Secretariat
Page 16
Breaking from the four hole, staying with the field in the first jump, Secretariat thrashed about as usual and immediately dropped to last. He had just one horse beaten as Angle Light swept Chuck Baltazar through an opening quarter mile in 0:22 4/5, then through a blazing half mile in 0:45 1/5. Angle Light was leading by two as he passed the half-mile pole at the turn, and Secretariat was running ninth behind Stop the Music under John (Gentleman John) Rotz. Secretariat raced along in 0:47, then just settled into the drumbeat of his stride. Ron kept him outside the horses once again, about fifteen feet off the rail, and he dashed past Zaca Spirit in several bounds. The colt was running his third quarter in 0:23 3/5, even losing ground, and it was sweeping him into the hunt midway at the turn. Angle Light chucked it on the bend, looking for a hole in the fence before the straight, and Puntilla made the lead with Linda’s Chief lapped on him in second. They ran as a team, as did Secretariat and Stop the Music turning for home. When Secretariat moved to Stop the Music on the turn, Rotz sent the little bay with him, not letting the red horse loose. Turcotte later said that Stop the Music drifted out on him, bumping him twice.
They moved to the lane as a team, head and head on the outside, turning for home with a quarter mile to go. The drive was on. Together, Secretariat on the outside and Stop the Music on his left, they moved to Linda’s Chief and Puntilla down the straight. Coming to the three-sixteenths pole, with about 350 yards to run, they were four abreast. It was an eyepopper.
Suddenly, Turcotte raised his right hand and lashed Secretariat once. A second later the red horse, who had been running on his right lead, switched to his left lead. He dropped to the left toward Stop the Music, bumping him and sending him into Linda’s Chief. Turcotte loosened his left line and snatched him sharply with his right, pulling him off the bay, who seemed to suck back at the buffeting, as if intimidated by it. Once Turcotte had Secretariat straight, he went to riding him again, and the colt pulled away as Turcotte rode him strongly to the wire. He won it in a drive by two, lengthening his lead through the final yards and running the mile in 1:35 flat, just two-fifths of a second slower than the stakes’ record set by Vitriolic, one of the Bold Rulers who failed to light up the sky as a three-year-old. Stop the Music, recovering from the contact, came on again and finished second. Moments after the horses crossed the line, the roar went up. On the tote board in the infield, the inquiry sign was flashing. The stewards called it, suspecting a foul, and quickly went down the elevator to their offices, ready to talk to jockeys and to see the film.
Turcotte went to see the stewards to explain his side of the race. Still in his blue and white silks, he stood before the stewards in their carpeted office complex and told them that Stop the Music started the contact sports on the turn for home.
“Stop the Music bumped me twice around the turn,” he told them. He further said that the colt switched leads near the three-sixteenths pole and came in on the Greentree Stable colt. “I might have bothered him some, but I grabbed my horse real quick. I hurt my horse more than his.”
“We’ll look at it,” said one steward.
The films do not show what, if any, interference the little bay might have caused on the turn. They do show that Secretariat swung into Stop the Music near the three-sixteenths pole, bumping and forcing him into Linda’s Chief, and that Turcotte hauled him off immediately.
The second roar from the crowd of 31,494 persons was louder than the first. Secretariat’s number, 1A, and Stop the Music’s number, 5, had been blinking off and on to show the order of their finish was under inquiry. If the lights stop blinking and the numbers stay lit, it means the order of finish remains as it was in the race; if the lights of the two numbers go dark, it means that the stewards have changed the official finish of the race. The lights went out. Turcotte sat stunned in the jockeys’ room wearing precisely the look of a man who had just lost 10 percent of an $87,900 purse, slowly shaking his head and staring in silence at the new order of finish, then the replay of the race on television. About twenty riders gathered in a circle around the set, looking and watching while Secretariat settled down at the turn and began his move.
The stewards placed Secretariat second, moving Stop the Music into first, and left behind not only hundreds of groaning favorite players—Secretariat would have paid $3.40 to win for a $2.00 bet—but the general belief that the best horse lost by Order of the Stewards. “I was surprised that the stewards were so strict with us for what seemed like a minor impediment,” Penny said. “Our horse had so clearly won.”
Nathaniel J. Hyland, the steward appointed by the Jockey Club, said simply that the stewards, when deliberating over an inquiry, do not speculate whether a horse might have won if a foul had not occurred. That Secretariat would have won (which was the consensus) was beside the point. The point was that Secretariat had committed an infraction, bumping a horse and bothering him, and evidence of that and that alone justified bringing his number down.
Despite the official order of finish, despite his sudden loss of $8700, Ron Turcotte was buoyed by the colt’s performance and enormously encouraged by it. “He ran his best race to date,” he said that afternoon while dressing to go home. “You never know until you try a mile, but after what I saw today—yes, he’ll go on in longer distances.” He knew he was not riding a stretch-running sprinter. The red horse, coming off his six furlongs in 1:10 3/5, zipped the last quarter mile in 0:24 2/5.
Through autumn, while Secretariat rose to dominate the nation’s two-year-olds and each race added more extravagantly to his reputation, Riva Ridge went on sliding toward Laurel, Maryland, last stop before The Meadow and a winter’s rest. On September 20, seven weeks after finishing fourth in the Monmouth Handicap, Riva Ridge hooked a buzz saw in the 1971 Kentucky Derby winner, Canonero II, in the Stymie Handicap at Belmont Park. Riva Ridge set a sizzling pace through most of the mile and an eighth, frying himself to a golden brown by the eighth pole, and Canonero ran off to win by five and tie the world’s record of 1:46 1/5 for the distance. Riva Ridge, carrying thirteen pounds more than Canonero, finished second. Ten days later, he finished fourth in the mile-and-a-half Woodward Stakes, more than six lengths behind his archrival Key to the Mint.
Just six months ago he had been the reigning champion of his generation in Florida, the best three-year-old in America, the luminary of shed row. After the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes, and the Hollywood Derby, he was everyone’s three-year-old of the year, the leading contender for Horse of the Year. By September 20, he was just Riva Ridge—fourth, second, and fourth in his last three starts. He was a tired pug whose managers had found too many fights for him, and they did not let up. Lucien entered him in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at two miles. That was for October 28, the day of the rich Laurel Futurity at Laurel Race Course in Maryland, the first time Secretariat would run a mile and one-sixteenth.
Riva Ridge’s groom, Eddie Sweat, took Secretariat to Laurel within a week of the race. Sweat had been working for Lucien since the early 1950s, and he was Lucien’s most trusted groom, the one to whom he gave the most responsibility. Sweat not only mucked out stalls and groomed and fed his horses, he also drove Lucien’s red van, chauffeuring horses cross country. He delivered Secretariat to Laurel that fall. Charlie Davis, who regularly galloped Riva Ridge, also went with Secretariat to Laurel, replacing Gaffney, who couldn’t afford to leave his job as a mutuel clerk to exercise the colt. The move to Laurel divided the Meadow Team, as Penny came to call it. Lucien went to Maryland for the Futurity. Turcotte, given his choice, opted to ride Secretariat instead of Riva Ridge, applying his rule to stay with a two-year-old rather than an older horse. Henny Hoeffner stayed behind, to train the stable of horses in Lucien’s absence and to saddle Riva Ridge. Penny chose to stay in New York, too, and watch the old golden boy try to get the two miles of the cup.
Penny’s life had become a swirl of activity ever since Riva Ridge won the Flash, and the centrifugal force of it was pulling her away from home and drawing her closer
to the farm and horses, to her new career in racing. She had wanted a career in the sport, and first Riva Ridge and now Secretariat were demanding her time, thought, and presence. Her involvement in the racing stable had been gradual, not precipitate, so it only slowly altered her relationship with her husband. In late May 1971, she actually considered putting her career with the horses before the wishes of her husband when Roger Laurin had decided to quit and she wanted to be in New York to look for a new trainer. But that would have meant being away from home in Denver for their anniversary. She stopped short of asking him. “It would have precipitated a terrible fight, so I didn’t,” she recalled. “There is a subtle thing, a point at which I started saying I have to go to New York because of this or that and I can’t be with the family for such and such an occasion. Wives work around the demands of their husbands and children. I stopped doing that. I started saying, ‘What I have to do is important, too, and I will do it even if it means missing something.’ ”
When Riva Ridge was racing to the two-year-old championship in the fall of 1971, Penny said, she sat down with her husband one day and asked him whether he could tolerate her moving to New York for six months. The Chenery house in Pelham was empty—with her mother dead and her father hospitalized—so she would have a place to live. “I wanted to follow Riva’s career and try to organize the stable so there would be an orderly transition into the estate, and Jack sort of gave an equivocal answer: ‘Well, that might work, but what are John and I going to do out there?’ ” John was their youngest child, then ten.
Jack Tweedy found a job in New York, partly to accommodate her involvement in racing, and she joined him in Pelham in April 1972, just before Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby. They moved to a rented home in Cold Spring Harbor later that year, then into the house in Laurel Hollow on September 1, 1972, the week after Secretariat won the Hopeful.
With the rise of Secretariat, the intensity of Penny’s involvement naturally quickened. After years of raising four children and responding to the demands of that way of life, she was now asserting her independence, putting herself and her career first. “Once I stopped putting Jack first in terms of plans, I stopped putting him first emotionally,” she said. “And that has really been the cut-off point. The more involved I got with racing, the less room there was for him in my life.” The day of the Gold Cup conflicted with Parents Day at Saint Paul’s, where young John was going to prep school. “Jack went up alone and he was quite resentful that I wouldn’t go with him, and I said, ‘There will be other Parents Days but there won’t be other Gold Cups.’ ”
So Penny remained in New York, reading Lucien’s instructions on riding the horse to jockey Jorge Velasquez in the paddock. She smiled and read them softly to Jorge, the small white paper in her hand, and he listened like a graduate student in theology. The strategy didn’t work. Nothing would have worked by then. Riva Ridge stayed close to the pace and then tired, drifting back to nowhere, to third place, eighteen lengths behind Autobiography, three lengths behind archrival Key to the Mint, who would be named the three-year-old champion. So the fall of the bay and the rise of the red horse continued. Forty minutes earlier that afternoon at Laurel, Maryland, Secretariat ran the race of his young life.
He came to the Futurity light on his feet, up on his toes, just where Lucien put him when he sent him five-eighths in 1:00 flat in a workout at Laurel, a racetrack not as fast as Belmont Park. Five other colts, including Stop the Music and Angle Light, went to the post with him, and for the first time in his life he ran in the mud, over a sloppy surface. But nothing seemed to bother him, to discourage him or make any impression on him.
Secretariat went his own way again, just as he had in his other starts, trying to pick up speed out of the gate and falling back to last as the field made the first turn. Ron, sensing that the racing strip was less tiring on the outside, parked himself there and waited. Rocket Pocket, a horse with a quick turn of early foot, dashed to the lead and led past the opening quarter by three, running it in 0:22 4/5. He was not dragging it. Secretariat passed the pole in 0:25 2/5, thirteen lengths to the rear. The leader kept up the pressure through the half, racing it in 0:45 4/5, while Secretariat was just getting with it through a half in 0:47 4/5, his second quarter mile in 0:22 2/5, three full seconds faster than his first. He was beginning to roll. Turcotte could feel him pick it up and relax down the backstretch.
Leaving the backstretch and heading into the far turn, Ron let out a notch, chirping to the colt, and he closed ground quickly. His neck outstretched, still pounding heavy-headedly, his legs smashing at the slop, Secretariat banked around the turn for the leaders. Rocket Pocket was tiring through his third quarter in 0:25 3/5, and Secretariat was just three lengths behind him. They were turning into the stretch. Rocket Pocket quit suddenly. Stop the Music lay third coming to the lane, and Turcotte still had not let his red horse loose. He was a length astern of Stop the Music, who was closing toward the lead. Then Ron chirped to him, let out a notch of line, and felt the colt reach out, blowing past Rotz and Stop the Music with a tremendous rush. He opened one, then two lengths, then three through the lane, five as they reached the eighth pole. Turcotte had stopped clucking by then and was taking the colt in hand as the youngster stretched his lead to six lengths nearing the sixteenth pole, to seven passing it, and then to eight as he raced for the wire. It was his easiest victory so far, and Turcotte would believe later it was his finest performance as a two-year-old. The colt lagged far behind early, but Ron sensed he could have made the lead when he wanted to make it, no rush—untouched by the whip, winning easily in hand, Secretariat raced the mile and a sixteenth in 1:42 4/5, just a fifth off the Laurel track record, and won $83,395.
Riva Ridge ran progressively worse. He was shipped to Laurel for the $150,000 Washington, D.C., International Stakes on November 11, over Laurel’s soft turf course, so-called, at one and one-half miles. He went to the lead under Velasquez and promptly bobbled in a hole going into the backstretch, almost falling. But that only hastened what already appeared inevitable that afternoon. He finished sixth, some thirty-eight lengths behind Droll Role. Riva Ridge was returned to The Meadow not long after the Washington fiasco, earning a long rest but no titles that year, and kept from the races for six months.
Secretariat, in spite of the growth of a small splint on one foreleg—probably the effect of hard pounding on hard racetracks—was shipped off to Garden State for the $298,665 Garden State Stakes at a mile and a sixteenth. Splints, which can be painful, are small, round, bony growths that occur between the splint and cannon bones. They are not unusual in young horses, and Secretariat’s was extremely small, giving no one any special concern. The red horse appeared to have the race at his mercy, with $179,199 going to the winner, and the treatment could certainly wait for that, for when the colt began his long winter rest.
Not all went smoothly at Garden State Park. Lucien, at his best when forced to improvise, was at his best again. He put Ron’s brother, Rudy, on Secretariat for a three-quarter-mile workout. Lucien wanted the colt to run the last part of it, to finish out in about 1:15. He was nowhere close. Fearing Secretariat might work too fast, Rudy broke him off cautiously, taking a strong hold of him. Secretariat took himself back, almost to a gallop, and finished out the work about four seconds too slow and not nearly sharp enough.
Lucien arranged for Ron to be in Garden State to work the red horse seven-eighths of a mile just four days later. Thus Lucien improvised. Lucien had his champion walk two days, gallop two more, and on the Wednesday before the Saturday, he wound him up tighter and Secretariat woke up ticking on Saturday.
Angle Light joined Secretariat in a race for the third time that year, and the customers sent them off at 1–10 against four others. Both were ready. Angle Light had worked sharply for the race, actually beating Secretariat in their final half-mile drill, just as he had been doing, off and on, since the winter past. Rudy Turcotte was on him in the Garden State, and when the gates sprang open he let
the youngster breathe on the pacesetting Piamem from the outset.
The two ran head and head through a casual first quarter at 0:24 1/5, relaxing around the first turn. Ron Turcotte, meanwhile, was taking ahold of Secretariat through a galloping first-quarter in 0:26 1/5, trotting-horse time, when it dawned on him that he might have blown the race already. He thought he had taken Secretariat too far back behind too slow a pace, and began to hope he could gain on speed horses, like Angle Light, whose edges had not been dulled by a quick opener. Secretariat was ten lengths behind at the end of that trotting-horse quarter, but Ron was chirping and feeling him pick up speed through the second 440 yards. He dashed through it in 0:23, a move that left him eight lengths behind Angle Light, who was also accelerating his pace. Angle Light pressured Piamem as the two went the half in 0:47 2/5. The pace was realistic now. Holding the tempo, sustaining his speed, Secretariat moved past Step Nicely and Knightly Dawn down the backside.
Going into and around the turn, Secretariat never eased off, shaving the lead to seven lengths, then to six, five, four, and finally to three as he raced through the third quarter in 0:23 3/5. Running past a tiring Piamem, Secretariat was in pursuit of Angle Light. He closed ground on the Whittaker colt, passing Impecunious near the turn for home and setting out for him. Angle Light was leading by three at the turn. Ron, moving on the outside, cut into that lead quickly as they ran down the lane. He ranged alongside the bay.
Ronnie was on the outside, brother Rudy on the rail.
“All right, brother, I’ve got the other end here,” yelled Rudy. “I’ve got second.”
Ronnie went on with his horse.
Secretariat was in front by a length and a half with 220 yards to run, leaving Angle Light to slug it out for second with Step Nicely. The red horse won it finally by three and a half. Angle Light held on to second, worth $59,733 to Whittaker, in what was the sharpest race of his two-year-old year. So Penny worried about Angle Light, respected and feared him in the fall, while Lucien told her not to worry about him. Angle Light, after all, was cheap speed.