Test of the Champion: The Story of the Belmont Dynasty

THE GRAND OLD NAMES OF AMERICAN Thoroughbred horse racing—Whitney, Phipps, DuPont, Mellon, and Widener—exude images of industry tycoons and lineages traceable to the Mayflower.

- Carly Silver

But several of the most important equestrians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hailed from a clan far more blue-collar than blue-blooded. Meet the family Belmont, namesakes of Belmont Park in Elmont, New York, as well as the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel of the Triple Crown. The 149th running of the “Test of the Champion,” as the 1 ½-mile contest has been dubbed, takes place on June 10, 2017.

The Belmonts’ origin story traces back more than 200 years, to the German town of Alzey. There, Simon Schönberg, a prominent Jewish citizen, and his wife, Fredericka, had a young child named August. Some sources claim their last name was Balmain, which was later Anglicized into “Belmont,” but “Schönberg” and “Belmont” both translate to “beautiful mountain” in English. Historian Bernard Livingston recounted in Their Turf: America’s Horsey Set and Its Princely Dynasties that August Belmont I began his career in finance essentially as an unpaid intern. At age fifteen, he started by sweeping the floors and taking out the trash for free at the banking house of the famed Rothschild clan, allegedly his distant cousins.

Young Schönberg worked his way up the corporate ladder so fast that it was rumored he was actually an illegitimate Rothschild, according to horseman Abram S. Hewitt in his Sire Lines. Regardless of the veracity of that claim, Schönberg became a near instant success; a few years after starting at Rothschild, he was negotiating finances with the Pope’s court. Schönberg acquired lavish tastes as he traveled from Germany to Italy and Cuba, as sports historian Steven A. Riess observed in The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime.