by William Nack
Traditionally, Saratoga is where the finest racing stables in America have first tried their untested two-year-olds. The $75,000-added Hopeful, the last stakes race run at Saratoga, is the meeting’s crowning touch, an important event that has been won by many horses who went on to greater fame—Man o’ War, Whirlaway, Battlefield, Native Dancer, Nashua, Hail to Reason, and Buckpasser. Several horses who finished second in the Hopeful later made major contributions to the American stud—including Fair Play, the sire of Man o’ War, the great Bull Lea, and Tom Fool, sire of Buckpasser—as have colts who finished third, such as Discovery, Turn-to, and Sir Gaylord.
Everyone congregated under the tree—the fans, the horsemen, the owners, and the simply curious—waiting to see the colt everyone was talking about. Penny was there, and so were Ogden Phipps and his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, a friendly bear of a man with a pug nose and freckles and a love of speed: power boats and running horses. Ogden Mills Phipps had come to see the full brother to The Bride, the filly his family picked when they won the toss but lost the horse—a good-looking filly with no speed.
More than a hundred people crowded in a circle around the tree when Secretariat was led across the walking ring and through the crowd. His coat was dappling in the sun—a sign of radiant health—and as he strode to the walking ring around the tree there were cameras clicking and choruses of “ooohhhs” and “ahhhhhhs,” as at the unveiling of a statue.
Turcotte thought the race was a cinch for Secretariat. Conditions in the race favored the colt. Linda’s Chief was not in the field, and Secretariat was coming off a sharp race and a fast work. The distance was 110 yards farther than the Sanford, and Turcotte felt the extra yards would simply give the colt that much more time to catch the leaders. For Turcotte the Hopeful became more than an ordinary race. It had an emotional sweep and cadence to it, becoming a 1:16 1/5 dash in which his feelings swept from near panic to desperation to a sense of awe.
Secretariat broke from the gate with the field, emerging with the others as the gate popped open, but immediately Turcotte felt him floundering as he tried to pick up speed.
“He was trying to run, trying to get with it and get in his best stride, but he just couldn’t.”
He fell back to last as Sunny South scooted to the lead, with Brandford Court a neck behind in second on the outside, Step Nicely tucked away in third, Trevose nearby with River of Fire, and Flight to Glory tracking them. They strung out racing for the turn, and the red horse bounded along in last.
Turcotte never rushed him a step. He thought the colt was doing his best but having problems getting all the parts to mesh. He was still an overgrown kid. Turcotte sat tight and clucked to him, trying to give him encouragement. As they charged the turn, running on top of it past the five-eighths pole, Turcotte sensed the colt was still having problems and he started thinking that he had to move soon. He was riding a prohibitive favorite, and already the turn was looming up ahead.
“I wasn’t panicky, but I was thinking, ‘My God, pick it up! Will ya?’ ”
Then, as the nine horses raced through the opening quarter mile, Sunny South dragging them through it in 0:22 4/5, Turcotte suddenly felt the colt pulling himself together, taking hold of the bit.
So he coaxed Secretariat, chirping to him, cajoled him, tapping his shoulder with the stick, and asked him for more speed, pumping him and urging him on. They went to the half-mile pole. The crowd stirred as Sunny South raced in front on the turn and track announcer Dave Johnson called out loudly over the speakers: “Secretariat is the trailer as they pass the half-mile pole!”
Then the move began. It was a powerful move, dramatic and compelling to see, devastating in the scope of its execution. In an instant the crowd was on its feet. Driving past the half-mile pole—two, three, perhaps four bounds past it—Secretariat suddenly leveled out under Turcotte, who sensed a lowering of the mass, as if the colt had found the gear, and took off as no two-year-old had ever done under Turcotte before. The jockey steered him to the outside and sat quietly feeling the surge.
Secretariat moved to the field with a rush, accelerating outside as they made the bend, without urging from Turcotte, bounding along as if independent of whatever momentum the race possessed, independent of its pace and tempo, independent of the shifting, slow-motion struggles unfolding within it, the small battles for position and advantage. But Secretariat was not responding to any force the race was generating, but rather moving as though he’d evolved his own kinetic field beyond it, and Turcotte would later recall sitting quietly and feeling awed.
From the clubhouse, where Vanderbilt and Laurin fastened their binoculars on him, Secretariat emerged for the first time as a spectacle in the sport, overpowering in his manner of performance. He ran to his horses in bunches and singly, first to Torsion and then to Flight to Glory and then to River of Fire as he headed around the bend for the three-eighths pole, the blue and white blocks disappearing as he swept past them on the outside, reappearing again in the gaps between them, disappearing again behind Trevose and Step Nicely. Measuring Stop the Music and Brandford Court, he raced into view again, but quickly disappeared behind them. He was sprinting his quarter mile in less than 0:22, as he charged to the throat of Sunny South, who was racing on the lead.
It was executed that quickly, startling veteran horsemen by the brilliance of it and leaving Lucien Laurin watching in disbelief.
The red horse raced from last to first over about 290 yards of ground, not passing a single horse until he’d raced well past the half-mile pole. He was already moving to the lead nearing the five-sixteenths pole. It was a spectacular sweep.
He turned for home two lengths in front, and the rest was simply a mopping up. He widened on Flight to Glory through the lane, winning by five and missing Bold Lad’s track mark by three-fifths of a second.
As Secretariat’s audacity in the Sanford first drew serious attention to him, his run in the Hopeful made him the most exciting racehorse in New York. He had come to Saratoga the winner only of a maiden race at Aqueduct. He promptly won three races in twenty-seven days and returned to Long Island the leading two-year-old in America, the heir apparent to Riva Ridge. The Sanford and the Hopeful turned everything around. No one was saying now that the Meadow Stable could not do it a second year in succession.
Among the believers was Penny Tweedy, convinced by witnessing the Hopeful Stakes that the Meadow Stable owned its second two-year-old champion in succession. “I was perfectly sure that, barring accident, this horse was going on and we were going to have another year like we had last year.”
It was then she began to hope that her father—oblivious to life around him in the hospital, unaware of the existence of Secretariat—would live to the end of the year. “All along I had been praying that he would die because his life had become meaningless. There was nothing left of the man I knew except a shell, a 90-pound shell, and once he could no longer speak there was less and less left.” Chris Chenery had been in New Rochelle Hospital for four and a half years, and during that time he had deteriorated from a 210-pound man to a childlike invalid, bedridden and helpless.
Then suddenly, with the rise of Secretariat, Chenery’s life acquired a new meaning. If he had died in September, the heavy inheritance tax imposed on the estate would have forced the heirs to syndicate Secretariat immediately. Penny believed there would have been irresistible pressure on her to syndicate the horse, since he was a son of the prepotent Bold Ruler, whose sons were already proving exceptional sires. The selling of Secretariat would have been premature in September, the timing of it wrong.
Penny did not feel she could have asked a syndicate for the right to race the horse to the end of 1972 and then through 1973, the first year syndicate members would expect to breed mares to the horse. So she foresaw Secretariat breeding on the farm, not competing at the track, if her father died that autumn. Moreover, off the Sanford and the Hopeful Stakes, she thought the red horse was going to win the same string of rich two-year-o
ld races Riva Ridge had won in 1971—the Futurity, the Champagne Stakes, the Laurel Futurity, and the Garden State Stakes. This would give him the champion two-year-old honors of 1972, giving him a multimillion-dollar value as a potential sire on the bloodstock market. He could not have commanded such a price after the Hopeful Stakes.
She had not learned painlessly the lessons of selling horses at their maximum financial potential. Earlier in the autumn, at the Keeneland yearling sales, she had been offered $1,250,000 for Upper Case, the pretty-boy son of Round Table–Bold Experience. While Riva Ridge was working toward the Kentucky Derby, Upper Case actually developed into one of America’s leading three-year-olds. He won the $100,000 Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park in Florida, then came back and won the prestigious $100,000 Wood Memorial at Aqueduct. Penny turned down the offer and she soon regretted it. Upper Case tailed off on the racetrack; he seemed to lose interest in his work. When he started losing, his value plummeted. “We finally sold him for $750,000, and very gratefully,” Penny said. “I have been playing two games: one is to get the horses to win and the other is to recognize their peak and sell them at their peak.” The trick is to figure out when horses are performing at optimal potential on the racetrack and, if the wish is to sell, to sell then. Secretariat was not yet for sale.
“So I was really just praying in my heart that Dad would last through December. Then we could syndicate Secretariat with the right to race him through 1973; I just didn’t think the chances of being allowed to race him a full year would be any good if Dad died in the fall. They would have sent him to the breeding shed that spring. I wanted him to get to his three-year-old year so I could say, ‘He hasn’t broken down—he’s at the peak of his powers, his full potential—and we shouldn’t retire him now.’ I wanted maximum potential financially from Secretariat because it would enable us to keep the farm and not have to sell the broodmares when Dad died.”
Chris Chenery lived through the fall of 1972, and through the rich series of two-year-old races—from the $144,200 Futurity through the $298,665 Garden State Stakes—the red horse built upon his record in the Sanford and the Hopeful, embellishing it as the distances grew longer. As a son of Bold Ruler, of course, his stamina would always be suspect, and so would his soundness. In fact later, whenever Secretariat first walked or jogged of mornings on the racetrack, he had a kind of crabbed, stiff way of moving that made horsemen wince when they saw him, reminding them of his rheumatic sire, who walked like an elderly man until he limbered up at the barn. Rumors of unsoundness would follow the red horse for months, none of them substantiated. The colt gave no indication of soreness in the way he raced that autumn through the last four races.
Groom Mordecai Williams was leaning against the reins and almost walking on his heels, holding fast to Secretariat, as they rose from the underground tunnel at Belmont Park between the stables and the paddock, and together went to the Futurity.
If trainer Johnny Campo and the others had a chance to beat Secretariat that fall, as it would turn out in the end, the chance was in the Futurity. Lucien had Turcotte work the colt seven-eighths in 1:24 following the Hopeful Stakes, then came back later for a five-furlong blowout in company with Gold Bag, jockey Jorge Velasquez aboard. As the two men took the youngsters to the racetrack, Lucien told them to let the colts ramble.
“Let him run as fast as he can without abusing him,” Lucien told Turcotte. “Don’t kill him.”
Velasquez had a long lead as he broke Gold Bag past the five-eighths pole, and Turcotte let the red horse run to catch him. Turning into the stretch, having cut the lead to five lengths behind Gold Bag, Turcotte lashed Secretariat twice right-handed, and the colt plunged down the straight. He caught Gold Bag at the sixteenth pole and opened six by the time they hit the wire, running the five-eighths in 0:58, the fastest workout of the day at that distance. It was a sensational move.
“Ronnie, you worked too fast,” Lucien scolded. “He’s only a baby and I think you asked too much of him.”
On Saturday it almost made the difference. A crowd of 34,248 people made the colt the odds-on favorite at $0.20 to $1.00, and he ran to pattern at the start. Swift Courier went to the lead down the backside, Secretariat dropping back to sixth. He was not running well. The racetrack was clodding under horses’ hooves, and as he trailed them down the backstretch, hard clods flew up and struck him in the face, causing him to climb with his front legs, rather than reach out with them. So Turcotte swung him to the outside, and Secretariat leveled out, racing the opening quarter in 0:23 4/5, six lengths behind Swift Courier in 0:22 3/5. Around the far turn, picking up speed and staying outside, Secretariat moved closer to the pace, passing Gallant Knave as they banked for home. He was rushing the second quarter in 0:22 3/5, and as Swift Courier turned for home, the colt was looping the field and losing ground. Sweeping into the stretch, Secretariat passed Stop the Music and Crimson Falcon. Then he raced to Whatabreeze and Swift Courier, and coming to the eighth pole, in midstretch, he drove past them and drew out by two. Laffit Pincay, Jr., on Stop the Music, had set out after him, and in the closing seconds he gained some ground. Seeing Pincay, Turcotte went to the whip.
Secretariat won it by one and three-quarters lengths, Stop the Music finishing second.
Penny met the red horse at the top of Victory Lane, just as Mrs. Phipps had met Bold Ruler after his Futurity victory sixteen years before.
The crowd, pressed against the iron fencing, clapped and whistled over flower boxes as Secretariat walked down the path toward the winner’s circle. He moved docilely along it, unruffled by the gathering commotion of the moment, by the people waving and clustering around him. Turning his head, he dabbed his nose on Penny’s blue and brown print dress, leaving a speck of mud on it. Penny wiped it off.
“He had to lose so much ground on the turn!” she said to Turcotte.
Across the jockeys’ room, Turcotte sat on the bench in front of his locker, betraying none of his concern about the race, answering questions in a cool, curt way. It had not gone as well as he had expected. Secretariat had tired at the end of the race, and that plainly worried Turcotte, raising questions in his mind whether the colt would go a mile, whether he might be a stretch-running sprinter: when horses win with bursts of late speed, passing horses around the turn and through the stretch, they create the sometimes mistaken impression that the longer the distances, the better they will perform. That is not necessarily so. There are stretch-running sprinters who would not have the stamina to run farther than six furlongs.
Turcotte had to hustle him in midstretch, hit him left-handed. But the colt had not won off, as he had in the Hopeful. Stop the Music was gaining on him. “I felt like he might hang going a mile and a half,” Ron said. “The race left me in doubt about his going a mile.”
Tired or not, Secretariat had won his fifth straight race, running just two-fifths behind the track record of 1:16 flat, and had earned the largest purse in his life, $82,320. Up in the trustees’ room after the race, Penny called her father’s room at New Rochelle Hospital. She spoke briefly to Chenery’s nurse.
“We won!” Penny said, hearing the nurse’s voice.
“Yes. We know.” She said she believed Chenery understood.
Penny said, “This is a birthday present for Dad and I hope he understands. Tell him happy birthday.”
Chenery was eighty-six that day.
For others close to Secretariat, though, this was not a day for toasts and celebrations.
The doctors believed at first that Bull Hancock had pleurisy. He became ill on the hunting trip to Scotland, after leaving Saratoga, and they flew him home to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. On August 28—opening day at Belmont Park—he underwent surgery. They found cancer. He died seventeen days later, on September 14.
Graveside services for Bull were held at four-thirty on Saturday afternoon, at about the same time Lucien was saddling Secretariat in New York for the Futurity—and among the family of mourners in Paris Cemetery were B
ull’s sons, Arthur III, an independent breeder with a farm down the road from Claiborne, and twenty-three-year-old Seth, who would now assume the business of running the empire of Claiborne Farm, as Bull had assumed it from his father, and his father had assumed it before him.
Chapter 16
By late afternoon of October 14, the one hundred first running of the Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park, bettors gathered in search of the horse that could beat Secretariat going a flat mile. Life in the nearby suburbs may be as predictable as the appearance of the yellow school bus at eight o’clock in the morning, but nothing is odds-on in Long Island City.
The pattern had been set. Lucien gave Ron no instructions in the paddock as Secretariat and eleven other horses circled the walking ring. The tactic of giving Secretariat time to pull himself together had been working flawlessly, and neither man wanted to tinker with it. For the first time in his life, Secretariat would be running as an entry with Ed Whittaker’s Angle Light, also trained by Lucien, who won his first start by three-quarters of a length, his second by six. He finished fourth in the Cowdin Stakes, tiring, but now he was back again. Lucien’s opinion had changed since Saratoga: he no longer regarded Angle Light as Secretariat’s equal, and throughout that fall, Penny would remember, Lucien assured her that Angle Light had “cheap speed”—could not sustain his speed under pressure—while also warning her not to underestimate the horse. Since he trained both, according to the rules, they would have to run as a single betting interest. Together, they went off as 2–3 favorites.