Queen's Plate

Queen's Plate

Restricted race
Norcliffe, painted by Bob Demuyser (1920-2003)
Location	Woodbine Racetrack Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Inaugurated	1860
Race type	Thoroughbred
Website	woodbineentertainment.com/queensplate
Race information
Distance	1 1⁄4 miles (10 furlongs)
Surface	Tapeta
Track	Left-handed
Qualification	3-year-old Canadian-bred
Weight	Colt/Gelding: 126 lbs (57.2 kg) Filly: 121 lbs. (54.9 kg)
Purse	CDN$1 million

The Queen's Plate is Canada's oldest thoroughbred horse race, having been founded in 1860. It is also the oldest continuously run race in North America. It is run at a distance of  1 ¹⁄₄ miles for a maximum of 17 three-year-old thoroughbred horses foaled in Canada. The race takes place each summer, in June or July, at Woodbine Racetrack, Etobicoke, Ontario, and is the first race in the Canadian Triple Crown.

Initiated in 1859 by the then president of the Toronto Turf Club, Sir Casimir Gzowski, the Queen's Plate was inaugurated on June 27, 1860, at the Carleton racetrack in Toronto, Ontario, with the prize of 50 guineas awarded by Queen Victoria. In 1902, the year after Victoria's death, the race became the King's Plate, after her successor, Edward VII. It became the Queen's Plate again when Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952.

Woodbine Racetrack hosted the race in 1876 and 1881 and then continuously from 1883 to 1955. The Queen's Plate has been running at Woodbine since 1956.

The record time for the race since 1957, the year in which the track was set at its current length of  1 ¹⁄₄ miles, is 2:01 4/5, set by Kinghaven Farms Izvestia in 1990.

Horses owned by Windfields Farm have won the Queen's Plate eleven times, but the most successful was the stable owned by Joseph E. Seagram, a prominent distiller from Waterloo, Ontario. Seagram's stable won it on twenty occasions between 1891 and 1935 including eight times in a row between 1891 and 1898, and ten times in eleven years from 1891 to 1901.