Belmont Stakes 2024 Beyer Speed Figures: Best, Most Recent Numbers

A powerful tool when handicapping Belmont Stakes odds is Beyer Speed Figures (BSF). While not an end-all, be-all, BSFs tell a more complete story about a horse’s performance than many other metrics. For the past 50 years, handicappers have relied on on BSFs. Todd Pletcher’s Mindframe likely enters as the favorite in the Belmont Stakes. Just two races in, the colt posted impressive BSFs. Can anyone else in the field catch him?

Belmont Stakes Beyer Speed Figures

Find the best, second-best, most recent, and second-most recent BSFs for all ten horses running in the Belmont Stakes below.

WHAT ARE BEYER SPEED FIGURES?

Horse racing handicapper Andrew Beyer designed BSF in the early 1970s as a handicapping tool. The purpose was to quantify a horse’s speed in a given race to compare it with other horses. Win margin tells only half the story – was the field fast? Slow? BSF sorts through track length, field strength, and all other variables to create a tidy number that can be applied to future races.

• Join TheLines.com’s free sports betting Discord — with over 4,000 community members and our staff sharing ideas daily.

Why Look At Second-Best BSFs?

As Rich Strike showed us in 2022, almost any horse can be the world’s best on its absolute best day. As March Madness underdogs show us yearly, all it takes is maxing out one performance. We call those “outliers.”

Trying to bet outliers isn’t a fruitful strategy. So, by looking at a horse’s second-best outing, we can more confidently discern how fast we can expect him to run.

We can now figure out trends by looking at the most recent and second-most recent performances. Is a horse improving race-over-race like Seize the Grey? Or have they likely run their best race like Dornoch?

Simply looking for the best BSF and blindly betting that horse isn’t a winning strategy.

Can Anyone Catch Mindframe?

With just two races under his belt, it’s difficult to figure out whether Mindframe is a champion in the making or just a really fast horse in two races. His 103 BSF from a Maiden Special Weight (MSW) turns heads. He followed it up a month later with a 97 in another ungraded race. Now, Mindframe steps up in class.

He was intriguing enough to draw Irad Ortiz Jr. for both of his most recent races. However, other horses like Sierra Leone and Seize the Grey have already run against these horses in two other Triple Crown legs; Seize the Grey and Mystik Dan won those races and will run again on Sunday.

According to Beyer Speed Figures, Mystik Dan has the highest ceiling to run down Mindframe; he posted his 101 in the Southwest Derby and followed it up with an opportune 100 at the Kentucky Derby. Seize the Grey continually improved his BSFs, topping out with a 100 at the Preakness.

Under trainer Todd Pletcher, Antiquarian and Protective still have their best races ahead. The former posted a high BSF of 92 in his last two races, while the latter maxed out at 89 in his latest race.

Sierra Leone is an obvious choice, having posted 95-98-99 BSFs in his last three races, respectively.

2024 Belmont Stakes Morning Line Odds

Belmont Stakes odds below are from the morning line draw. Horse racing odds continue to shift until post time.