If horse racing is more about the horse than the jockey — as we argued after the Preakness was almost won by a riderless horse — then how is the Sun going to explain this year’s Belmont? That’s the question put to us by a friend who is savvy about the nags. Our crony credits the jockey Joel Rosario with causing Sir Winston to make his astounding — and winning — moves at the top of the stretch.

Journalistic ethics — an oxymoron, we understand — require us to disclose that we didn’t see the race in real time. Plus, our practice with the Belmont is to watch the first one minute and nine and four-fifths seconds. That’s the record-breaking point at which Secretariat hurtled past three-quarters of a mile. At that point we usually lie down for a nap and wait for latest wannabes to catch up.

This year it was clearly going to be a long snooze. That signal came at the half-mile, when the announcer exclaimed in bated breath: “The pace has not been fast!” At that point, Sir Winston was third from the end of the pokey pack. When the field dragged itself past the famed three-quarters-of-a-mile marker at 1:13:54, it was almost four weeks … pardon, four seconds … behind Secretariat.

So we lay down for a nap, only to get mugged by Morpheus. This is why we had to watch the second half after a longer-than-usual delay. We did, though, study what happened as the nags hauled into the Belmont’s stretch. That’s when Sir Winston got himself into contention by waddling up the inside. It was breathtaking enough — it looked like he could have sanded the paint off the inside rail.

It’s what happened next that will be studied for years. Suddenly, Sir Winston hung a sharp right. It was such a dramatic move that, forgive us, we thought the Churchillian colt was going to pull over to smoke one of his cigars. Instead, after crossing what passed for the field, Sir Winston promptly hung a left and found himself staring ahead down an empty track. So he took off like a bat out of … well, purgatory.

Gosh it was moderately exciting.

We might not even have written about it, but for our horse-savvy friend, who’s forgotten more about the nags than we’ll ever know. She represents that the 2019 Belmont is a reminder that, contra the Sun, jockeys can matter. We take her point. Then again, too, if Joel Rosario had been riding Secretariat, he’d’ve’d no need to cut across the track. The rest of the horses would have been behind him by 31 lengths.