something always went wrong. Either the baler knotter didn’t work, or the tying was so tight the bale twine broke; for sure something.
It was a one-man operation up to this point. There wasn’t a hay trailer, so, the small bales were dropped on the ground behind the baler. At about 5 o’clock, his son arrived at the ranch from a town job and started picking up the hay bales.
The half-ton pickup was driven from bale to bale, and the then-younger worker got out at each bale and threw it into the truck bed. About 39 bales would make a load when properly stacked.
Real work was still to come as the hay bales had to be unloaded and stored away. Dad generally pushed the bales off the pickup to the helper who stacked them into the open hay barn. It was a lot harder when the bales were stored in the hay mow.
This year has been entirely different. Dad’s grandson uses the ranch swing-type swather to mow down the grass. If weather cooperates, hay is ready to bale the next day.
Custom operators bale the hay into either big round bales or small square bales. While big bales are easier to handle, small bales are needed for feeding livestock in small pens.
Small bales are accumulated into eight-bale packs that are picked up with a tractor front-end loader and stacked on a hay wagon. The bales are easily unloaded with the tractor and stored in the hay barn.
Putting up hay is sure a lot easier than it used to be.
Reminded of Proverbs 27:25: “Grass can become hay, but a rancher must work diligently to harvest what he can for the livestock.”
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XVIII–27–7-1-2024