A patient ride through a crowded pace, then a neck margin at the wire: that was how Eddie Belmonte won the 1970 Preakness Stakes aboard Personality, becoming the first Puerto Rican jockey to capture a leg of the American Triple Crown, according to Past the Wire's account of the race. Belmonte died Wednesday, September 30, 2026, in Puerto Rico, according to Thoroughbred Daily News. He was 83.

The win carried weight beyond the winner's circle. Personality, a colt who also beat older horses that fall in the Woodward Stakes and was later named champion three-year-old of 1970, had carried Belmonte from mid-pack, past tiring leaders, to the lead in deep stretch. 'Fue él quien abrió las puertas,' the racing commentator Norman H. Davila said after Belmonte's death. 'Hubo otros puertorriqueños en los años 40 y 50, pero no eran, como diríamos, de las Grandes Ligas, de los que se establecieron y tuvieron reconocimiento en la hípica de mayor nivel en Estados Unidos,' he said, according to El Nuevo Dia. He was, in Davila's words, the one who opened the doors, the first Puerto Rican rider to reach what Davila called the major leagues of American racing.

Belmonte was born February 5, 1943, in Santurce, near the site of the old Hipodromo Las Casas in San Juan, the son of Francisco 'Paco' Belmonte, a jockey, trainer and horse owner who was later inducted into the Puerto Rican Horse Racing Hall of Fame himself. Two of Eddie's brothers also rode and trained on the island's circuit. He turned professional on February 3, 1961, finishing third in his first mount aboard Moslem Prince, then won his first race about a week later aboard San Carlos. He topped the Puerto Rico jockey standings in 1963 with 107 victories and again in 1964 with 95, a run that totaled 321 wins and 11 stakes races on the island before he ever set foot on a track in the United States.

He left for New York in the latter part of 1964, and two years later became the first Puerto Rico-born jockey to compete in the Kentucky Derby, finishing ninth aboard Exhibitionist for trainer Hirsch Jacobs. The Preakness followed four years after that. Over a career that reached more than 1,800 wins, Belmonte also took the Whitney Handicap, the Donn Handicap, the Metropolitan Handicap, the Santa Anita Handicap and the Wood Memorial Stakes, and in October 1973 he crossed the Atlantic to ride El Famoso in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, one of the few Puerto Rican riders of his era to compete in a European classic.

Belmonte retired from the saddle in 1976 and stayed close to the sport afterward as a riding instructor and jockeys' agent. His son, Willie Belmonte, followed him into racing, training more than 600 winners at tracks including Penn National, Philadelphia Park and Delaware Park before riding again himself in his final years, and died in 2004, according to the Daily Racing Form.

In 2018, Belmonte was inducted into the Salon de la Fama del Deporte de Rio Piedras, adding to an induction into the Puerto Rican Horse Racing Hall of Fame, the same institution that had already honored his father. When news of his death reached the sport, the Hall of Fame mourned him in a statement as 'a legendary figure in the history of Puerto Rican horse racing,' according to Thoroughbred Daily News.

What Belmonte left on the sport is countable in the riders who followed him from Puerto Rico into the major leagues of American racing: Angel 'Junior' Cordero Jr., who went on to his own Kentucky Derby victories, John Velazquez, Miguel Angel Rivera Vargas, and brothers Irad and Jose Luis Ortiz, all of them riding a path he first rode alone from San Juan to the winner's circles of New York. His name hangs in two island halls of fame alongside his father's, and the neck margin he forced out of Personality at Pimlico in 1970 remains the race Puerto Rican racing fans point to first when they explain how their riders reached the United States.