Of all the classic races for 3-year-olds, the Belmont Stakes is supposed to be the “truest.” Belmont was designed to allow a horse’s ability to decide the race while minimizing the effects of the post-position draw, early-race traffic, and track bias. To this end, the track is wide, the turns are sweeping, and there’s a lot of room for the charge to the clubhouse turn.

In this game, however, any struggle toward purity is bound to be asymptotic at best. You might refine the sport and get it closer and closer to some imaginary ideal, but you’ll never achieve your goal. So while Saturday’s Belmont Stakes is more than likely to come down to a duel between the two favorites – Preakness winner Afleet Alex and Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo – several other factors are worthy of consideration.

Because the track is so long – the 1 1/2 -mile distance of the Stakes is one complete run around the oval – the run-up to the first turn is rarely used, and the surface going into it is said to be deep and sticky. The backstretch, on the other hand, is long and sandy – like an endless beach, say the jockeys.

Jockeys have to recalibrate their mental clocks to run a race this long. It’s not just the horses that aren’t ever asked to run 1 1/2 miles, after all. This is a full two furlongs past the distance to which these guys are accustomed.

These concerns are probably more important than the fact that Afleet Alex is going to like breaking from the ninth slot. True, he’s away from the front-runners, so he won’t be pulled in with them, and he shouldn’t be tempted to engage the race too early. But Alex could start from anywhere. If Jeremy Rose rides the race correctly, he’s going to hang back off the pace and stay out of traffic, which he’d be able to do out of any hole.

Derby winner Giacomo’s spot in the five-slot seems equally immaterial. It’ll be up to jockey Mike Smith to time the race to his advantage, and to be there when Alex comes charging up to the lead. From the fifth hole, he should have his choice of how to run into the clubhouse turn, and how to set himself up so that he’s not trapped when it’s time to move.

A much more important influence on the way this race is run comes from Pinpoint and A. P. Arrow being lined up next to each another in the second and third holes

Last time out, A. P. Arrow broke his maiden at a Churchill Downs Maiden Special Weight on May 14; that race offered proof that he is a front-runner. Back when he was running off the pace, in the Santa Anita Derby, for instance, he failed to threaten. But in the last race, after setting the pace all the way over 1 1/4 miles,he repelled a challenge by drawing off after a horse came at him. Out front is where he belongs.

And he’ll have the perfect company in Pinpoint, right next to him. Pinpoint’s last two races were won gate-to-wire. At Keeneland on April 17, he set the fractions in all splits over 1 1/16 miles. Last out in the Sir Barton on Preakness Day, he led the whole way and took it by three-quarters of a length.

No doubt it’ll be those two out front, pressing through the early fractions; the inside slots and their individual proclivities almost guarantee it. And pace, as we’ve seen, can make the race.

In the Derby, it was Spanish Chestnut and Bellamy Road blazing through the first half-mile and setting up the eventual collapse of the favorites. In the Preakness, High Limit and Scrappy T were out front, and Scrappy T had nothing left to give – except an attempted tackle – as Alex flew by at the end.

This time, Pinpoint and A. P. Arrow will be setting this race up, but how? What’s interesting here is that these two speed horses are miles slower than High Limit, Spanish Chestnut, Scrappy T, and Bellamy Road. The pace they set will not be anywhere near as hot as what we’ve seen on the Triple Crown trail so far.

During A. P. Arrow’s last race, he set fractions of 47.8 seconds for the half and 1:14.2 at 6 furlongs. The Derby, by contrast, opened with 45.2 and 1:09.4. Pinpoint’s Sir Barton figures, meanwhile, were a poky 49 and 1:13.

So the speed out front won’t be that speedy at all. Which means that when Alex comes on, he’s not going to look like the whirlwind we saw in Baltimore. The rest of the horses in the race are going to have a lot of juice left, and when he goes, they’re all going to go.

Of course, all that is mitigated by the other piece of information released yesterday at Belmont, the morning line. Looking it over, one gets a real sense that these horses are not Grade I-caliber runners. Eric Donovan sets the morning line at Belmont, and you can almost imagine him approaching each entry with a shake of the head. What are the proper odds on a horse that has never won a race going off in the Belmont Stakes? Is 50-1 on Nolan’s Cat reasonable? Shouldn’t it be 500-1?

When it comes time to close off what’s going to be a very relaxed pace, this is exactly the herd of plodders that might manage to blow it. That could leave us with a duel between the only two horses that have been there since Derby day: Giacomo and Afleet Alex. That’s how everyone keeps trying to bill the race, and there’s a good chance it’s exactly what we’re going to get.