Belmont Stakes day is supposed to be a one-race sprint of attention. Portnoy and Elio decided to make it a 12-hour shift. The setup started days earlier with a DraftKings-partnered preview show filmed trackside, Portnoy repping his Go Go Greys Stables hoodie and Elio glued to a MacBook like a guy actually doing the homework.
The DraftKings-sponsored Belmont preview show, filmed on-site with Portnoy and Elio.
By Saturday morning Elio was already deep in the Saratoga card, screen-recording the DRF past performances and openly drooling over Race 13 — the Grade 1 Belmont with a 7:04 ET post. This is the Elio energy people show up for: not vague vibes, but actual race numbers, actual exacta boxes, actual tickets.
Elio walking through the Saratoga card on DRF ahead of the Belmont.
Then the day did what horse racing always does — it punched everyone in the mouth. Race 3 at Saratoga turned into a Syndicate funeral when the 3/5 chalk Intellect (FR) ran the field down in the stretch. Portnoy's reaction was, uh, vivid. Not exactly a Hallmark card for Elio and the crew.
Portnoy posting the stretch run after the Syndicate got cooked by the favorite.
Elio kept firing anyway, because that is the only acceptable response to a bad beat. A 6 win-place here, a 6-2 exacta box there, eventually a 7 to win with 7-2 and 7-4 exactas as the card rolled toward the main event. Portnoy, meanwhile, made it onto the actual Fox Belmont broadcast desk alongside Joe Buck and Charissa Thompson, which prompted Elio to publicly lobby him to box the 6 and 7.
Elio yelling a boxed exacta at Portnoy live on the Fox broadcast.
Somewhere between losing tickets and merch drops — yes, there is now a 48-hour Tea By the Track hat — Portnoy went full old-man-yells-at-cloud about his racing origin story. The verdict on the long-shuttered Boston track where he spent a million hours of his life: ''Suffolk Downs was unequivocally a dump.'' Total dump. That is the whole Belmont day in one tweet — a guy who grew up in the worst racetrack in America now hosting the biggest one on TV, still chasing the same exacta.