There’s no such thing as a certainty in racing, is there? In the latest instalment of his popular series, Steve Dennis remembers Secretariat’s notorious visit to Saratoga – and a horse called Onion
It was back to the day job for Triple Crown hero Secretariat, who had been briefly resting on his laurels after a seven-race spring/summer campaign that had rendered him a global phenomenon, this outstanding specimen of equine pulchritude who could bend time and space seemingly at will. Big Red had conquered his age group almost without resistance and now it was the moment for him to take on older horses for the first time, in the G2 Whitney at Saratoga.
Where reputations came to die
The aptly-named Upset. Jim Dandy. Wichita Oil, even. Saratoga had a name it went by, a forbidding, foreboding name whispered now and then underneath the candy-stripe awnings of upstate New York’s jewel of a racetrack. The ‘Graveyard of Champions’, they called it, where reputations came to die.
Upset beat the fabled Man o’War, the only defeat of the paragon’s career. Jim Dandy popped up at 100-1 to put away 1930 Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox, and hadn’t 56-1 poke Wichita Oil beaten Secretariat’s illustrious barnmate Riva Ridge, winner of the 1972 Kentucky Derby and Belmont, just three days earlier?
But what do the young and strong care for the lessons of history, things that happened to others but wouldn’t, couldn’t happen to them? Secretariat swaggered into Saratoga like a golden Goliath, ready to scatter any pesky Davids with a roll of his powerful shoulders, implacable, irresistible, incontestable.
Even the blue-and-white ‘Meadow Stable’ bunting garlanding Broadway, the main drag of Saratoga Springs, honoured the conquering hero, although those with a classical education – or even merely a railbird’s nous – may have mouthed the word ‘hubris’ as the flags flapped in the breeze.
Underpinning Secretariat’s generally fireproof aura was the bullet work he’d turned in a week before the Whitney, when he’d made the trees sway, going through a mile in 1:34, a new but obviously unofficial track record.
Puny pebbles
His trainer Lucien Laurin often put a zinger of a workout into Secretariat in the last days before a race, just to tune the engine high, and with that safely in the bank everything seemed in place. Bring on the Davids, with their puny pebbles.
There were four of them, with the four-year-old True Knight the second-choice on the morning-line at 8-1, following his fine effort to play second fiddle to the aforementioned Riva Ridge in a Brooklyn Handicap run in world-record time at Aqueduct.
West Coast Scout was coming off victory in the $100,000 Amory L. Haskell Handicap at Monmouth Park; the six-year-old Rule By Reason had chased home 1972 champion three-year-old colt Key To The Mint on his last start; and then there was a front-running speed horse named, ingloriously, Onion.
Onion, trained by the astute, iconoclastic Allen Jerkens, had been busy through the campaign, going three-for-ten and hitting the board every time, although the mile-eighth of the Whitney was stretching him out some.
Just four days earlier the gelding had set a new track record for 6½ furlongs at Saratoga, barrelling by eight lengths in an allowance race, gate-to-wire, so he had a sharp edge on him and would lead under Jacinto Vasquez, until at some point he would be expected to move deferentially aside as the champ steamed past.
Secretariat was 1-10 on the tote board, and many of the 30,119 souls crammed into the venerable grandstands at the Spa had a two-dollar ticket on him about their person, for souvenir value. Goliath walked into the gate, banged his noble head on the door of the three-hole and it lurched open, before being swiftly slammed shut again in the demigod’s face. As inauspicious portents go, it went.
Waiting game
Secretariat was not renowned as a gate horse, not usually ready to rise and shine at the first twitch of the curtain. Yet this time his red head in those blue-and-white-checked blinkers poked out first before jockey Ron Turcotte reined him back, content to play a waiting game as Onion peeled away towards the clubhouse turn, laying down an indifferent pace, going through the first quarter in 24⅖s as Vasquez endeavoured to husband his sprinting speed over a nine-furlong course.
Turcotte steered Secretariat towards the rail, orbiting the first turn in fourth place. He waited for the wide-open space of the back-stretch before letting out an inch of rein, which Secretariat gleefully took, hustling up the inside of Rule By Reason, who was already being pushed along to hold his position.
Vasquez kept Onion clear of the rail all the way down to the turn, because some riders had noted that the inside path was unusually deep that day, and set ‘Three Bears’ fractions on the lead, 47⅘ for the half, 1:11 for the three-quarters, not too hot, not too chilly, just right. As they rolled into the far turn, Secretariat dispensed with the attentions of West Coast Scout and Turcotte took him on a dream run up the rail, challenging Onion for the first time.
The crowd reacted audibly to the move, surely the shape of things to come, surely the moment when Onion would move aside, powerless in the face of all that power pent-up in Secretariat’s mighty frame. Turcotte waved his whip left-handed in front of Secretariat’s eye, an unmistakable gesture of ‘hurry up and go now’.
But he didn’t.
With three-sixteenths to run and the race to win, Onion still held a narrow advantage and Turcotte was no longer waving his whip but using it, beating Secretariat’s backside like a carpet.
There was plenty of room for the champ on the fence, but astonishingly he couldn’t go past Onion, who was repelling all boarders under a vigorous Vasquez drive. It couldn’t be … but it was, for everyone knows what can happen when David meets Goliath.
At the eighth-pole, Secretariat was a head behind and hope sprang eternal; at the sixteenth-pole he was a neck adrift and hope died with every futile stride towards the wire. Onion was on top, Onion was getting it done, Secretariat wasn’t and couldn’t, and in the last 50 yards Onion drew off to win by a length.
It was fortunate that Turcotte kept pushing, as Rule By Reason was rallying hard and got within half a length of the red horse as they slipped under the wire, the clock frozen a flat second outside the track record. Secretariat, the hero of Churchill Downs, the pride of Pimlico, the beast of Belmont, had been beaten.
“I was ready for Secretariat, but I never thought he would stay beside me for so long,” said Vasquez, who merited high praise for riding the perfect waiting-in-front race, having used similar Secretariat-defying tactics aboard Angle Light in the Wood Memorial, although that got lost in the daze of the aftermath.
“I thought he would just go right on by. But at the eighth-pole, I thought ‘this is not the same Secretariat today’.”
He was right. At no point in the Whitney had Secretariat shown the blurring brilliance of his Triple Crown races, nor even the vigour of his earlier victories in the Bay Shore and the Gotham. The press pack pushed their notebooks towards Turcotte and Laurin, but answers came there none.
‘He just wasn’t the same horse’
“I really cannot explain what happened to him,” Turcotte told the New York Times. “He didn’t seem to like the track, and he just never fired. Hitting his head on the gate didn’t help, and when I tried to set him down he just wasn’t the same horse.”
That much was obvious. The horse everyone believed to be unbeatable had been beaten for a fourth time, although on one of those occasions the stewards got together to knock him down.
“I believe he’s smart enough to know he got beat,” said Laurin, and that was probably true, as a horse accustomed to acclaim will notice its absence.
And there was a contributory factor to his defeat, as the following day Secretariat spiked a temperature of 102. A bid for the Travers, Saratoga’s ‘Midsummer Derby’ centrepiece two weeks later, was now out of the question.
Big Red had been a sick horse, plagued by the indignity of loose bowels before the race, hobbled by a low-grade infection that wasn’t news to his connections, who believed he was strong enough to win the race anyway. Hubris, blowing in the breeze from the very start, at its finest.
“There was a feeling this horse could do anything, and some of the decisions I made were not good,” his owner Penny Chenery told the Blood-Horse, a confession made 40 years after the fact.
Onion had never won a stakes before the Whitney and never won a stakes after the Whitney, though he raced another three seasons. This lightning strike was emblematic of the work of Allen Jerkens, who sobbed with joy – or relief, or surprise – when he lifted the big-race trophy.
Like Saratoga, Jerkens had another name he went by, although it generally had to be whispered if he was around as he wasn’t all that keen on it. People called him the ‘Giant Killer’, as he had long shown a talent for upsetting big names in big races – he beat five-time Horse of the Year Kelso three times with the less distinguished Beau Purple.
If there had been any doubt, the victory of Onion over Secretariat, of David over Goliath, sealed that identity, that legacy forever.
Jerkens instead preferred his other nickname - the Chief. Hail to the Chief, then … and not, as will become clear, for the last time.
• Visit the dedicated Secretariat website at secretariat.com
Race 7: ‘A lavishly paid breeze, a three-inch putt, a slam dunk, a gentle volley into an open court’
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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