Arcangelo crosses finish line first at Belmont Stakes, Jena Antonucci first female trainer to win the race

NEW YORK (AP) — Arcangelo took the lead at the top of the stretch and won the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, making Jena Antonucci the first female trainer to win the race in its 155 years.

After the horse crossed the finish line, Antonucci doubled over and rested her arm and her head on the back of a chair. She kissed the horse on the nose when it returned to the area in front of the winner’s circle.

Arcangelo finished the 1 1/2 mile race in 2:29.23 and as 1 1/2 lengths in front of favored Fotre, with Tapit Trice third.

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AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Four days before the running of last month’s Kentucky Derby, a story was posted on NBCSports.com under my byline, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Secretariat’s 1973 Triple Crown, and more specifically, his climactic, 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes in a time of two minutes, 24 seconds, still two seconds faster than any other thoroughbred has run the race. The story was, as the writer says in Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, “… the kind of story I enjoy…” A joyful story. Secretariat and his Belmont are cultural touchstones of stunning durability and power in modern American sports, almost bereft of negativity. As I wrote in the piece, only the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal – the “The Miracle On Ice” – is in the same league for evoking a certain type of emotional response. If you can find the right entry point, and you know your way around a keyboard, Big Red is storytelling gold. Check, and check.

To tell the story of Secretariat’s 50th, I chose a narrative device. We writers love terms like device, because it purports to impose order on the process, as if we are software engineers or carpenters,