In the latest of our series reliving Secretariat’s three-year-old campaign, we look back on the day the equine icon went back to Belmont Park – and got seriously stuck in the mud
It had been business as usual for the magnificent Secretariat in the Marlboro Cup on his previous start, a romping victory in record time.
The next step for Big Red was expected to take him on to turf and the Man o’ War was earmarked as the target. Plans can change, though, and instead Secretariat was sent for the G1 Woodward at Belmont Park over a mile and a half on dirt – the very stage upon which he had seized racing immortality by main force in the Belmont Stakes.
But this was not, as became plain, business as usual …
Sacrificed on the altar of expedience
Considering his all-encompassing glory, his brilliance and his charisma and his iron grip on the imagination, considering his position, Secretariat was not always treated very well by his people.
That isn’t to say they left him out in the rain, or forgot to feed him. But now and again their duty to his bigger picture was overlooked, his excellence sacrificed on the altar of expedience.
No-one should ever train a horse for the benefit of the Historical Review Committee, but in those different times, o tempora o mores, Secretariat was occasionally campaigned like an all-purpose horse rather than the all-timer he was.
He was kept out of the winner’s circle five times in his career, and defeat is not a terrible thing. As a metric of greatness, an unbeaten record is an unnecessary accessory. Secretariat was beaten on debut; so it goes. He won the Champagne at Belmont as a two-year-old but the stewards took his number down; it happens.
He should probably not have run in the Wood Memorial, because he had worked poorly beforehand and had a throbbing abscess in his mouth, but he needed another start before the Kentucky Derby.
He should not have run in the Whitney, because he was fighting a low-grade infection, but he needed a race before the Travers and by that stage of his career he had become almost a mythical beast, capable of fantastical feats beyond the confines of possibility.
“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 in its 40-year retrospective of Secretariat’s campaign, an opinion given in the safety of the statute of limitations.
And he definitely, definitely should not have run in the Woodward. But he did. To look at the chain of events that put him in the gate is to see hubris, arrogance and sheer bad decision-making working in concert, with the inevitable result.
At the beginning of the week, trainer Lucien Laurin entered Secretariat and Riva Ridge for the Woodward at Belmont Park over a mile and a half, with the clear intention that they would not run against each other.
Riva Ridge was the intended runner; Secretariat had been working on the lawn in preparation for the Man o’War on turf at the same track nine days hence. He had not been working hard, just a couple of leisurely blowouts, the old ‘pawn to e4’ in initial preparation for the forthcoming and habitual swift checkmate.
Secretariat wasn’t ready to run in the Woodward. He thrived on hard work before his races, needed what his biographer William Nack termed the ‘zinger’ to bring him to the boil. He was training for another race.
Yet Laurin put him in to pinch-hit for Riva Ridge just in case the weather turned. Riva Ridge hated a sloppy track; Secretariat could handle it. According to popular belief, Secretariat could handle anything. That was his curse as well as his good fortune.
Knife at a gunfight
And, whaddaya know, New York in late September, it rained hard the day before the race. So Riva Ridge was out, Secretariat was in. Plan B. B for balls-up. As race-planning went, it was as shoddy, as foolish a decision as could possibly have been made, Secretariat the archetypal knife at a gunfight.
The betting public made him 3-10 favourite to beat four rivals, none of whom should have given him any trouble, which had no doubt been the kernel of the nutty idea to run an unprepared horse in a headline race. Chenery’s contrition echoes down the ages.
There was the big-hearted, durable and enduring Cougar II, the Chilean-bred ‘Big Cat’ from California, who had won the Woodward in 1971 before being disqualified for barely discernible interference. He was a champion on turf, majestic on dirt, but he didn’t like a sloppy track any more than Riva Ridge did, and Secretariat had beaten him with ease in the Marlboro Cup.
Then there was the filly Summer Guest, runner-up in the 1972 Woodward but demoted to third; the French import Amen II, coming off victory in the Lawrence Realization over the Woodward course and distance; and Prove Out, the 16-1 longshot who had never won a stakes.
Prove Out was trained by the great H. Allen Jerkens, who lived by the mantra ‘if you’re not in, you can’t win’ and lived with a nickname he cared little for – the ‘Giant Killer’. Jerkens was also the trainer of Onion, who had never won a stakes un
til he famously, infamously beat Secretariat in the Whitney.
The barnmates Prove Out and Onion ran in the orange colours of Hobeau Farm, were both front-running longshots in a five-horse race that began with the letter W run in New York state. Lightning can strike as often as it damn well pleases; the storm would come.
It may have been a five-horse race, but it was a two-horse contest all the way around the Big Sandy. Prove Out broke smartly under Jorge Velasquez and went to the lead, Secretariat was not as lumpen at the gate as he often was and went after Prove Out. The other three horses could have been added to the attendance of 32,117, onlookers all.
Velasquez did not have a train to catch; he went only slowly aboard Prove Out, 50s flat through the first half-mile as Ron Turcotte set Secretariat down at Prove Out’s quarters. Halfway down the backside Turcotte sent Secretariat forward, conscious of the slow gallop, and Big Red opened up a lead of two, maybe three lengths. So far, so scripted.
Secretariat appeared in complete control, and when the posse closed on him around the far turn he moved disdainfully away from them again, taking a clear lead past the three-eighths pole. Prove Out was still there on the fence, but he’d had his moment. Hadn’t he?
‘He did not respond’
“At the three-eighths pole, I tried to get Secretariat to move out,” said Turcotte. “But he did not respond the way he normally does.”
Secretariat was, in fact, responding like a horse who wasn’t ready for a hard race, and between the three and the two, the storm broke upon him. Secretariat was four paths off the rail and not extending his lead, and now Prove Out was right there, back for more, going strongly again as they swung into the long stretch.
Battle was joined, but not for long. Turcotte hit Secretariat right-handed and then left-handed as they made the three-sixteenth pole but there was nothing there, no answer to the question being so urgently asked. Startlingly, stunningly, Secretariat was beat and Prove Out was beating him, easily.
With a furlong to run it was just weights and measures. Prove Out, conceding seven pounds to Secretariat, skipped clear of the labouring champion who had nothing, nothing at all, left to give. Prove Out drew off to win by 4½ lengths in a very fast time, 2m 25⅘s, meting out to Secretariat the biggest beating of his illustrious life.
Cougar II came along when he was ready for third, 11 lengths further back, and even before the Big Cat had crossed the line boos and catcalls were ringing out across Belmont. They had come to praise Secretariat, now they were burying him under invective, the curious mindset of the affronted racefan.
What had happened? The slow pace had not helped, sure, and that was the straw Laurin clung to as the deluge of questions threatened to overwhelm him. In the modern vernacular, he threw Turcotte under the bus.
“Don’t let anyone tell you that the slow pace didn’t matter,” said Laurin. “Of course it did. After those first two slow quarters Ron shouldn’t have just opened up two lengths on the backstretch.
Monday-morning quarterback
“This colt likes to run and he was ready to run,” he went on. “He should have been allowed to open up five or six lengths – or even more – and then he would have made those other horses come and run at him.”
Such Monday-morning quarterbacking shouldn’t be allowed to hide what Laurin had to know in his heart – that Secretariat wasn’t ready for the race, had run strongly early but then finished off like a tired horse who hadn’t been conditioned to his usual peak. Later, taking direct aim at Laurin’s opening statement, Turcotte had his turn.
“The slow pace didn’t matter,” he said. “He was going pretty good at that point and I wasn’t worried. I just don’t know what happened to him after that.”
A dispassionate view, with the detachment hindsight allows, is that Secretariat beat Cougar II twice as far as he had done in 
the Marlboro Cup, also ran a good time in defeat, but lacked his customary outstanding level of performance because he was not 100 per cent ready to run in the Woodward.
Moreover, Prove Out was peaking in a big way and won the Jockey Club Gold Cup – then run over two miles – on his next start, beating no less an adversary than Riva Ridge. This may have been Secretariat’s most comprehensive defeat, but in many ways it was an entirely understandable defeat.
Understandable, too, because Allen Jerkens was its architect. Jerkens had a magic touch, a fearless outlook and a legacy that lives on beyond his place in the Hall of Fame. It was he, not Laurin, who won the trainers’ Eclipse Award for 1973, and when Jerkens died in March 2015 he was granted the sort of tribute he would have prized above practically all his big-race wins.
“He was a horseman’s horseman,” Wayne Lukas told the Daily Racing Form. “No frills, very thorough. Always to be considered, whether it was the third race on a Wednesday or a Grade 1 on a Saturday.”
And he beat Secretariat twice, once in a Grade 1 on a Saturday. Yes, the great horse had been beaten again, but he would never be beaten again. Plan B had failed, had failed him, but Laurin would go back to Plan A next time and all would be well.
• Visit the dedicated Secretariat website at secretariat.com
Race 9: ‘It was a field of champions and he was just toying with them’ – Ron Turcotte marvels
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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