New Belmont, New Surface Questions: Previewing the Joe Hirsch Turf Classic
By: The Turk
This is the second weekend of racing at the rebuilt Belmont Park, which reopened September 18 after more than two years dark. The old grandstand — a 1968 concrete structure built for crowds that stopped coming decades ago was torn down and what replaced it is a five-story, 300,000-square-foot building that seats about 10,000 for an ordinary card and expands to 50,000 for the Belmont Stakes (btw- secondary ticket price market averages $550-$1,000 currently!)
The price was $555 million, most of it a $455 million loan from the state approved in 2024. Whether that was a good investment in a sport that has lost a track every seven months since 2000 is a question for another post. I'll note only that the money was spent building something smaller, which is at least an honest read of the audience and I'm hopeful it gives the Turk a modern facility to visit that I felt was lost when Arlington Park was torn down needlessly.
The main track is still a mile and a half, the only one of its kind in the country, and there are still two turf courses on 60 acres of new sod. A new one-mile Tapeta synthetic oval was installed to allow year- round racing and gave cover to the political hacks who closed Aqueduct.
With the fake dirt, a race like this G1 Turf Classic can be transferred if the grass is unfit. The Turk handicapped a lot of synthetic dirt races over the years as well, and the book isn't written yet on how this track surface will perform. Stand by! Will this race run on turf, fake dirt or be cancelled or postponed? We'll get to the weather in a moment.
Joe Hirsch wrote about horse racing for the Daily Racing Form for 49 years, from 1954 until 2003, and when he retired the sport renamed its fall turf championship after him before he'd been gone a year. That tells you something about how the industry saw him and his loss.
In many ways, and all due respect to current turf writers, he was the last of a kind: a beat writer who covered racing the way the newspapers of my childhood covered anything, by showing up. He was at the Derby every year for half a century. He founded the National Turf Writers Association in 1959. He wrote five books, including the definitive one on Calumet Farm, and for eleven years in the sixties and seventies he shared a Manhattan apartment with Joe Namath — the quarterback said Hirsch taught him how to dress and how to handle the press.
What made him different from the sportswriters of his time was that he had no interest in being the story. Retired DRF CEO/Editor/Publisher et al Steven Crist called him a global ambassador for the sport and a mentor to two generations of journalists, and when he died in January 2009 at 80, the Racing Museum eventually made him a Pillar of the Turf — a category reserved for people who built the sport, not just covered it.
Nobody writes about racing that way anymore, mostly because nobody employs anyone to.
Now, the weather. A nor'easter is a coastal storm that spins up when cold air from Canada meets warm Atlantic water, and it earns the name from the wind that blows in from the northeast, off the ocean. Long Island takes it on the chin in these sort of conditions, with rain, sustained gusts, tidal flooding, and the storms tend to sit for a day or two rather than blowing through.
There is one arrives Friday evening. The forecast calls for moderate-to-heavy rain through Saturday, with 30-to-50 mph gusts in Nassau County, and the heaviest rain Saturday evening into Sunday. Post time is 5:19. The Turf Classic will be run on the leading edge of the worst of it.
Three things can happen, and I'd handicap (perhaps more accurate than my horse handicapping) them like this:
Run on the turf, yielding or soft: 9-5 that NYRA doesn't cancel for rain. But these are brand-new courses on brand-new sod, ten days old, and I doubt they'll risk them.
Off the turf to the Tapeta at a mile and three-sixteenths: 6-5. The conditions say so explicitly, and a downgrade to G2 is possible. This would gut the field's distance edge and hand the race to whoever handles synthetic. Pride of Arras won on Polytrack at Kempton last out. El Cordobes is 1-for-2 on it. Far Bridge and Asbury Park have never seen it.
Canceled or postponed: 3-1. NYRA has pulled cards for wind before, and 50 mph is the number where that gets discussed. If they don't do it for the horses, they should at least consider the fans and the back-of-the-track staff that has to work in it and commute to it.
Ok, so let's pretend the race will be run. I am going to assume it's on fake dirt for the purposes of this handicap, since it seems unlikely that the new sod, if heavy, would be safe for the horses or worth putting the horses or course at risk.
How do I look at horses that have some Timeform, some Beyer? This is something you will deal with every year as Breeders' Cup approaches. The weakness is what the two systems measure. Beyer is a time figure. Timeform is a handicapper's judgment of merit, adjusted for weight and age. A horse who beats a good rival in a slow race gets a big Timeform number and would have earned a modest Beyer. The bridge gives you the typical gap, calibrated on two horses. It doesn't give you the gap for any one race.
Three of the seven have been running overseas, and Pride of Arras has never started in North America. Beyer figures don't exist for foreign races, and you can't straight-line compare Timeform and Beyers.
The DRF prints a Timeform Rating on every foreign line, and that's how I build a correction. Timeform and Beyer are different scales, but two horses in this field have run under both within the last eighteen months. El Cordobes's best Timeform is 115 against a best Beyer of 105. Fort George's is 114 against 101. That's a gap of 10 to 13, so I've subtracted 12 from every Timeform figure and plotted the result as an open diamond. Same recency colors, different shape, so you can see at a glance which marks are measured and which are estimated. It's small sample sizes with one race, but it's a good quick and dirty, and I've seen it hold up pretty consistently.
The strength is that the bridge comes from the field itself, not a rule of thumb, and you can check it against the chart. Pride of Arras's last two runs convert to 105, right where El Cordobes runs.
Taking a look at some recent video.
15 August 2026; SAR 1 1/2 Miles Christophe Clement Stakes G1 on Yielding Turf.
5 September 2026; Kempton (GB) 1 1/2 Miles September Stakes G3 on fake dirt
28 March 2026; GP 1 1/2 Miles Pan America G3 on firm turf.
5 September 2026; KD 1 1/2 mile Turf Cup G2 on firm turf
While I like to stick to current video, a look at last year's Breeders' Cup Turf gives a look at El Cordobes (Ire) against a big and talented field.
1 November 2025; DMR 1/1/2 mile Breeders' Cup Turf G1 on firm turf.
It's a bit of a quandary, I focus on handicapping very analytically and Saturday's race could very well be, in technical terms, a S**t show. This is how I see the race on artificial dirt.
I like Far Bridge. The trainer has won 20% of the time on +180 day layoff, he's got a good pedigree for fake dirt too. A journeyman in the best way. El Cordobes (Ire) joins Far Bridge as the top two in the race. 13 months since his last win, a long layoff after a failed Doha trip, I'll like him better next time out.
My next layer down has Fort George (GB), Program Trading (GB) and Pride of Arras (Ire). I like Fort George to possibly win and I like Program Trading and Prince of Arras to be in the Trifecta/Superfecta mix with one of them possibly in exacta.
To my own peril, I'm essentially tossing Minerat Station and Asbury Park.
I don't read media coverage of horses or races before I handicap as I'm too susceptible to external bias, but here's what DRF is saying about Saturday's race.
Have fun, stay dry, Turk's Out!
