In the latest instalment of his popular series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Secretariat’s Triple Crown, Steve Dennis recalls an iconic display that has long since gone down in the annals of racing history
There hadn’t been a Triple Crown winner since Citation swept the board in 1948, but now, with record-breaking victories in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness behind him, Secretariat stood on the brink of achieving US racing’s most coveted, most celebrated feat. Thus the stage was superbly set for the Belmont Stakes, with Secretariat’s old antagonist Sham again in opposition and a place in history on the line.
As bright and beautiful as it was 50 years ago
To write about the 1973 Belmont Stakes is never quite to be able to do it justice, to fall perpetually just short of distilling the sheer poetry of it into prose.
That’s not to be critical of the best turf writers ever to sit down before a blank page and fill it with brilliance, rather a tacit admission that no-one can be as perfect as Secretariat was on that hot June afternoon in suburban New York.
Secretariat’s performance defies encapsulation, refuses to be made small enough to fit on the page, remains as bright and beautiful as it was 50 years ago, having lost no lustre to the passage of time. It is as important, as vital, as definitive now as it was then.
Perhaps its awesome power can be best reconstructed in fragments that adhere to the collective memory despite time’s hellish tendency to erase: 2:24; “he is moving like a tremendous machine”; 31 lengths; three-quarters in 1:09⅘; Ron Turcotte’s sideways glance; “he’s going too damn fast”; 5,617 winning tickets; the lazy flap of the Stars and Stripes on the infield, like a benediction, as one horse begins to separate himself from the rest, from reality.
It is – almost inarguably, allowing for the propensity of heated debate around these things – the greatest performance ever seen on a racetrack, any time, any place. Its only point of reference, to borrow from the best, is itself.
So back to the beginning. There were just five runners in the Belmont, almost everyone having given up on trying to beat Secretariat. Kentucky Derby and Preakness runner-up Sham was back for round four, a puncher who wouldn’t, couldn’t quit, the cuts around his eyes bearing witness to an unequal struggle.
Derby also-rans Twice A Prince and My Gallant were there to take a shot at the board, and Jersey Derby runner-up Pvt. Smiles completed the field.
‘Unflawed hunk of beauty and beast’
Only one of this quintet had, utterly unprecedentedly, been the cover star of three national weekly magazines in the days leading to the big race. Secretariat was front-page news for Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and Time, the latter two adding the cover line ‘Superhorse’ in case there might have been any misunderstanding.
“He has a neck like a buffalo, a back as broad as a sofa,” gushed Time, making America’s new national hero sound like a chimera put together by an overexcited committee.
The New York Post may have been nearer the mark with its assertion that “here was the apparently unflawed hunk of beauty and beast dreamed of by horse-players”, yet still there were those who thought it could be third time lucky for Sham, well-beaten second in both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. Sham was 5-1 on the tote board behind the almost unbackable Secretariat at 1-10.
The red horse’s trainer Lucien Laurin thought differently. Bullet works since the Preakness had convinced him that Secretariat was unwearied by his relentless schedule, energised by his own vitality. On the evening before the Belmont, as though he were Henry V at Agincourt, Laurin tore down the wall of his own caution and spoke uninhibitedly to Secretariat’s faithful biographer William Nack.
“I think he’ll win by more than he’s ever won by in his life,” he said. “I think he’ll probably win by ten. What do you think of that?”
Late on the following afternoon the gates crack open with all the percussive force of the starter’s pistol and this time, for the first time, Secretariat is out of there like a burly bullet under jockey Ron Turcotte, vying for the lead from his inside post. Not like the Derby, where he trailed, or the Preakness, where he ambled, but now like a bull coming into the arena. He arrows for the clubhouse turn as the almost 70,000 souls crammed into every available viewing position on the Belmont Park grounds roar him on.
Just like old times
When he gets there it is just he and Sham, just like old times. Secretariat has the rail and a slight lead, Sham is on his outside, dripping with sweat from the broiling afternoon but also, perhaps, because humans like to anthropomorphise, from trepidation.
As they travel around the turn, the other three horses reduced already to fading hoofbeats, Sham moves to the lead under Laffit Pincay.
The first quarter goes in 23⅗s, faster than expected for a mile-and-a-half race. Sham edges further ahead, a neck, a half-length, working hard while beside him Secretariat is hardly working, gliding over the dirt under Turcotte’s tight hold.
That is Sham’s high-water mark, as good as it gets. A half-length. Don’t ever forget how good Sham was, how brave, how unlucky. He has a half-length on Secretariat as they sweep out of the first turn and then Secretariat takes it back, just like that, takes everything away from Sham and breaks him like a twig.
The race is over. The procession, the parade has started. The half-mile in 46⅕s, the fastest opening half in Belmont history. It’s too damn fast. No horse can maintain that gallop.
Secretariat moves smoothly away from Sham, into another dimension. At halfway he is four lengths clear, the three-quarters gone in 1:09⅘s. It’s too fast. No ordinary horse could maintain that hammering gallop, but now Secretariat barrels towards the far turn, heedless of the normal constraints of time, motion and equine endeavour, and racecaller Chic Anderson rises magnificently to a magnificent occasion.
“They’re on the turn, Secretariat is blazing along. Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine! Secretariat by 12, by 14 lengths. Secretariat is all alone …”
Secretariat passes the three-eighths pole in 1:46⅕s, tying the world record for nine furlongs. Twenty lengths. Behind him, in a race between some other horses, Twice A Prince and My Gallant catch Sham, who for some time has been moving forward purely on muscle memory.
When Secretariat gusts past the quarter-pole the teletimer shows 1:59 flat, two-fifths of a second faster than he ran the Kentucky Derby. The clock is the only thing that can keep up with him.
Howling in amazement and delight
Secretariat is into the stretch now, and the crowd can see him up close. They howl at him in amazement and delight. Twenty-two lengths. He is showing no sign of exertion, his one vivid white forefoot grabbing relentlessly, metronomically for the dirt. He is a tremendous machine. Twenty-four, twenty-five lengths.
No-one has seen anything like this. No-one will again. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. In deep stretch Turcotte glances over at the teletimer, and he knows another record is within reach.
He moves his arms and drives the big red horse forward, and when Secretariat hits the wire he is an astonishing 31 lengths clear as the teletimer judders to a halt at 2:24 flat. Another track record in the Triple Crown, this one by a yawning two and three-fifths seconds; no horse has ever run faster, will ever run faster, on dirt for the distance.
In another part of town, Twice A Prince outbattles My Gallant by a half-length for the honour of second place to Secretariat, the pair running hard to the line but still those jaw-dropping 31 lengths adrift.
Sham finishes last of the five. Later, he was found to have fractured a bone in his right foreleg, injury piled upon insult. He never ran again.
‘I knew we were going fast’
Secretariat won the Triple Crown – the ninth horse to sweep the series – with track records in each of the three races, and while that is unique and an almost supernatural achievement, it is the extraordinary way in which he won the Belmont that will forever be his legacy. As a final flourish, as he galloped out, Turcotte tugging on the reins, Secretariat smashed the world record for a mile and five furlongs. If the world had been flat he might have run clean off the edge of it.
“I knew we were going fast,” said Turcotte, the man who rode the lightning. “But my horse was running so easily, I was not afraid.
“I never pushed him. He was running on his own. The only time I started riding him was in the last sixteenth, when I saw the time, and I wanted the record.”
Others were less phlegmatic than the hardy, cheerful Canadian jockey, who at the age of 81 is still happy to answer phone calls asking him about the events of that incomparable afternoon.
“Two twenty-four flat! I don’t believe it. Impossible,” wrote Kent Hollingsworth, editor of the Blood-Horse. “But I saw it. He won by
a sixteenth of a mile. I saw it. I have to believe it.”
Hollingsworth had had the best part of a week before deadline to get his head around it. Up in the Belmont Park grandstand, in the wild-eyed tumult of the press room, the doyen Charlie Hatton – long the most devoted champion of this nonpareil champion – extemporised words on the spot that have followed Secretariat around like an alphabetic Sham.
“He could not have moved faster if he had fallen off the grandstand roof,” he typed. “His only point of reference is himself.”
And far away, at home in Florida, the peerless golden golfer Jack Nicklaus was moved to tears in his own front room as he watched the broadcast of the Belmont.
Perfection
Later, he asked CBS broadcaster Heywood Hale Broun why he might have been so affected by the race. “It’s because you’ve been looking for perfection your whole life, Jack,” said Broun. “In the Belmont, you finally saw it.”
Perhaps, though, the most sincere tribute was the silent one offered by racegoers at Belmont Park who were well aware of their proximity to greatness.
When the day was done, and the counting over, there remained 5,617 mutuel tickets on Secretariat left uncashed. At ten cents on the dollar they were far more highly prized as souvenirs of an unrepeatable afternoon when everyone got their money’s worth, and so much more besides.
So it’s plain to see how a writer could write all day and still not fully capture the bewitching and immortal majesty of Secretariat’s victory in the Belmont Stakes. Watch the tape instead, watch what was not so much a horse race as a spiritual experience, a glimpse of nirvana while we are still alive to enjoy it.
• Visit the dedicated Secretariat website at secretariat.com
Race 2: ‘I think we should send this horse today’ – time for a change of tactics in the Gotham
Race 1: ‘I made a mistake’ – more trouble than expected as Secretariat sets out for greatness
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