Test of the Champion: The Story of the Belmont Dynasty
TriBeCa Magazine|Issue 60

Test of the Champion: The Story of the Belmont Dynasty.

Carly Silver
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. 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.

This story is from the Issue 60 edition of TriBeCa Magazine.

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This story is from the Issue 60 edition of TriBeCa Magazine.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.