When does the Belmont Stakes start? What TV channel is it on?

The best race of the Triple Crown series is Saturday at Belmont Park. Not surprisingly, it’s called the Belmont Stakes.

And we bet They want to know when the race is taking place. Time generally only changes by a minute or two from year to year unless you have the time memory of a goldfish (miss you already Ted Lasso) you kind of know. But not his year.

On the east coast, it starts around 7:02 p.m., which is about 15 minutes later than usual.

Okay, let’s go through them.

For those of you in Chicago or the Central Time Zone, it means 6:02 p.m.

That means 5:02 PM for those of you who are in the Denver area or in the mountains time zone.

And for the people we value most, for those of you in Los Angeles, it’s 4:02 p.m.

But that’s not the most important thing to remember. This is the first year the race has moved from NBC to Fox. Let’s repeat that, look for the race on Fox. Of course, there’s no point in hosting the first two stages of the Triple Crown on one network and then moving them to another network for the final stage.

There is a reason for this, however. Fox owns about a quarter of NYRA Bets, the ADW (Advance Deposit Betting) arm of New York Racing Assn. When NBC’s contract with the other races expires, one might expect Fox to put on a strong showing for them.

And there’s another big wrinkle.

Tom Durkin, who hasn’t been a presenter since 2014, will announce the races, which will air on Fox starting at 4:00 p.m. ET. You can perform the calculation for the remaining time zones. Durkin has contested approximately 80,000 races in his career.

“The Belmont Stakes has been an iconic part of sports culture for more than 150 years,” said Durkin. “There’s nothing quite like the energy and enthusiasm surrounding Belmont Park when a Triple Crown is at stake. It is the apotheosis of excitement.”

Apotheosis?

Oxford Languages ​​says: “The highest point in the development of something; climax or climax.”

Okay, just to be clear: Our next times are all local time, so New York. Races at Belmont begin at approximately 11:20 am. Coverage begins at 11:00 a.m. and lasts until 4:00 p.m. on FS1. At 4:00 p.m. it switches to Fox and lasts until 7:30 p.m. If you haven’t had enough, there’s coverage of the final race on FS2 from 7:30pm to 8:00pm

One more time, just one more time, it’s on Fox. In Los Angeles, Channel 11; New York, Channel 5; Chicago, Channel 32 and Denver, Channel 31.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.