Essential Quality held off Hot Rod Charlie in the stretch to take home the winner’s share of the 2021 Belmont Stakes prize money, confirming his top favorite status and delivering a gritty, exciting finish for the fans and for his owner, Godolphin, the racing operation belonging to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of the emirate of Dubai. In fact, the race was their battle for much of the way, and it very much looked as if the game Hot Rod Charlie might just slip away with the prize, were it not for Essential Quality’s strength and poise as he delivered his stretch run. Essential Quality went off at 2-1 and paid $4.60.

Rombauer, who had gone off at 3-1, just a slight bit better than Hot Rod Charlie’s 7-2, just didn’t have the mustard to keep up with those two, who seemed in the stretch as if they had been cast in an almost entirely separate race. Known Agenda, at 6-1, ran fourth, followed by a relative surprise, the 15-1 Bourbonic in fifth. The hapless Rock Your World, who went off at a respectable 9-2, disappointed his many backers by running sixth.

Since this Belmont was, with the exception of Rock Your World’s lackluster efforts, pretty much the favorites’ race in descending order of their probability to win, Hot Rod Charlie and Rombauer paid a correspondingly low $4.10 and $3.50, respectively. Hot Rod Charlie’s jockey, Flavien Prat, showed his horse sense: He had been aboard Rombauer for the Preakness win and had leapt at the chance to ride Hot Rod Charlie in the Belmont.

But it was Essential Quality’s day and his moment to deliver a graceful, big-hearted stretch run. For a moment or two in the teeth of it, it looked as if he might not be able to pull that off, but he dug down and inched away, bringing in the win by a length-and-a-quarter at the wire. With that, his trainer, Brad Cox, gets his first Belmont victory. Cox was ebullient but clear-headed about the structure of the race, observing that the fast pace, largely engineered by Hot Rod Charlie, helped Essential Quality, who showed from the start that he could exercise the patience requested by masterful jockey Luis Saez as he took his slot in the middle of the field. Up the backstretch and into the far turn, Saez and Essential Quality tactically picked off the frontrunners until they came to Hot Rod Charlie and their real fight.

“Hot Rod Charlie ran a tremendous race,” Cox said, “and I thought, with the hot pace, we were in a good spot where they would come back. [Jockey Luis Saez] did a fantastic job putting him in position turning for home, and he really showed his stamina late.”

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