The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Others do not lack for confidence in the red horse. The Associated Press will report after the race that one man at an offtrack betting joint plunked down $35,000 on Secretariat to win.

  The press corps has by now swollen. Raymond Woolfe will later liken it to “an invasion of ants,” and some on the shed row begin to resent Meadow Stable for drawing all these insects that are making their own work impossible and even dangerous. Secretariat’s image graces the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers. Bill Nack, in his book, will later report that 28 million people had watched the Derby on television, and that a like number had watched the Preakness. When Eddie and Secretariat returned to their home barn at Belmont, some sixty reporters, photographers, and film crew members were gathered at shed row to greet them—until new rules were laid down and the hordes were banished to the perimeter.

  And though Secretariat is the overwhelming favorite in the 105th running of the Belmont Stakes, and surely the sentimental favorite, he still faces the stiffest test of all. So many horses before him, and after him, have won the Derby and the Preakness, only to falter in the Belmont. Some horses lack stamina for the epic race; some have been weakened by the two races preceding it. Injury, fatigue, rider error, the horse gods: Any or all can prick a balloon.

  The jockey and trainer are both confident going into the race, and they say so to the press. But everyone on the Meadow side just wants the Belmont Stakes to be over.

  At 5:38 p.m. on that muggy day in New York, just five horses leave the starting gate: Secretariat, Twice a Prince, My Gallant, Pvt. Smiles, and, back for his third Triple Crown race, Sham. Lucien Laurin’s instructions to Ron Turcotte before the race were much like the others. Neither send the horse nor hold him back. Just let him roll. Use ton propre jugement. “Use your own judgment,” Laurin was saying, “and let your horse use his.”

  Secretariat breaks sharply. It seems there will be no lazy beginning this time, no stalking from behind, no leisurely acceleration. By the first turn, two horses are in the lead, sprinting. Secretariat’s on the rail, Sham on the outside. They are embarked on a viritual marathon, and yet they are running as if the finish line were a hundred yards away.

  After one furlong, Sham actually has a lead—a head, a neck, even a half length. But Secretariat stays with him, and then passes him. This is not a move meant to take a lead and try to hold it, but something else. The copper horse leads Sham by a head at the half-mile point, and by seven lengths at a mile. A half mile to go, and Secretariat—unhurried by his jockey—continues to pull steadily away from the field. There is no field, just one horse and one rider operating in some other dimension, beyond gravity and the usual forces of nature.

  Somewhere behind is Sham. The early dash and the attempt to stay with Secretariat have left him with nothing. He’s coasting now, Pincay all too aware that this fine horse is done. Three times Sham has valiantly faced his nemesis, and three times he has tasted defeat. This one is crushing. For three-quarters of the race, Sham has been right there with Secretariat and then, perhaps demoralized and completely out of gas, “stops badly” (in Daily Racing Form parlance). He will finish last, forty-five lengths behind Secretariat. Sham’s racing career is over. Several days after the race, a hairline fracture will be discovered in one of his cannon bones and he will be retired to stud.

  Twice a Prince will grab second, thirty-one lengths back of Secretariat.

  The miracle in this race is that Secretariat never lets up, even when the other four horses are several dozen lengths behind, with no chance of overtaking him—unless Eddie Sweat’s dream was prescient. Victory is by a stunning, almost unimaginable margin: thirty-one lengths.

  A horse length, nose to tail, is about eight feet. Secretariat, then, is some 248 feet ahead of the horse behind him as he crosses the finish line. In baseball, this would be almost the distance from first base to third. In football, imagine running almost three-quarters the length of the field. That’s how far ahead Secretariat was.

  Turcotte never touched him with the whip, just hand-rode him home. Throughout the race, this son of Bold Ruler did not once lose form or slow or give any indication at all that the mile and a half race was cutting into his extraordinary reserves of power and grace. Among the almost 68,000 fans in the stands, there is bedlam.

  You might think that one horse racing alone lacks drama, that a rout in any sport is dull and lifeless. But those who looked on that day knew they were witnessing one of the greatest moments in horse-racing history. Secretariat was putting on a show. I’m guessing that he ran so long and so fast simply because he felt like it. Humans have names for such a feeling: joy, elation, glee. Whatever its equivalent in the equine world, it was now coursing through him. His blood was up, way up. He had never been more fit in his life: The Derby and the Preakness and all those workouts before and after had sharpened him as never before. Whenever talk turns to the greatest racehorse of all time, this is the one race that Secretariat backers offer as evidence in debate. The Belmont displayed a magnificent horse at a pinnacle moment, doing what he was bred to do as only he could.

  One newspaper ran a photograph showing the turn for home and Ron Turcotte looking back, way back, over his left shoulder at the trailing field of horses. The playful caption read “Hey! You guys comin’ or not?”

  Sports Illustrated used an astonishing close-up photo from the race in its June 18 issue. In it, Secretariat is fifty feet from the finish line; his mouth is slightly open, his ears are back, and you can see the lather at his neck. Turcotte has turned to face the photographer (he’s actually peeking at the infield Teletimer) and his eyes are wide, his mouth pursed to form a small o. His is a “holy cow” look of shock and awe.

  The article, by Whitney Tower, tried to set the 105th running of the Belmont in some sort of context. He likened it to Joe Namath tossing ten touchdown passes in a football game, or golfer Jack Nicklaus shooting a 55 in the U.S. Open.

  “If there was one moment I would want him remembered for,” Penny Chenery later declared, “it would be the Belmont Stakes. The fact that he was able to outrun what people considered the limitations of his pedigree. And really, he was running that fast just out of the joy of running. Not from the whip, not from competition. He was running because he loved it. Glorying in his own ability.”

  Dave Anderson wrote in the New York Times about what he had seen and heard at Belmont. The writer took note of Eddie Sweat’s red undershirt the morning of that sweltering day, Secretariat’s blue reins, how a crowd of a hundred or so followed groom and horse from barn to tunnel to paddock. “You see,” wrote Anderson, “why everybody has fallen in love with this horse. He’s beautiful, he’s just beautiful.” A man told his child to stop crying: “While you’re crying, you can’t see the horse.” As the horse circled under the trees of the paddock, applause followed Secretariat. “Bravo,” said someone. “Bravo.” After the race, some fans ran after Secretariat. One reached out and touched him. As officials swabbed saliva from his mouth into a basin, one woman said, “To think that they’re treating him like any other horse.”

  Penny Chenery told someone after the race that she loved Riva Ridge for his gentleness. “It isn’t that I don’t love Secretariat,” she explained. “I love him, but at the same time I am in awe of him. I am in awe of his bigness, his good looks, his power.” Before the race, she talked about how Secretariat loved to run and came back wanting to play after a workout—“as if he thinks racing is a game we thought up for his amusement.”

  June 30, 1973, Arlington. The Arlington crowd of 41,223 is the largest in three decades. The applause for Secretariat is constant from the moment he appears on the track. In a rare move, the infield has been opened. A band plays.

  Secretariat is so fit, so raring to go all the time, that any notions of resting before the race have gone out the window. When Charlie Davis tries to hand-walk him as exercise, the horse drags him around like a pull toy. On the track, Ron Turcotte has the same problem when he tries to
give the horse just light exercise. The powerful rider’s arms are sore from holding Secretariat back. Finally, the horse gets his wish—some fast workouts in the morning.

  Sacrificial lambs are hard to come by, and Secretariat takes on just three other horses in the Arlington Invitational. He goes wide at the clubhouse turn, then ducks inside. No horse challenges him, and My Gallant, the second horse, is nine lengths back at the finish. College kids have propped a beer keg on a wheelchair, and as Secretariat turns down the homestretch, hundreds of them shoot up their arms in the power salute. There is brisk business for a man selling pennants that read secretariat 1973 triple crown winner and super

  horse.

  Before the Arlington, trainer William J. Resseguet, Jr.—who had a horse in that race, Our Native (he came in third, as he had in the Derby and the Preakness)—instructed his groom to take a photo of Secretariat’s head.

  “Why just the head?” asked the groom.

  “Because all I’ve seen all summer,” the trainer replied, “is his rear end.”

  August 4, 1973, Saratoga. Man o’War’s lone loss was to a horse called Upset. Secretariat has lost to several horses, but today’s loss in the Whitney to one called Onion will be the most memorable.

  The town of Saratoga Springs welcomes Secretariat as if he were an emperor home from a great conquest. Blue-and-white-checkered flags, the Meadow’s colors, hang from lampposts, and hawkers at souvenir stands are selling everything from Secretariat T-shirts to bags of the horse’s droppings. People throng to the track to pay homage, to see the great horse cruise to another victory. Some five thousand faithful go to the track three days before the race just to watch him gallop, and thirty thousand come on race day.

  The race starts badly for the red horse: He bangs his head on the starting gate when he lunges forward. Some observers thought he had lost weight before the race, and it is perhaps also significant that he is up against older, four-year-old horses. Later, it will be discovered that he is running a fever. For whatever reason, Secretariat does not have his usual dramatic acceleration at the end. “He didn’t fire up” is how the winning jockey Jacinto Vasquez puts it. Secretariat loses by a length and stuns the crowd into silence.

  Ron Turcotte told me he had pleaded with Lucien Laurin before the race not to run the horse—for everyone in the barn knew that Secretariat was sick—but Laurin apparently warned his jockey that if he chose not to ride him, another jockey would be found. The trainer John Veitch includes himself among those who believe that Secretariat should never have lost a race. Veitch believes that a horse of Secretariat’s stature can dupe a trainer into thinking that his horse, even when he’s not firing on all cylinders, can still beat any other horse, that malady and lack of conditioning can be overcome. “That’s human frailty,” says Veitch, and should not be held against the horse. After the loss, Secretariat stood facing the back of his stall and ignored all attempts at communication or condolence.

  September 15, 1973, Belmont. The first running of the one-and-one-eighth-mile Marlboro Cup Handicap gathers a classy field of seven horses, including Riva Ridge, the aforementioned Onion, and a quick Canadian horse called Kennedy Road. And for a while it is Riva Ridge (with Eddie Maple up) and Secretariat in a battle before the red horse pulls away. He wins by three and a half lengths, setting a world record along the way.

  Track sage Charles Hatton is dumbfounded that the horse—who looked “distressingly ill” and “bloody awful” from a coughing virus picked up the day before the Whitney—has rebounded so mightily. The horse has gained weight and he seems to be thriving on punishing workouts, setting track records in his dawn runs. Lucien Laurin, writes Hatton, “never got to the bottom of him actually.” And Laurin will later say the same thing.

  September 29, 1973, Belmont. Secretariat has never run on grass before, but he seems to like it when Turcotte takes him for his first training on grass. “He loved it!” the jockey will enthusiastically report afterward. “I could ride this horse over broken bottles or a plowed field if we had to! He adapts to anything.”

  However, even great horses need time to adjust to new surfaces. But there is no time. Wet weather means that Secretariat, not Riva Ridge, will run in the mile-and-a-half Woodward, which has always been plan B. Plan A was to run the red colt in the Man o’War Stakes on October 8, giving him nine more days to work on grass.

  Lack of conditioning, then, may explain why he comes up flat in a stretch duel with Prove Out in the Woodward. Prove Out wins by four and a half lengths.

  October 8, 1973, Belmont. Now the Man o’War Stakes looms, and so does Tentam, widely seen as the best grass horse in America. His trainer originally decided against entering the Man o’War Stakes, but seeing Secretariat falter on the grass at Belmont gave him hope. When the trainer, MacKenzie “Mac” Miller, starts taking note of Secretariat’s training times on the grass (one is the quickest five furlongs ever recorded on grass), he has grave second thoughts. “At times he is frightening,” the trainer says. “I’ve never seen a colt with more fluid, marvelous action.”

  In this race, the copper horse simply takes the lead and neverrelinquishes it. Without seeming to strain, and running against the wind down the backstretch, Secretariat covers the mile and a half in 2:24 4⁄5, matching the world record for that distance on any surface.

  October 28, 1973, Woodbine. Penny Chenery is intent on retiring Secretariat to stud at Claiborne Farm on November 15, so there is time for just one final race. Among her options are the Washington International and the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Aqueduct. There is also the Canadian International on the grass in Toronto, and that choice prevails for obvious reasons.

  “I favor the Canadian race,” the owner says, reminding reporters that the horse’s trainer and jockey are both Canadian. “This brings a degree of sentiment into the decision.” She is also well aware of what E. P. Taylor, the owner of Northern Dancer, and others in Toronto have done for North American racing: “I believe it would be nice to reciprocate.”

  The stars, though, do not align. For one thing, Ron Turcotte is suspended for five days for a racing infraction just days before the Woodbine race. So Eddie Maple is chosen to ride the red horse, though Maple is dispirited after riding Riva Ridge to an ignoble last place in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. It marks a cruel end to the horse’s long and sterling career. (Riva Ridge will then stand at stud at Claiborne Farm, where he will die in 1985. Secretariat was buried next to him.)

  Eddie Sweat notes Secretariat’s mood the day of the Canadian International Championship (now called the Rothmans International). “The morning of the race felt real good,” he will tell the Daily Racing Form. “We took him out and he just bounced around the shed row. He was kicking at the tubs, he was kicking at the wall boxes; anything that got in his way he was kicking at it.”

  Bruce Walker, then working in publicity for the Ontario Jockey Club, has vivid memories of the week before the race. “Eddie,” he told me, “would lead Secretariat to the walking ring under the trees. And the owners and trainers and grooms would line the fence to watch them and admire the horse. The horse always looked magnificent. He was rubbed to glistening. And what struck me was that Eddie was always talking to Secretariat and the horse would cock his head, as if he understood every word. On the morning of October twenty-fifth, there was heavy fog, and I remember hearing his hooves on the track; then I heard that huge whoosh from his nostrils. Then, finally, I saw him. He came flying out of the fog. It was just amazing, almost magical. I couldn’t believe the power, and his stride was immense.” Secretariat did five-eighths of a mile in a scorching fifty-seven seconds “and change,” as racetrackers like to say.

  And as Secretariat left the track each day, he passed a kind of honor guard of grooms. They would all line the roadway. Bruce Walker is convinced they were there to pay homage to the horse: “People on the backstretch knew they were in the presence of royalty.” But the grooms, said Walker, were also paying respect to a great colleague. “There was adm
iration for Eddie, too.”

  On race day, more than 35,000 fans brave cold, wet weather to watch a great horse run for the last time. Some ten thousand fans came earlier to watch his morning workout on the grass. My brother, Wayne Scanlan, now a sports columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, had gone to the race with a friend and they were waiting interminably to buy a pari-mutuel ticket. “We all wanted the same thing,” he said, “a souvenir of Secretariat’s last race. Finally, my friend said, ‘I’d rather see the horse.’ So we walked down to the paddock and we got within fifteen to twenty feet of Secretariat. It was such a thrill to see him. And I’ll never forget his size and his beauty. That memory means a lot more to me than a ticket stub I would have stuck in a drawer.” (Track officials later estimated that more than $100,000 in uncashed pari-mutuel tickets remain from Secretariat’s races.)

  The Woodbine crowd cheers the star horse from the time he comes out on the track until he enters the starting gate, and they keep on cheering. Secretariat wins convincingly, by six and a half lengths, but only after enduring two hard bumps from Kennedy Road, with Avelino Gomez up. After that, Secretariat takes the lead—a decision he apparently makes himself. Maple will later surmise that the horse was angry, that he took off in a huff.

  Secretariat, along with his francophone jockey and trainer, struck a chord in Canada. In late 2003, an unidentified Thoroughbred breeder in Canada paid $21,600 for the blanket worn by Secretariat after his last race at Woodbine. Penny Chenery sold the cooler to benefit the Secretariat Foundation, which funds equine research.