The Triple Crown,
race by race.

The three races in order

The distances change shape across the series: the Preakness is actually the shortest leg, then the Belmont traditionally stretches out to a mile and a half, the longest dirt trip most of these horses will ever attempt. The five-week window is the real filter. A Derby winner has to hold form through two more peak efforts while fresh horses, some of whom skipped a leg on purpose, wait in each field.

Traditional venues and temporary arrangements

The table above describes the series as it is normally run. Venues and distances can be changed temporarily when a host track is rebuilt, and recent editions have been affected by exactly that. The distinction matters: a temporary venue is a scheduling decision about one running, not a change to the race's identity.

Belmont Park has been scheduled to reopen in fall 2026, with the traditional mile-and-a-half trip expected to return with it. Because these arrangements have changed more than once, always confirm the current year's venue and distance against the official race sites rather than assuming the traditional setup applies.

Every Triple Crown winner

Thirteen horses have swept the series. The list below matches the official winners list published by Churchill Downs on the Kentucky Derby site, which identifies thirteen winners of the American Triple Crown.

The gaps tell the story: eight winners in the series' first 30 years, then a 25-year wait for Secretariat, a 37-year wait after Affirmed, and only two sweeps since. No horse has won the Triple Crown since Justify in 2018.

Omaha, 1935

Omaha was the third American Triple Crown winner. The National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame records him as a son of Gallant Fox, the 1930 Triple Crown winner, bred and owned by William Woodward Sr.'s Belair Stud and trained by James "Sunny Jim" Fitzsimmons. Churchill Downs also identifies Gallant Fox as the only Triple Crown champion to sire another Triple Crown champion, making the Gallant Fox and Omaha pairing unique on the winners list.

American Pharoah, 2015

American Pharoah was the twelfth Triple Crown winner and the one who ended the longest drought in the series' history, the 37 years since Affirmed in 1978. He then won that year's Breeders' Cup Classic at Keeneland, which Breeders' Cup's own coverage headlined as landing the "Grand Slam." Justify followed three years later, in 2018, and remains the most recent winner.

What the "Grand Slam" means in racing

The Grand Slam is an informal label, not an official fourth leg of the Triple Crown. It is applied when a horse adds the Breeders' Cup Classic to a Triple Crown sweep in the same year. Breeders' Cup itself used the phrase when American Pharoah won the 2015 Classic after sweeping that year's Triple Crown.

Two cautions are worth carrying. The phrase "Grand Slam" is also used in racing for something else entirely: it is the name of a multi-race wager, and NYRA lists a Grand Slam among the bet types in its published takeout schedule. Check what a given source means before assuming it refers to the Triple Crown plus the Classic. And because the Classic is run in the autumn against older horses at a rotating host track, it is a genuinely different test from the three spring classics rather than a fourth leg of the same series.

Why the sweep always happens in one calendar year

All three legs are restricted to three-year-olds, and they are run within about five weeks of one another in May and early June. A horse is a three-year-old for exactly one season, so there is no mechanism by which the three wins could be assembled across different years. That is what people are pointing at when they call it a calendar-year Triple Crown: in American Thoroughbred racing the qualifier is redundant, because a sweep cannot happen any other way.

The phrase exists mainly because "Triple Crown" is used loosely elsewhere, in other sports and in other racing series that carry their own conditions and are not limited to a single crop. If a source describes a Triple Crown that was won over more than one season, it is describing a different series, not this one.

See also: how graded stakes earn their grades · the Kentucky Oaks, the filly classic of Derby week