Preakness Stakes

Preakness Stakes, a 13/16-mile (about 1,900-metre) flat race for three-year-old Thoroughbred horses, held at Pimlico Race Course, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., annually in mid-May. Fillies carry 121 pounds (55 kg), colts 126 pounds (57 kg). The Preakness Stakes is the second (and shortest) race of the Triple Crown of American horse racing, which also comprises the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes.

The Preakness was established at Pimlico in 1873 and was named after the horse that won the Dinner Party Stakes at the track in its opening year, 1870. The Preakness was suspended at Pimlico in 1889 and run at Morris Park in Westchester county, New York, in 1890. After a hiatus of three years, the race returned in 1894 but was held at the Gravesend track in Brooklyn, New York, until 1908, whereupon the race finally returned to Maryland and settled permanently at Pimlico the following year.

Preakness traditions include the singing of “Maryland, My Maryland,” the official state song; the “painting of the colours,” in which a painter, right after the winner has been officially announced, climbs a ladder to the top of the replica Old Clubhouse and applies the colours of the winning team’s silks to the cupola’s jockey-and-horse weather vane; and the draping of the winning horse with a blanket of “black-eyed Susans.” (Because black-eyed Susans, which are Maryland’s state flower, usually do not bloom until June or July, yellow daisies are used instead, with their centres hand-painted with black lacquer to mimic the flower.) After the fashion of the Kentucky Derby’s nickname,“Run for the Roses,” the Preakness is often called “the Run for the Black-Eyed Susans.”

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Winners of the Preakness Stakes are provided in the table.