Secretariat

by William Nack

  Venezia asked the roan for more speed, and he responded at the bend, edging up toward Secretariat as they made the turn and set off down the lane. He could feel Champagne Charlie close the gap. He reached, asking for more. The roan responded again, shaving the margin to a length and a half, then to a length. Turcotte, at first unaware as Champagne Charlie came to him, suddenly heard the immediacy of the crowd—a reboant roar that grew in intensity as Champagne Charlie came to Secretariat.

  “I could hear the crowd and I thought the stands were coming down.”

  They were passing the three-sixteenths pole now, with 330 yards to go, and announcer Dave Johnson’s voice boomed out: “Secretariat now in front by a length and a quarter. Champagne Charlie on the outside up to challenge. Down the stretch they come! Secretariat on the rail. Champagne Charlie on the outside.”

  Turcotte, hearing the crowd and aware that something was unfolding behind him—something of an alarming nature—glanced to his right. He could hardly believe it, after that pace he had been setting with the red horse.

  By now, as the two raced for the eighth pole, Secretariat had had the breather he needed, and he had finally relaxed, easing off between the quarter pole and the three-sixteenths pole. “I still thought I had that closing run,” said Turcotte. “When Champagne Charlie came to me at the three-sixteenths pole, I set my horse down again, and I could feel Secretariat start to pick up the momentum again.”

  The roan never got his nose to the front, though the crowd was frantic as he edged to a neck away. Turcotte struck Secretariat twice, deep in the stretch, and the red horse moved away again. In the last 200 yards he rushed off to win by three.

  Secretariat raced the mile in 1:33 2/5, tying the track mark set by an older horse five years before, and up in the stands there was another sustained breath of relief following that long drive through the lane, as there had been after the Bay Shore. Laurin was almost as excited as he was after that race. “I thought he was beat at the three-sixteenths pole. I almost had a heart attack.”

  Chapter 22

  All seemed within their grasp after the Gotham. Secretariat appeared virtually invincible, emerging without a peer among the three-year-olds, bounding along as if inexorably destined to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes. Historically, all this was in the harshest defiance of the odds. Only eight horses had ever won the Triple Crown, and never in history had the same team of owner-breeder-trainer-jockey won consecutive runnings of the Kentucky Derby, much less all three. Never had a son of Bold Ruler won any of the three, so star-crossed were the sire’s progeny for the three-year-old spring classics. Yet never had a two-year-old son of Bold Ruler come to his three-year-old year with such speed and promise.

  For Laurin, Turcotte, and Penny Tweedy, the press was on to win the second Kentucky Derby, to take another crack at the Preakness Stakes, and to try to win the Belmont the second year in a row. Following the Gotham they radiated confidence, swelling with hope. Penny’s feelings of pessimism about Secretariat had dissolved almost entirely since the Bay Shore Stakes. The race had convinced her that the colt had experienced safe passage through the transition period over winter, and it set her to thinking that she had a shot to win the Derby again in 1973. The Gotham simply reinforced that notion in her mind, filling her with optimism. The colt was running heavy-headedly, battering at the ground, but not so much as he had at the age of two. He was giving signs that he was learning to run, to carry himself more smoothly. Turcotte felt a change between the Bay Shore and the Gotham stakes—a greater airiness in stride. The colt had done everything asked of him and had done it well. He had blown by horses on the outside. He had rushed past them on the rail in the Gotham. He had busted between horses. He had come from behind and had gone to the lead. He had run over fast and sloppy racetracks. He relished turns—the sharper the better—and worked willingly in the morning. He had no limiting flaws, at least none that had surfaced yet.

  After the Gotham, Laurin turned and aimed him for the final prep race before the Kentucky Derby, the $100,000-added Wood Memorial, one mile and an eighth at Aqueduct on April 21. To that race the colt brought a lengthening list of nicknames—Superhorse, Big Red, Big Red II, Red, the Big Red Machine, the Red Horse, and Super Red. He was hailed already as the ninth Triple Crown winner, the peer of Man o’ War, and the greatest heir of the greatest sire in American history.

  But at least one major question had arisen in the last several weeks, one major threat to Secretariat’s dominance of the spring classics. There were no outstanding three-year-olds tracking the red horse through Florida, as Arcaro had said, and there was nothing of critical note training in either Louisiana or Kentucky. But out west in California, a big horse had emerged in full scale, growing up and filling out that winter in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains at Santa Anita Park. He was Sham, and he had classic dimensions to him.

  Sham had become one of America’s most accomplished three-year-olds since Pancho Martin started training him at Santa Anita that winter, just weeks after his patron, construction magnate Sigmund Sommer, paid $200,000 for him at the Bull Hancock dispersal sale at Belmont Park. He had won that first start for them in December at Aqueduct, breaking his maiden, and had come back New Year’s Day at Santa Anita and won that allowance race by fifteen.

  “This is my Derby horse,” said jockey Laffit Pincay, Jr.

  Pancho shipped Sham across the Rockies following the Santa Anita Derby, bringing him to Long Island and a stall in the Sommer barn at Belmont Park, at the opposite end of the stable area from Secretariat. It was a fighting move—a move that said that Secretariat’s reign as champion of his generation had endured too long, that vowed Sham would go out of his way to meet him on his own turf.

  Proud, defiant, angry, and confident, Martin came looking for a scrap, for the chance to send his Sham against the red horse. The Kentucky Derby could wait.

  He would battle him first in the Wood.

  Pancho had deviated from the traditional course: other Santa Anita Derby winners—Swaps, Lucky Debonair, and Majestic Prince—went directly to Kentucky from California, doing their final tuning up at Churchill Downs or Keeneland. Now Martin was gearing up for the race at Aqueduct. “The Wood is the way I wanted to go, that’s all,” Martin said one day at the barn. Trainers, like fight managers, often speak for their horses in the first person.

  While Martin was grabbing hold of the bit on his way to Kentucky via Aqueduct, it was not unanimous in the Sommer camp that the colt should even go to Churchill Downs. When Sommer saw Sham in the Santa Anita Derby, his thoughts turned to Kentucky. He had never run in a Derby.

  Martin had never even been to Churchill Downs, much less had a horse in the Derby, and the challenge of winning it and beating the red horse began to consume him. The two men decided that Sham would run in the ninety-ninth Kentucky Derby. But they had to overrule Viola Sommer, Sigmund’s pleasant, cherubic, unobtrusive wife, who shared her husband’s interest in the racing stable and had definite ideas of her own concerning the Kentucky Derby.

  Viola Sommer thought there were too many unqualified horses causing too much traffic in the Derby and that a good horse could get hurt in it too easily. The Kentucky Derby, in fact, was known for its large fields and the unqualified horses entered in it by owners willing to pay the $4100 in entry fees for the privilege of saying they had a horse compete in it. Martin believed Sham could win, but that, to Viola, was beside the point. Even if Sham were better than Secretariat, that didn’t justify risking injury to their horse.

  But the plans were laid, against her wishes, to ship the bay colt to Kentucky following the Wood.

  Martin and Sommer had been together for eight years. Martin had a reputation as a brilliant conditioner, a peer of the inimitable Allen Jerkens and Hirsch Jacobs, and Sommer, a self-made construction millionaire, had strong ambitions. Sommer sought out Martin after Martin claimed a horse from him, won several races with the horse at a higher claiming value, and then lost
him in a claiming race himself, though not before making a large profit for the owner. He hired Martin to train for him exclusively.

  By 1971, Sigmund Sommer was America’s leading owner in money won, the horses owned by him winning a world’s record $1,523,508 in prize money. Sommer broke his own record in 1972: his horses won $1,605,896. He owned a high-class operation, with Martin orchestrating the stable operations like a major-general, buying and selling horses at the races. They lost a number of exceptional horses, however, to illnesses and accidents. Sommer’s Autobiography, voted the leading handicap horse in America in 1972, broke a leg at Santa Anita and was destroyed. Dust the Plate, a promising two-year-old, broke a leg that summer past and had to be destroyed. Stakes-winning Hitchcock collapsed and died one morning of a heart attack. While being loaded on a plane bound for Europe, stakes-winning Never Bow fell from the loading ramp and broke his neck.

  Autobiography died in March, while Sham was emerging as the leading three-year-old in California, and the death left Martin and Sommer crushed. In that emptiness rose Sham, a rangy, elegant-looking bay horse with a leggy leanness to him and a dappling coat. Pancho soon came to regard Sham as the best horse he’d ever trained, better than Autobiography, and toward him became as solicitous as a father toward his gifted son. There was honor involved in all this, too—and pride and faith. All these needed defending during battle. As it turned out, Martin would have a better chance to win the Wood than he ever imagined then, for events in mid-April began conspiring to bring the race within his reach and shape the course of things for weeks to come.

  Laurin eased off Secretariat’s training following such a fast mile in the Gotham. He sent him out an easy half mile in 0:49 on April 13. Then he said, “I’ll work him once again and then try to catch Sham.” On April 17, he boosted Turcotte aboard the red horse for that second work, a one-mile breeze around the main track at Belmont Park. Laurin told Turcotte to let the colt run the mile in about 1:38, two seconds slower than twelving it. Turcotte, after warming him up through the stretch, took Secretariat to the mile pole past the clocker’s shed and got ready to break him off. The colt grew anxious. Ahead of him, at once, Turcotte saw a loose horse galloping toward him, clockwise. So he waited. The loose horse came charging past him and up the homestretch, reins flapping and riderless, going the wrong way. Secretariat was getting edgy as Turcotte waited. Then he lost sight of the loose horse, and decided to send the colt on his way.

  Turcotte picked up speed and galloped toward the mile pole, then sat down on Secretariat and took off around the turn and into the long Belmont backstretch, all the while letting the colt run and watching ahead for the loose horse. Down the backside and around the turn Turcotte watched for trouble. The fractions were agonizingly slow: 0:13 1/5, 0:26 1/5, 0:52 for the half, 1:17 4/5 for the three-quarters. “He’s thirteening it pretty good,” Laurin said, grimly.

  The red horse accelerated through the final quarter in 0:24 2/5, finishing out the mile in 1:42 2/5, about five seconds slower than Laurin had wanted him to go. It was a dismal move, the slowest and least impressive of all Secretariat’s workouts.

  But Laurin was a master at last-minute improvisation, and what he planned was a quick blowout to bring the colt to his toes.

  Sham, meanwhile, had his second sharp workout since arriving in New York. Martin sent him a mile in 1:37 2/5 on April 12, and five days later wound the watch with a sizzling five-eighths in 0:58, the fastest move of the day. It may have been too fast.

  Nor were Sham and Secretariat the only runners aiming for the Wood to appear on the racetrack that morning. Laurin sent Edwin Whittaker’s Angle Light a mile in 1:42 for his final Wood Memorial prep. It is a common and legal practice for trainers to run two horses of different owners in the same race. Angle Light was getting sharp. The same day Sham worked his mile, Angle Light worked a brisk six furlongs in 1:11 2/5. Meanwhile, Laurin was still assuring Penny that there was nothing to worry about with Angle Light, as he had assured her the last fall; yet she remained concerned about him, seeing him as a real threat to Secretariat.

  Angle Light was the best horse Whittaker had ever owned. Whittaker had bought him for only $15,500 at the 1971 Keeneland summer sales, and he’d already won $89,006 as a two-year-old, and had finished second in the Garden State to the Horse of the Year. That winter, while Secretariat was idle, Whittaker nearly won the $100,000-added Flamingo Stakes at one and an eighth miles with him. The colt just missed for all the money, finishing a neck behind Our Native in third. Whittaker’s enthusiasm grew. After Angle Light raced to a ten-length victory at Aqueduct on March 21, according to The New York Times, Whittaker said, “This colt is going to the Kentucky Derby with Secretariat because they’re both trained by Lucien Laurin. As to who will win, I can’t say, but they’ll run one-two.” Laurin thought the colt would run sharply in the Wood, and he also believed Sham’s long journey from California might adversely affect him.

  The problems began sometime before the Wood Memorial, perhaps even before the slow mile workout. Jimmy Gaffney jumped on Secretariat on Thursday morning, two days before the Wood, and took him to the track to gallop him. The horse wasn’t acting himself. Gaffney started to gallop him and sensed there was something wrong. He went a mile and a half open gallop and had to kick the colt a little bit to do it.

  This puzzled Gaffney because Secretariat was a horse who worked so willingly in the morning. When he brought the colt back to the barn he told Sweat about it.

  The next day was even more alarming to Gaffney. On Friday, Hoeffner told Gaffney to gallop the red horse a “two-minute lick”—that is, a mile in two minutes, which is not a flat-out run but is faster than a normal gallop. Gaffney took him to the track, and again he had to kick the colt to keep him going. Worse, when he brought Secretariat back to the barn, the colt was blowing—a sign of distress fatigue. After Turcotte brought Secretariat back to the barn following the slow mile on Tuesday, the colt was blowing and his nostrils were flared.

  Gaffney never told Laurin of the need to kick the red horse. Lucien’s father-in-law had died the week of the Wood, and Gaffney didn’t want to upset him further. He was under more strain than usual by the close of the week. He had two horses coming to the Wood Memorial, the final Derby prep race, and there was a death in the family. In the confusion of those final days, things weren’t meshing at Barn 5, and whatever plans there were to give the colt a blowout never materialized. The source of the problem remained hidden and unknown until the morning of the Wood Memorial, concealed under Secretariat’s upper lip, just to the right of center.

  Dr. Manuel A. Gilman, the examining veterinarian for the New York Racing Association, discovered a swelling abscess under the lip. Gilman arrived early at Barn 5 that morning to give Secretariat the routine prerace physical examination and to identify Secretariat as Secretariat by checking his tattoo number—Z20669. All horses have a tattoo number as part of the universal horse identification system, which is designed, in part, to ensure that horses competing in races are the horses their handlers claim they are.

  The number is tattooed inside the upper lip. Gilman lifted the lip to look at it.

  He was the first to notice the abscess. It was blue, about the size of a quarter, and was sore and getting sorer. Gilman went to see Laurin about it, and brought Lucien back to the stall to show it to him, referring to it at the time as an abscess.

  “I don’t think it will bother him,” Gilman was heard to tell Laurin.

  So Secretariat would go to the post that afternoon with what appeared to be a harmless abscess inside his upper lip. But the morning brought a combination of things that would bear upon the Wood Memorial that afternoon. Pancho Martin and Sommer read Charles Hatton’s column for the day, and it compelled Martin to rashness. Through the week, Martin planned to run three Sommer three-year-olds in the Wood—Sham; Knightly Dawn, the colt accused of bothering Linda’s Chief in the Santa Anita Derby; and a speedy colt named Beautiful Music, who had just won his only start by
ten lengths at Santa Anita. There was talk that Martin might be ganging up on Secretariat and still talk of the Santa Anita Derby, with intimations that Knightly Dawn had lain on Linda’s Chief deliberately, despite the stewards’ ruling to the contrary. Hatton sat in Secretariat’s corner, and he was clearly concerned about the entry. Through the week his column implied that there might be skulduggery afoot in the Wood Memorial. He accused no one of plotting foul play, but the slant of his column made it clear that he believed the three New York stewards—Nathaniel Hyland, Francis Dunne, and Warren Mehrtens—might have to settle the outcome of the Wood by arbitrating foul claims. Hatton came to racing in an era when jockeys rammed one another, grabbed saddlecloths, and recklessly cut each other off—before the film patrol—when anything went if you could get away with it.

  Fearful that the Wood might develop into a donnybrook, Hatton wrote on Thursday: “The Wood is supposed to decide who has the most horse, not the most horses.”

  On Friday Hatton criticized several horses being pointed for the Wood:

  There . . . were indications the stage would be cluttered by a lot of spear carriers when the protagonists, Sham and Secretariat, make their appearance. The eyes of turf fans everywhere, as well as the sharp optics of the stewards, will be focused on the $100,000 added nine furlongs. We shall not be surprised if the tote board lights up with foul claims like Times Square on Saturday night. Our best advice is to hold all mutuel tickets.