The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Secretariat never races again, but he does go to the track one final time—for Secretariat Day at Aqueduct on November 6, 1973. Some 33,000 people show up to say good-bye and to hear from a tearful Penny Chenery. “The most memorable thing we do have,” she says into the microphone, “is the memory of Secretariat in his moments of triumph. We have also been proud of him in his moments of defeat.”

  His record for twenty-one races would stand at sixteen wins, three second-place finishes (including a disqualification), one third-place finish, and one fourth-place result.

  Ron Turcotte jogs Secretariat—whom he calls “the smartest and boldest horse I ever rode”—out onto the track and then into the winner’s circle. But the muscled horse appears angry that there will be no racing that day, and he tries to eat the bouquet of roses that Penny Chenery holds in her hands. And then, four friends make their way down the track and off into the sunset: Charlie Davis on Billy Silver, Eddie Sweat leading the blanketed Secretariat.

  Someone asked Eddie what Secretariat would miss most in his retirement. “He’s going to miss running,” he replied. “Every morning he would wait for someone to put the tack on so he could get out and run. He loved it.”

  On another occasion, Eddie observed of Secretariat, “The only thing he knows is eat, relax and run. He never acts up. He’s always loose. Lots of times he’ll look around at the crowd while we’re going to the post, like he’s saying, ‘What’s them people doing here?’”

  And when, that day at Claiborne, he was asked what he would miss most about Secretariat and Riva Ridge, Eddie answered without hesitation, as if he had already carefully considered the matter. “Early in the mornings,” he said. “Every morning at five thirty Secretariat would be sitting there waiting for me. Both of them would be waiting, looking down the shed row. . . .”

  For the next sixteen years, Secretariat would stand at stud at Claiborne Farm. It was indeed a place fit for a king. Today, the farm encompasses three thousand acres (it was once bigger, but a Saudi sheikh bought six hundred acres), with 55 barns, 650 stalls, 45 employee houses, 90 miles of fencing, and 27 miles of paved road. Secretariat’s own paddock at Claiborne was 1.9 acres. Seabiscuit was born here, as were Forego and Kelso, but the most frequently asked question in all the time that Secretariat lived there was, of course, “Where’s Secretariat?” During Derby week, six hundred people a day would pour in to Claiborne. In the spring of 1974, the farm was forced to close its doors to visitors after so many came that traffic derailed normal operations at the farm. Every visitor wanted to see the horse and, more, to touch him. As the years passed and the pilgrims to Claiborne continued to come, more people saw him up close at the stud farm than got close to him at the track. This may explain why he never lost stature, even decades after he ran.

  When Secretariat first went to Claiborne, he would race the stud in the next paddock (Round Table in the early days), but he eventually chose to ignore the other studs. He knew he was the star attraction, the horse visitors approached first. His dam, Somethingroyal, had the same imperiousness and may have passed it on.

  Lawrence Robinson was the head caretaker of stallions at Claiborne. “He’s kind, a very kind horse,” he said in 1977. “I really think he’s the most kindest horse I ever groomed. He’s perfect in every way.

  “I’ve seen this son of a gun some cool mornings circle around this paddock and I mean really cut loose. It looks like he’s almost lying down around those turns. But he never slips.”

  Robinson worked at Claiborne Farm for forty years. He suffered a stroke in 1981. He told Time magazine in 1988, not long before he died, “The stroke made me forget some things. But I’ll never forget the day that beautiful horse stepped out of that trailer.” As he spoke of his eight years with Secretariat, Robinson was sitting in a lawn chair near his home on a hill, which overlooked Claiborne, and his eyes teared up. “I sit up here every day and think about that horse,” he said then. “That horse loved me. I could see it in his eyes.” The aged groom had cared for hundreds of horses, including Bold Ruler, Nasrullah, and Princequillo, but he had fallen in love with only one horse.

  Secretariat’s routine at Claiborne rarely varied; out to pasture at 7:45 a.m., then back to the barn at 2:00 p.m. He would get two quarts of grain in the morning and twenty-five pounds of hay in his stall. During his six hours in the paddock, he never stopped eating grass. Robinson guessed he ate twenty-five pounds of grass a day.

  A reporter for a newspaper in Hamilton, Ohio, wrote in 1974 of going to visit Secretariat at Claiborne. The horse apparently liked to play pickup sticks: He would have a stick in his mouth and you were supposed to take it from him and then give it back.

  Bobby Anderson, Secretariat’s groom for the horse’s last six years at Claiborne, talked about Secretariat in the spring of 1989, only months before the horse died. “He’s really a smart horse,” said Anderson. “He listens to your voice a lot. Most of them, you’ve got to kind of discipline them and make them mind, but if you raise your voice to him, you’ve hurt his feelings.”

  Anderson said that visitors would take as a keepsake straw from Secretariat’s stall, his droppings, filaments of his mane if they could get them. They would take home photographs, and memories, too, of how he walked, how he stared at them, how he ignored them, how he grazed. He was a lord in his manor, self-aware and proud.

  Ron Turcotte gave an interview to the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1998, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Triple Crown win. “He was something special,” his old jockey said, “like God decided to make the perfect horse. There is no word I can find to explain what it was like being on him. It was just like, instead of pushing the accelerator, I was pulling the throttle, because I’d pull on the reins to make him run faster.”

  I later asked Turcotte the obvious question: “How did you stop him, given that the usual method of stopping a horse—applying the brakes—only made him go faster? “I’d drop his head,” the rider replied. “That put him into idling mode. He learned that at Hialeah.”

  “The only thing I can tell you,” Turcotte told the Courier-Journal, “is that nobody has seen the true Secretariat. A horse reaches his peak at five, and this horse was barely a baby when he was retiring. He was just learning how to run.”

  As a stud, he was very, very good, though some were disappointed that he did not sire a horse to equal his own stature. His first “cover” of a mare was a test, since there was some concern that his sperm count was low. Of two test mares sent to him, one took—an eight-year-old Appaloosa called Leola. They picked her because she was gentle, more so than high-strung Thoroughbred mares. The result was a hefty colt called First Secretary—he had markings much like his sire’s, and he would grow to 17 hands.

  Gus Koch, who is now the farm manager at Claiborne but was the stud manager in Secretariat’s day, saw the stallion every day for seventeen years. “He made my job easy,” said Koch. “He was up in one jump; he never took longer in the shed than three or four minutes; he was fertile, an easy keeper. I can still see him coming to the breeding shed. Poetry in motion. He sure had a personality, and he was so smart. You could tell by the way he carried himself. Other stallions would be jumping around and showing off. With him, there was no wasted motion.”

  Secretariat would sire 663 foals, including fifty-nine stakes winners, and they would win some $29 million on tracks all over North America. Risen Star, who won the Preakness and the Belmont (by fifteen lengths) in 1988, was voted champion three-year-old colt. Lady’s Secret, a filly and Horse of the Year in 1986, retired as all-time leading female winner with $3,021,425 in earnings. General Assembly was a fine horse, as was Kingston Rule, a tall chestnut, who won Australia’s famous Melbourne Cup.

  Secretariat’s great-grandson Charismatic won the Derby and Preakness in 1999 and was in the lead to win the Belmont when he tragically fractured a front leg and was pulled up by jockey Chris Antley.

  Secreto, a grandson on the dam’s side, won the Epsom Derby in 19
84. Tabasco Cat, another grandson, won the Preakness and Belmont in 1994. Erhaab, whose sire, Chief’s Crown, is out of Secretariat’s daughter Six Crowns, won the Epsom Derby. Secretariat’s daughter Terlingua won seven stakes races and earned $423,896. Pancho Villa, a full brother to Terlingua, won $596,734 from 1985 to 1986. Secretariat’s daughters were good, and so were the sires out of his daughters—like Storm Cat and Gone West and A. P. Indy. The latter horse was by Seattle Slew out of Weekend Surprise, a daughter of Secretariat’s. How’s that for bloodlines?

  On the other hand, the $1.5-million Canadian Bound and the $550,000 Grey Legion—among Secretariat’s first draft of sales yearlings—were duds on the track. Yet a great-grandson of his sold at auction for $5.5 million. So much for no faith in his bloodlines.

  “What is certain,” noted The Blood-Horse magazine, “is that Secretariat’s daughters already have assured their sire a lasting mark on the breed.” Runners from his daughters earned $33.8 million.

  The debate continues about Secretariat’s mark as sire, but there is no doubting his enduring legacy. Think back to 1973: student protests against the war in Vietnam; White House lies and cover-up. And out of that dark and charged time stepped a hero: a stunning horse with a coat of copper and red that turned a burnished gold in bright sun. Handsome and smart, strong and playful, he was an athlete we could cheer for when it seemed there was little to cheer about.

  While Secretariat was running for the roses, Vice President Spiro Agnew was resigning in the wake of charges of income tax evasion. This was the year of Woodstock and Wounded Knee, when the hit movies were The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Last Tango in Paris. Pete Rose was named the National League’s Most Valued Player in 1973 and O. J. Simpson set an NFL rushing record, but both athletes would later fall from grace. Secretariat was, and remains, the unsullied hero of that era.

  Looking back on that time, Penny Chenery remembers that “horse racing was in a down period. The country was in a blue mood. It was the time of Watergate and the Nixon scandals, and people wanted something to make them feel good. This red horse with the blue-and-white blinkers and silks seemed to epitomize an American hero.” Secretariat was everything the Watergate crooks were not: an elegant creature without vice or motive, and beyond corruption.

  George Plimpton called Secretariat “the only honest thing in the country at the time. . . . Where the public so often looks for the metaphor of simple, uncomplicated excellence, the big red horse has come along and provided it, and made the air seem a little cleaner and nicer to breathe.”

  The former general manager at Pimlico Race Course, Chick Lang, once said of Secretariat: “It is as if God decided to create the perfect horse!” (Lang had another good line about Secretariat: “He even grazed better than any horse I ever saw.”)

  Secretariat was famous, but, of course, he did not seek fame, nor was he moved by fame. He simply was—perhaps the best ever at what he did. Secretariat ran, as track wise men say, a hole in the wind.

  In the same week in 1973, he graced the covers of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated. ‘at last, an honest face’ was the small headline over the various letters that later appeared in Time by way of response. Corruption in Washington was then clearly on everyone’s mind, as one reader asked, “Who can question the honesty of Secretariat’s face?” Another slyly wondered, “How many readers wrote in to remark that it was refreshing to see the front end of a horse on the cover of Time ?” Underneath the letter was the number—sixty-five— and editor’s world-weary comment: “so far.”

  A Las Vegas nightclub offered Penny Chenery $25,000 if her horse would appear twice a day—prance onto a stage, stand fifteen minutes, then walk off again. The offer was rejected, as was a plan to market Secretariat’s droppings. A hotel, also in Las Vegas, created the Secretariat Suite: a four-thousand-square-foot spread, with two parlors, four bars, a game room, an eighteen-by-thirty-five-foot pool, a sauna, and four bedrooms.

  Today, Secretariat remains the source of intense hero worship. At the elaborate Web site Secretariat.com, dedicated to his legacy, fans can pitch questions to Penny Chenery or buy bobble-head dolls and snow globes, T-shirts and ball caps. In 1999, Secretariat became the first Thoroughbred to be honored with his own U.S. postage stamp. The state of Virginia plans to offer Secretariat license plates to raise funds for a horse museum in Caroline County, where he was born. The plate will show Secretariat on the left, staring out from his white-and-blue blinkers, with his name and “Triple Crown Champion” below. A stable for retired racehorses near Lexington, opened in 2004, was named the Secretariat Center. The $400,000 Secretariat Stakes in Arlington Heights, Illinois, helps keep his name alive. There is even a chocolate bar (“the official fine chocolate bar of America’s horse”) named after Secretariat and made by Kentucky’s venerable Ruth Hunt Candy Company. Claiborne Farm still gets flowers meant for his grave. He was no mere horse; he was, and remains, a legend.

  In the spring of 2000, a letter appeared in Newsweek in response to a column by Anna Quindlen on how professional athletes had earned irrelevance by their often awful behavior. The correspondent, one Jerry Redmond from Huntington, New York, lamented the “egotistical louts” whose lawyers finagle them counseling programs in lieu of jail time. “For every gentlemanly Wayne Gretzky or Nolan Ryan,” Redmond wrote, “we have a platoon of John Rockers and Mike Tysons”— both of whom were punished, the baseball player for racist comments, the boxer for rape. “For that reason, my favorite athlete of all time is Secretariat. At least he always knew how to behave in public.”

  Vogue magazine called Secretariat “the Clark Gable of horses.” Secretariat won the Triple Crown—the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont—all in dramatic fashion. (In both the Derby and Preakness, he came from dead last.) His times in all three races still stand as the fastest in history (though it should be noted that the Preakness record is unofficial, owing to a fault in the Teletimer on race day). Secretariat shattered track records and world records, and he won the Belmont by a staggering and unprecedented thirty-one lengths—a feat witnessed by more than fifty million fans on television. That he lost a few races, to lesser horses and often when either his health or training was compromised, only endeared him all the more to his admirers. When Secretariat was three years old, three secretaries were employed at Claiborne Farm to answer the two hundred or so letters sent to the horse every day.

  When, near the end of 1999, ESPN assembled its list of the top fifty athletes of the twentieth century, only one animal made the list. Secretariat was thirty-fifth, ahead of Mickey Mantle and Pete Sampras. In 1984, The Blood-Horse magazine asked its readers to rank the ten best Horses of the Years in the past half century; 89 percent included Secretariat on that list, but when turf writers were parceled off from the two thousand who sent in ballots, the figure was 100 percent. And when The Blood-Horse in 2000 asked seven experts to rank the top one hundred horses of the twentieth century, Secretariat was second only to the great Man o’War. (Seabiscuit, that game and storied horse, ranked twenty-fifth.) Charles Hatton, the dean of turf writers in America, would have scoffed at the survey. He saw both Man o’War and Secretariat run, and he called the latter horse “the greatest I have seen and the greatest anyone has ever seen.”

  In 1999, Time magazine ranked the ten most influential athletes of the twentieth century, and there, again, was Secretariat, alongside Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan. The Athlete of the Year in 1973 had not been forgotten.

  An MIT professor named George Pratt, an authority on the biomechanics of the equine gait, examined Secretariat at Claiborne Farm in 1987 and pronounced his the most efficient ever measured. “He looked,” said Pratt, “like he would run through a stone wall. He is a mountain of muscle, a mountain of dignity, a mountain of aristocratic bearing—the most impressive live creature I have ever looked upon.”

  Professor Pratt uttered the comment in the course of a TV documentary made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and first aired on November 15
, 1989—just six weeks after Secretariat’s death. Dr. Pratt’s comment that Secretariat had “a magic way of going” gave the documentary its title. In a note to me, the MIT professor emeritus elaborated on what he saw at Claiborne Farm:

  Flying back to Boston with the program’s producer, we were chatting about horses and I described my visit to Claiborne Farm in Kentucky where Secretariat was at stud. I was then and still am a great fan of that horse on whom I have done a detailed biomechanical analysis. I went down to his stall with the stallion manager who brought him out for me to see. Well, it was truly a religious experience. I was blown away by this god-like creature who simply paralyzed the shed row by his majestic presence. Nobody said a word. All the other stallions, all the workers, every living thing there froze at the sight of him.

  No one who saw Secretariat up close will ever forget him. He had presence, he had majesty, and he had a look about him—the look of eagles. It’s a phrase that some may stumble over. How can a horse look like an eagle? One day in Lexington, I went to the Hall of Champions at Kentucky Horse Park, where some modern-day racing legends—John Henry and Cigar among them—were being paraded around a small amphitheater while a park employee with a microphone told the audience their stories. I was up in the far reaches, maybe ten rows back in the bleachers, and fussing with my telephoto lens as Cigar was being circled by a groom. Cigar, for the record, was Horse of the Year in 1995, when he won ten races in a row, extending that to sixteen in a row the following year, after which he retired, having won some ten million dollars, more than any horse in history. He was about thirty feet away from me. I looked up to see him stop, look me square in the eye, and hold my gaze for about five seconds. This grandson of Seattle Slew was not looking at me, but through me, and I felt both honored and fixed by his imperial gaze.

  Secretariat had that look, and then some. Raymond Woolfe loved his “clean, broad head with lovely bright eyes, which to horsemen signifies intelligence and good sense.” Woolfe admired his short, strong back, his powerful shoulders, his deep chest, his fine balance, and his straight hind legs. And it seemed he loved to be looked at, especially if you had a camera in your hand. Woolfe, who took thousands of shots of Secretariat, said the horse would pose for him, arching his neck, flashing his eyes, flaring his nostrils, and pricking his ears.