The horse was saying, I don’t want to work. I can’t. He was not listened to. Exercise rider Jimmy Gaffney told me he had taken note of Secretariat’s prerace sluggishness and passed on that information to Lucien Laurin’s assistant, Henry Hoeffner. But the jockey, Ron Turcotte, is apparently kept in the dark. “I had no idea Secretariat wasn’t right,” he told me. “Charlie Davis and Eddie Sweat both knew about the abscess, but they later told me that Lucien had instructed them not to tell me. I wish I’d known about the abscess because I would have run him differently. I would have turned him loose and hoped for the best.”
Was the trainer—amid the confusion and turmoil that followed a death in his family—fully aware of the major change in Secretariat’s condition? Was Laurin convinced that other horses were no match for even a weakened Secretariat? Did the trainer worry that word of the abscess would unnerve his jockey? Without Lucien Laurin’s testimony, it’s anybody’s guess.
A stablemate, Angle Light, wins the Wood Memorial, with Sham—a Claiborne Farm horse who has turned in some sensational results on the California circuit—coming in second and Secretariat a shocking four lengths back of the winner. A “sure thing” suddenly looks beatable.
On April 23, a plane takes Angle Light, Secretariat, Eddie Sweat, and Charlie Davis to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby—that most famous of races. The press corps that has been tagging Secretariat for months has become an almost unbearable distraction for the horse’s owner and trainer, jockey, groom, and exercise rider.
The doubters in the press corps disinter the old Bold Ruler rap, that his get will not go the distance. A few see Secretariat as the moody son of a moody sire, and prone to sulking.
Drawn by the charismatic Secretariat, the media horde is unusually large and includes a great many scribes and broadcasters who know precious little about horses and who are easy prey for backside pranksters. Derby entrants are given a numbered cloth to be worn under the saddle to help journalists pick them out during morning workouts (Secretariat’s is yellow, with black numbers). But the mischievous on shed row attach a similar cloth to the sorriest-looking nag in their barn, just to watch the note takers chase him.
Eddie Sweat has a dream one night just before the Derby. He tells his nephew, David Walker, about it on the phone. “Looka here, I had a dream about the Triple Crown. We’re going to win the Derby, we’re going to win the Preakness, and we’re gonna do something never seen in the Belmont. It will be totally unbelievable.”
The day before the Derby, the post positions for the thirteen horses entered are chosen according to a time-honored ritual. Into a leather-covered bottle are placed numbered ivory balls, 1 to 13. Secretariat draws number 10, farther to the outside than Lucien Laurin would have liked.
For a man inclined to worry, it is one more item for his fret list. A six-million-dollar price tag on a racehorse can rattle even the calmest horseman, and the fiery little Quebecois trainer is far from calm these days. Will he be able to keep Secretariat focused and fit in the days leading up to and throughout the thirty-five-day Triple Crown campaign? If the trainer begins to unravel, how might it affect others in the Secretariat camp? And even assuming the trainer’s even keel, how will the Meadow staff respond to the unrelenting pressure? Will the much-second-guessed jockey get rattled by the great expectations placed on him? Can the groom spare the horse the crackling tension that now runs through the barn and that will only get worse? Will all the travel in the coming weeks, the press of journalists, the crush of adoring race fans (not to mention all the attention from nervous members of the Secretariat syndicate wondering how their precious investment is faring) wear the horse and his team down? Or will Secretariat, as the nation is hoping and track wise men are predicting, be the first horse to win the Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont in twenty-five years?
May 5, 1973, Churchill Downs. On race day, a record crowd of 134,476 packs the track, and most have come to see one horse. Some of the other entries are familiar to Secretariat. There is Angle Light, the neighbor on shed row who beat him just two weeks before. There is Gold Bag, who used to outrun Secretariat during that first sojourn at Hialeah. And there is Sham, whose trainer, Frank “Pancho” Martin, is noisily predicting victory. The band begins playing “My Old Kentucky Home” and thousands of people are drinking mint juleps—that blend of sugar, fresh mint, crushed ice, and bourbon that seems to go only with the Derby, in the way that Greek food calls out for retsina. Alone, such drinks are best avoided.
The start is delayed five minutes when Twice a Prince, in the number 6 slot, rears in the starting gate and falls backward. Ron Turcotte smartly stays clear while the dust settles. Secretariat is thus among the last to load and is spared the stress of sitting in the gate all that time.
At a mile and a quarter, the Derby marks the longest race these three-year-old horses have run in their lives. Lucien Laurin has pulled out the stops to prepare for it—mixed up slow gallops with breezes and blowouts. He wanted the horse in peak condition before the Derby, but a trainer can wear a horse out by working him too hard or leave him unprepared by exercising too lightly. It’s a fine line, and this trainer can only hope he’s gotten close to the line without crossing it.
The log shows that Secretariat was walked on April 24, galloped on April 25 and 26, and did three-quarters of a mile on April 27 in 1:123⁄5. He was walked again on the twenty-eighth, and galloped on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth. May 1 saw him gallop again, and on May 2 he ran five-eighths of a mile in :58 3⁄5. Any time between fifty-five and sixty seconds for that five-furlong distance is considered fast. But Secretariat’s rider was not pressing, just letting him out, and Turcotte came back from that ride with a smile on his face. On Thursday, May 3, the chestnut was walked, followed by a gallop the day before the race.
After every workout, Eddie Sweat is always there to orchestrate the bath, the blanketing, the cooling out, the feeding, the almost clinical examination of Secretariat’s body to look for heat in the legs or any sign of chill or discomfort or distress. By the time of the Derby, Eddie has been a groom for more than two decades. He had already seen Riva Ridge win the Derby the year before, but the preamble to that race was nothing like this one. This time, it seems the entire world is watching. Eddie stays in the barn around the clock. Night watchman is now added to his long list of duties.
There are those, like Eddie, who quietly know a great deal about horses. And there are others with precious little experience in equestrian matters who nonetheless speak into a megaphone. A Las Vegas oddsmaker named Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder incenses the Meadow camp when he tells an Associated Press reporter that track insiders are telling him an awful secret: Those on Laurin’s team are routinely icing one of Secretariat’s knees. This is just one of many wild rumors that fly around the track in the days leading up to the Derby (another story has it on good authority that Secretariat will be scratched just before the race). The trainer offers to fly Snyder to Kentucky and to look on as the vet of his choosing examines Secretariat. Laurin is willing to bet a thousand dollars the horse is sound. Jimmy the Greek wisely declines. (Ray Woolfe reported in his book that Snyder, who died in 1988, admitted—during a dinner with Ron Turcotte seven years after the race—that he had invented the rumor so he could win a bet on Secretariat.)
The Derby goes off as planned at 5:37 p.m. The track is fast, Secretariat has not been scratched, and his knees look just fine.
In this race, Secretariat neither makes a late charge nor grabs the lead, but adopts a middle strategy. Turcotte has him a relaxed fifth at the halfway point, then uses the whip, once at the midpoint of the race—“just enough to let him know I was serious,” as he will later put it—and again as they turn for home. The race is like a two-minute opera, the tempo steadily rising for Secretariat as the piece unfolds.
Down the stretch, the jockey simply shows the whip, and this, too, yields yet another surge. Another jockey in the race, Laffit Pincay, Jr., will later win the Kentucky Derby and three co
nsecutive Belmonts in the early 1980s. He will retire in April 2003 as the most successful jockey in horse-racing history, with 9,530 victories. But on this day, his mount, the noble Sham, cannot match Secretariat down the stretch. The two horses run together for some one hundred yards, Pincay turning in vain to his whip, Turcotte sailing past, his whip silent.
The red horse “willingly drew away in record-breaking time” in the words of the Daily Racing Form. Jockey Larry Adams, aboard Shecky Greene—who has led for the first half of the race—will later remember looking back as Secretariat made his charge: “I glanced back and saw him coming and thought, If I get in his way, I’ll get killed. He looked like the Red Ball Express!”
Turcotte feels underneath him some new sense of stride and purpose in the young horse, as if the ten victories leading up to this one were mere rehearsals. Secretariat is picking off horses one and two at a time, but there is nothing surgical about the process. He’s moving along with surreal and apparently effortless grace, switching leads to fuel the drive. “It was the first time,” his jockey will say later, “he ever put everything together.” As for the other horses: “They were rolling. I was flying.”
Just before Secretariat makes that final thrust to gain the lead, Eddie Sweat looks on, screaming and waving his white hat, the one with the purple headband. The horses are nose-to-nose, but Eddie is convinced the duel is over, and he shouts out words to that effect. He is, of course, right.
The victory is by two and a half lengths. The time is 1:59 2⁄5, beating the record set in 1964 by a Canadian horse, Northern Dancer, by three-fifths of a second (the equivalent of three lengths). Even more astonishing is that Secretariat—even though he took an outside, and therefore longer, path—actually increased his speed as the race progressed. The quarters went like this: :25 1⁄5, :24, :23 4⁄5, :23 2⁄5, and :23.
As for Angle Light, there would be no repeat of his win in the Wood over Secretariat. He finished well back, in tenth. And Gold Bag, winner of those little schoolyard sprints in the paddocks of Hialeah? He was eleventh. Twice a Prince, meanwhile, paid a price for rearing and dumping his jockey in the starting gate: He was second to last, ahead of only Warbucks. On this day, there is only one horse, and all the rest follow in ragtag succession.
Eddie Sweat is wearing for Derby day a pair of wild candy-colored pants: black, white, and yellow. Near the winner’s circle, someone hastily hangs a garland of red roses over Secretariat’s withers, while someone else reaches out and touches the horse on the flank. Hard to say which causes the horse to recoil, but recoil he does, and Eddie is tossed into a retaining rope and suffers rope burns to his neck. But he’s back on his feet in seconds and seeing, as always, to the horse. If there is pain, Eddie feels none of it, only exultation.
When Secretariat is cooled out back in stall number 21, Barn 42, at Churchill Downs, Eddie makes him an enormous feast—six quarts of oats, a quart of sweet feed, two quarts of bran, and several carrots. The champion tears into his feed tub. Next morning, he is so wired that Charlie Davis is unable to hand-walk him and instead saddles him up and rides him around shed row to exercise him. It was Lucien Laurin’s idea to tack him up, make him think he was going to the track as a way of settling him down.
Secretariat is a horse who loves to work. Any stress, any worry, any tension in him seems to get ironed out by a pure and simple run—the longer and quicker, the better. The horse knows it, and so, it seems, does his trainer.
“I never trained a horse in my life as hard as I trained Secretariat,” Lucien Laurin will later tell the Thoroughbred Record. The horse is eating fourteen quarts of grain daily and twenty-five pounds of hay. “A horse that does that well, you have to work him,” says Laurin, “otherwise he’s going to get fat.” He gallops the horse farther than any other in his stable, often a couple of miles a day. And no matter how hard Secretariat works, he never backs off his feed.
Lucien Laurin is astonished that the horse continues to grow—both in stature and in the flesh. Despite precautions, the saddle slipped a little during the Derby. Now a new girth—measuring an enormous fifty-three inches—is fashioned to accommodate him.
As Eddie Sweat leads the untacked Secretariat away for the usual postrace saliva and urine tests after the Derby, his right hand is on the lead, his left fist raised in a victory salute. The crowd in each section cheers horse and groom as they pass, the sound rippling through the stands like a slow, rolling wave.
May 19, 1973, Pimlico. I have often wondered whether racehorses sock away in their memory banks horses they have faced in previous encounters. Does one horse remember besting another? Or losing to that horse? Does victory embolden them? Does a loss shake their confidence?
Sham, for instance, beat Secretariat in the Wood Memorial but lost to him in the Derby. A lot of hearts went out to Sham on Derby day: The horse had to steam in the starting gate for a full five minutes while Twice a Prince was being sorted out. So unruly was Twice a Prince that one of the assistant starters had left Sham’s side and gone to the aid of his colleague. When the gates clanged open, Sham hit the gate with his head and knocked out two front teeth. Even so, Sham finished second in the Derby and he, too, broke Northern Dancer’s record—in his case, by about one-fifth of a second. The Racing Form noted his hand ride down the stretch to the finish and how, though clearly beaten by Secretariat, Sham “continued resolutely to dominate the remainder of the field.” Will this classy horse now dig a little deeper for the rubber match that is the Preakness? Or will the bloody business in the starting gate unravel him?
With Jimmy Gaffney dispatched from the Meadow barn after a dispute with Lucien Laurin, Charlie Davis is exercising Secretariat at dawn these days. Charlie had ridden him in Florida, but the horse was in his clown phase then. The new Secretariat astonishes and delights his rider. “Like ridin’ on air,” Charlie says, or driving a Rolls-Royce.
Another record crowd—61,657 people—comes out for the Preakness, most of them there to see the one horse who’s been making such a fuss. Traffic in Baltimore is utter chaos, the worst in the city’s history. The race has drawn a good many young people, some of them seeing a racetrack for the first time in their lives. They toss Frisbees, gather around the rock bands there to entertain them, and use backpacks for pillows as they lie tangled like snakes in the sun. The long-hairs are not the usual Preakness patrons, but the copper horse’s star appeal has clearly crossed the generational line.
Secretariat’s convincing victory in the Derby has brought some measure of ease to the Meadow camp, but the tension builds anew as post time for the Preakness approaches. Only six horses will leave the gate at 5:40 p.m.: Secretariat, Sham, Our Native, Ecole Etage, Deadly Dream, and Torsion. The wisdom is that only Sham is game enough to challenge Secretariat. Both horses have the same grandsire on the dam’s side—Princequillo—and both have run record times in the Derby.
Sham is indeed up for this race, but he is still no match for the red horse. Turcotte lets Secretariat ease into the pace in a manner so casual, you would think he was a race-car driver wanting to listen to the engine rev for a few seconds before stepping on the gas. There is no whip this time, just a small message with his hands that tells Secretariat it is time to go. And go he does.
Turcotte passes Our Native on the outside, then Deadly Dream and Torsion, before sprinting past the leader, Ecole Etage. All this in a quarter of a mile.
The jockey takes Secretariat wide at the clubhouse turn and then makes what the Daily Racing Form will call “a spectacular run” approaching the backstretch. He leaves Sham two and a half lengths back. Jockey George Cusimano, on Ecole Etage, will later describe what it was like to get passed by Secretariat: “I got to hearing this noise beside me—them big nostrils goin’—and I knew what it was. When he came by, it felt like a freight train passing—blew the number right off my sleeve.”
Before the race, there was speculation that Secretariat’s long, easy stride was the longest of any horse in history. So they measured it,
and at first there was disappointment. His longest stride was just shy of twenty-five feet, but well shy of Native Dancer’s twenty-nine feet. But, as Dr. Manuel Gilman of the New York Racing Association later explained, Secretariat uses both a long and a short stride, and it was the short one they had measured at the Maryland racetrack.
Secretariat, said Gilman, “is a most unusual horse. He’s very heavily muscled and looks like a sprinter . . . but he also has the body length of the long striding horse. He’s an all-purpose horse, a sprinter and stayer—and he uses the typical stride of each at different points in a race . . . and the way he accelerates is fantastic.”
Sham did get within a few lengths of Secretariat down the stretch, but Laffit Pincay, Jr., was lashing his mount to get even that close. Ron Turcotte, meanwhile, simply let out his horse a little more. There was plenty of power left to be called upon if need be. But there was no need for the whip or any chirping. The jockey, as racetrackers say, sat chilly.
Despite a gutsy effort, Sham again finishes second, two and a half lengths back, as he did in the Derby. Our Native likewise finishes as he did in the Derby, coming in third. No horse in the small five-horse field posed any real threat. “Won handily” was how the Racing Form summed up both the Derby win and Secretariat’s victory in the Preakness.
A pigeon feather was making Secretariat’s whiskers itch back in the stables the night before the Preakness. Eddie Sweat blew it away and the feather floated into the hand of Bill Nack, Secretariat’s vigilant scribe. Nack would keep in his wallet that feather and the two-dollar pari-mutuel ticket he had on Secretariat to win the Preakness. (Feather, ticket, and wallet, sadly, were lost to a pickpocket in 1983, when Nack was at Madison Square Garden to watch a prizefight between Roberto Duran and Davey Moore.)
June 9, 1973, Belmont. Secretariat will go for the last leg of the Triple Crown, the punishing mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes, on his home track. On Friday night, Eddie Sweat has a dream—nightmare, more like it. Big Red has a huge lead when he goes down, is passed by the field, somehow regains his feet with Turcotte still in the irons, and desperately chases the leaders, to no avail. Eddie does not sleep. He agonizes.
The Horse God Built Page 15