Betting a 20-1 Longshot Bomb in the Belmont: David Papadopoulos

(Bloomberg) -- It took wunderkind racehorse trainer Chad Brown a decade to capture his first Triple Crown trophy. I’m betting his second one comes just three weeks later.

Is it a longshot? Yeah, it’s a longshot, especially because the horse he’s sending out in the Belmont Stakes on Saturday isn’t the same up-and-coming colt that won the Preakness Stakes last month.

That was Cloud Computing.

This is Twisted Tom.

And Tom, to be frank, has his problems. He’s slow -- on a speed-figure scale, he’s not even close to the top Belmont contenders -- and he’s never faced elite competition like this before. But he also has some things going for him: He’s won three races in a row, he’s training well and he’s drawn a favorable inside post position for the race. What’s more, that grind-it-out, slow-and-steady way he has about him is perfect for the marathon Belmont distance of 1 1/2 miles.

At expected odds of 20-1, I like the risk-reward equation.

I’m betting Tom to win and will also weave him into an exacta box with Tapwrit, a talented colt who finished a respectable sixth in the Kentucky Derby after a rough start. To try to further juice returns, I’ll pair Tom up in a Daily Double wager with a horse named Time Test in the race prior to the Belmont. Unlike Tom, there’s nothing slow about Time Test. He can flat-out run.

(David Papadopoulos, a managing editor at Bloomberg News, is a voter in the thoroughbred industry’s annual Eclipse Awards. He has been publishing his Triple Crown picks since 2012.)

To contact the reporter on this story: David Papadopoulos in New York at papadopoulos@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Reibstein at lreibstein@bloomberg.net.