Someone had to win the 149th running of the Belmont Stakes, and as the field of 11 mostly maligned horses edged into the starting gate, the odds board was a patchwork of indecision, with no clear favorites and few bettors backing up their convictions with cold, hard cash.

The “Test of the Champion,” as the Belmont is known, was anything but this time. The Kentucky Derby winner, Always Dreaming, was in no shape to race after finishing a disappointing eighth in the Preakness Stakes. The colt that had banished him, Cloud Computing, was rested by his owners and pointed toward rich races at the end of the summer like the Haskell Invitational and the Travers Stakes.

So this grand old racetrack on Long Island, the site of Triple Crown coronations for immortal horses like Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed and, most recently, American Pharoah, was more or less an audition stage for a bunch of unproven 3-year-olds, any one of whom might evolve into a future powerhouse.

Let’s not keep anyone in suspense — a colt named Tapwrit passed the favorite, Irish War Cry, down the stretch and legged out a two-length victory in the mile-and-a-half marathon in a final time of 2 minutes 30.02 seconds. He paid a handsome $12.60 for a $2 bet, and rewarded his owners, a partnership of Bridlewood Farm, Eclipse Thoroughbred and Robert LaPenta, a first-place check worth $800,000. Not a bad payday at all, but a little short of the $1.2 million that Tapwrit, the son of Tapit, had fetched at auction as a yearling.