Authors: William Nack
Secretariat (14 page)
On the eve of the Sanford Stakes at Saratoga, Braulio Baeza knew about Secretariat but didn’t know what to think of him. The jockey, one of the world’s finest, had seen Secretariat lose his first start (“I knew he would have won that day if he hadn’t gotten bothered, knew it for sure”) and he saw the youngster win his second start. “But you see that too often. Horses get in trouble their first start and then they come back and win and then they don’t turn out to be anything.” Baeza had been impressed with Secretariat’s second victory, but he was confident because he was riding a youngster—the undefeated Linda’s Chief—who had already proved himself a superior runner, and consistently so, in far more compelling company than Secretariat had run against. The only colt he feared was Secretariat.
Lucien, meanwhile, did not stop cranking up his red horse through the morning hours at Saratoga. On August 11, just five days before the Sanford, Secretariat drilled five-eighths of a mile in 0:59, the fastest workout in his life. He came back dancing, and he was saddled and standing ready in the paddock for the Sanford Stakes when Lucien and Ron conferred in generalities. Lucien had never given Ron elaborate instructions for a race.
Lucien boosted him aboard. Nearby, trainer Al Scotti gave Baeza a leg up.
This was the fifty-ninth running of the $27,750 Sanford, with $16,650 to the winner, the only race Man o’ War ever lost, to Upset in 1919. The crowd was not anticipating any such outlandish surprises that afternoon, making Linda’s Chief the heavy favorite at $0.60 to $1.00, Secretariat the second choice at 3–2. Secretariat walked into the four hole on the backstretch, Linda’s Chief beside him in the three slip. Then they were in the gate—Linda’s Chief, the undefeated, standing next to Secretariat, the unknown factor.
In a moment of fury near the head of the stretch, in the space of a dozen bounds passing the three-sixteenths pole, Secretariat made his name. He broke sharply, but he was outrun in the first jumps out of the gate. It took him a little longer to get in gear. He was running last as the field assembled loosely at the far turn. Trevose led by a half length as they went the quarter in 0:22
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, honest enough bidding, with stablemate Northstar Dancer joining him on the outside. Linda’s Chief was bounding along in third, a length and a half in front of Sailor Go Home. Secretariat was trailing inside of Sailor Go Home, as the horses in front of him made the bend. It was a bad place to be.
Secretariat surprised Turcotte, taking longer to get rolling than the first time Ron had ridden him, and he had to steady the colt and let him drop off the leaders. This time he was falling back on his own. The pace was faster, and it seemed to Turcotte that Secretariat was having more trouble getting his things in order. “I was giving him time to find his stride,” he said. Sailor Go Home drifted outside the red horse at the turn, leaving him on the rail and hemmed in to it. Up ahead, Turcotte saw the entry in front, but he couldn’t swing outside; Sailor Go Home was in that lane. Nor could he drop to the rail; Trevose was holding that down.
Trevose made the straight still leading by a half, in 0:46
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at the pole, and Secretariat was right behind him a length away. Linda’s Chief moved on the outside, running to the leaders. Secretariat was blocked behind the front two. Turcotte waited. Baeza drove up on the outside with Linda’s Chief, taking the lead nearing midstretch, and everything happened at once.
Turcotte saw jockey Angel Cordero, riding Northstar Dancer outside Trevose, glance quickly over his right shoulder at Linda’s Chief. Ron felt Secretariat grabbing hold of the bit, running powerfully against it, and he waited. Waited for Cordero to drift away from Trevose, waited for the crack to open up between the two, feeling his horse reaching for it and seeming to wait with him as they neared the eighth pole. And that was when Cordero drifted out, and here Ron turned his colt loose and chirped to him.
Secretariat exploded, driving through whatever room there was, skimming both Trevose and Northstar Dancer and driving forward like a wedge, splitting the hole and shouldering Northstar Dancer aside. His head rose as he went through, gaining speed as Turcotte pumped and sent him to the front. He led by a half length at the eighth pole, then accelerated past Linda’s Chief and Baeza, who hardly knew what to make of it.
Secretariat raced the six furlongs in a sharp 1:10 flat, and in that time he remade himself into the leading two-year-old in America, not only beating the best, but doing it with a dramatic flourish, as a seasoned five-year-old horse might do it. He threw his weight around in tight quarters. He bulled about the racetrack. He won by three.
Penny Tweedy, prodding Lucien, said to him, “Well, there’s
one
horse that came from off the farm that’s not afraid of going between other horses.” Lucien had not spoken well of Riva Ridge’s training at The Meadow, telling her that the farm training was incomplete and had made the bay timid of other horses.
Alfred Vanderbilt walked over to the Meadow Stable box, leaned over, and said, “I wasn’t worried about your horse, I was worried about those other poor horses.” Trainer P. G. Johnson, shaking his head, mused aloud, “I’ve seen a lot of races and it makes you think. Now, Linda’s Chief is a horse of quality, and Secretariat just took him apart, undressed him, beat him all to hell.”
Up in the press box, Art Kennedy had not seen anything like it, and days later he was still speaking incredulously that a two-year-old with only three lifetime starts would even conceive of doing anything so bold as splitting two horses as he did.
Charles Hatton left the clubhouse turn a man in search of a metaphor. He rummaged around in print for the next few weeks before finally settling on one he liked. On August 18, in his daily column, Hatton had his first chance to comment on the Sanford, and he wrote:
In the race, the Tweedy colt proved himself a positive thinker. He required just 1:10, swiftest time of the meeting, to spot unbeaten Linda’s Chief and the others two lengths’ running start, then simply pulverized them a last quarter in :23
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. Coming to the quarter pole, he lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, like “Orange Juice” Simpson plunging the line and scattering a bunch of rookies from the second team.
A week later, Hatton wrote:
In action he can be terrifying. He swoops down on his field like a monster in a horror movie, and in the Sanford he left shambles of them reeling around the racetrack.
While Charlie Hatton emerged as Secretariat’s most loyal and ardent cheerleader in print, Lucien Laurin seemed to be having trouble believing what was taking place. Only a year ago, he abandoned the idea of retirement, and Riva Ridge had yet to win the Futurity. Since then there had been Riva Ridge’s victory at the Kentucky Derby, the race Lucien always wanted to win, the galling disappointment of the Preakness, and the victory in the Belmont. He had just missed winning the Triple Crown, but in doing so he had reached his professional summit. Now, in August at Saratoga, Lucien saddled a horse who ran as if he had classic dimensions to him, a colt combative to a degree rarely seen in thoroughbreds and almost never in two-year-olds.
Nothing at a racetrack seems to stir imaginations more than the sudden rise of a two-year-old. The Kentucky Derby is no sooner over one year than the search begins for the winner of the next—the Triple Crown candidate and the champion three-year-old. The older horses grind each other down, beating each other week after week, and the fillies and the sprinters dash; the grass horses drive for the American turf championship, and the three-year-olds head into summer with the Derby behind them. But nothing matches seeing and discovering a baby with a future.
Secretariat’s workouts, like those of Riva Ridge, were events. Despite the tendency toward laziness that Turcotte sensed in him, Secretariat thrived on work, and he devoured his hay and oats and sweet feed and mash after even strenuous workouts, never backing off his feed cup, never missing an oat. He bloomed to a spectacular sheen in the Saratoga sun, gleaming on Tuesday morning, August 22, when Ron climbed aboard him for his only serious workout between the Sanford and Hopeful stakes.
Secretariat was feeling sharp, jumping around as Mordecai Williams led him out. Eddie Sweat then walked out Riva Ridge. Riva Ridge was scheduled to gallop that morning, Secretariat to work a fast half mile. Lucien and Penny posted themselves along the wooden fence on the backstretch and watched for Secretariat. Lucien had his stopwatch in his right hand as Riva Ridge galloped slowly past. Heads followed him, turning in silence.
Around the bend, coming to the backstretch, Turcotte galloped Secretariat slowly. The colt’s neck was bowed slightly, and he was following about a half mile behind Riva Ridge. The symbolism was not lost on Lucien, and Secretariat, nearing the half-mile pole, galloped past. As Secretariat reached for the wire in the distance, Laurin snapped the watch and grinned. He caught Secretariat in 0:46
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for the half, just a fifth of a second slower than Trevose went the first half in the Sanford.
As usual, following a day of a workout, Secretariat walked inside the shed on Wednesday, but on Thursday Williams saddled the colt for a slow gallop around the racetrack. Jimmy Gaffney, as usual, climbed on the colt. It was just past eight o’clock, and it was an idyllic day, one of those Saratoga mornings when bacon smoke filled the air around the stable kitchen and mash for the oats was cooking in the giant tubs, sending the aroma of oatmeal through the barns and wafting toward the backstretch.
Out the gap to the main track, turning right, the colt moved off at a canter, around the turn for home, past the empty grandstand and clubhouse, past the crowds eating ham and eggs and French toast, around the clubhouse turn, and toward the backstretch. Secretariat was galloping easily. Gaffney neared the pole and started easing him to a walk.
Secretariat was dancing as they neared the gap in the fence leading to the barn, frisky and alert to things around him. That half-mile workout had screwed him up tight, and the colt was simply full of himself.
A van driver, climbing into the cab parked by the backstretch fence, slammed the door behind him. Secretariat stopped, stiffening and bowing his neck. He looked at the van and snorted. Motors made Secretariat especially spooky, Gaffney had noticed at Belmont Park. The colt would duck sharply from tractors chugging along pulling furrows on the racetrack.
“Please don’t start the truck!” Gaffney shouted.
But the window was closed, and the van driver couldn’t hear him. As the diesel fired up, Secretariat ducked out from under him and Gaffney dropped six feet to the very seat of his pants on the racetrack, the bridle still in his left hand. Secretariat took off through the gap toward the barn. Gaffney held on. Secretariat picked up speed bolting through the stable area, and Gaffney remembered the wet dew on the grass as the horse drew him across it like a sled. Secretariat gained speed. Trees rushed by. Finally Gaffney let the colt loose. Secretariat kept running, disappearing behind a barn, running toward the Meadow Stable, reins flapping.
Gaffney jumped up and headed after him, reaching the stable minutes later. Lucien was ashen. Secretariat was still loose and running around. It took ten minutes to catch him at another stable.
“Jimmy, you just took ten years off my life,” Lucien said.
“You? He took fifteen off mine. He’s quick.”
Late in the afternoon on the day of the Hopeful Stakes, Lucien Laurin stepped beneath a giant elm in the Saratoga paddock and waited for Secretariat. He was smoking a cigarette and was wrapped in a splash of colors—a red plaid sports coat, white shirt and pants, white shoes, and a white and purple tie. Lucien smoked only when he felt the pressure of the game closing around him, as he did now, with half an hour to post for the Hopeful Stakes.
Traditionally, Saratoga is where the finest racing stables in America have first tried their untested two-year-olds. The $75,000-added Hopeful, the last stakes race run at Saratoga, is the meeting’s crowning touch, an important event that has been won by many horses who went on to greater fame—Man o’ War, Whirlaway, Battlefield, Native Dancer, Nashua, Hail to Reason, and Buckpasser. Several horses who finished second in the Hopeful later made major contributions to the American stud—including Fair Play, the sire of Man o’ War, the great Bull Lea, and Tom Fool, sire of Buckpasser—as have colts who finished third, such as Discovery, Turn-to, and Sir Gaylord.
Everyone congregated under the tree—the fans, the horsemen, the owners, and the simply curious—waiting to see the colt everyone was talking about. Penny was there, and so were Ogden Phipps and his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, a friendly bear of a man with a pug nose and freckles and a love of speed: power boats and running horses. Ogden Mills Phipps had come to see the full brother to The Bride, the filly his family picked when they won the toss but lost the horse—a good-looking filly with no speed.
More than a hundred people crowded in a circle around the tree when Secretariat was led across the walking ring and through the crowd. His coat was dappling in the sun—a sign of radiant health—and as he strode to the walking ring around the tree there were cameras clicking and choruses of “ooohhhs” and “ahhhhhhs,” as at the unveiling of a statue.
Turcotte thought the race was a cinch for Secretariat. Conditions in the race favored the colt. Linda’s Chief was not in the field, and Secretariat was coming off a sharp race and a fast work. The distance was 110 yards farther than the Sanford, and Turcotte felt the extra yards would simply give the colt that much more time to catch the leaders. For Turcotte the Hopeful became more than an ordinary race. It had an emotional sweep and cadence to it, becoming a 1:16
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dash in which his feelings swept from near panic to desperation to a sense of awe.
Secretariat broke from the gate with the field, emerging with the others as the gate popped open, but immediately Turcotte felt him floundering as he tried to pick up speed.
“He was trying to run, trying to get with it and get in his best stride, but he just couldn’t.”
He fell back to last as Sunny South scooted to the lead, with Brandford Court a neck behind in second on the outside, Step Nicely tucked away in third, Trevose nearby with River of Fire, and Flight to Glory tracking them. They strung out racing for the turn, and the red horse bounded along in last.
Turcotte never rushed him a step. He thought the colt was doing his best but having problems getting all the parts to mesh. He was still an overgrown kid. Turcotte sat tight and clucked to him, trying to give him encouragement. As they charged the turn, running on top of it past the five-eighths pole, Turcotte sensed the colt was still having problems and he started thinking that he had to move soon. He was riding a prohibitive favorite, and already the turn was looming up ahead.
“I wasn’t panicky, but I was thinking, ‘My God, pick it up! Will ya?’ ”
Then, as the nine horses raced through the opening quarter mile, Sunny South dragging them through it in 0:22
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, Turcotte suddenly felt the colt pulling himself together, taking hold of the bit.
So he coaxed Secretariat, chirping to him, cajoled him, tapping his shoulder with the stick, and asked him for more speed, pumping him and urging him on. They went to the half-mile pole. The crowd stirred as Sunny South raced in front on the turn and track announcer Dave Johnson called out loudly over the speakers: “Secretariat is the trailer as they pass the half-mile pole!”
Then the move began. It was a powerful move, dramatic and compelling to see, devastating in the scope of its execution. In an instant the crowd was on its feet. Driving past the half-mile pole—two, three, perhaps four bounds past it—Secretariat suddenly leveled out under Turcotte, who sensed a lowering of the mass, as if the colt had found the gear, and took off as no two-year-old had ever done under Turcotte before. The jockey steered him to the outside and sat quietly feeling the surge.
Secretariat moved to the field with a rush, accelerating outside as they made the bend, without urging from Turcotte, bounding along as if independent of whatever momentum the race possessed, independent of its pace and tempo, independent of the shifting, slow-motion struggles unfolding within it, the small battles for position and advantage. But Secretariat was not responding to any force the race was generating, but rather moving as though he’d evolved his own kinetic field beyond it, and Turcotte would later recall sitting quietly and feeling awed.
From the clubhouse, where Vanderbilt and Laurin fastened their binoculars on him, Secretariat emerged for the first time as a spectacle in the sport, overpowering in his manner of performance. He ran to his horses in bunches and singly, first to Torsion and then to Flight to Glory and then to River of Fire as he headed around the bend for the three-eighths pole, the blue and white blocks disappearing as he swept past them on the outside, reappearing again in the gaps between them, disappearing again behind Trevose and Step Nicely. Measuring Stop the Music and Brandford Court, he raced into view again, but quickly disappeared behind them. He was sprinting his quarter mile in less than 0:22, as he charged to the throat of Sunny South, who was racing on the lead.
It was executed that quickly, startling veteran horsemen by the brilliance of it and leaving Lucien Laurin watching in disbelief.
The red horse raced from last to first over about 290 yards of ground, not passing a single horse until he’d raced well past the half-mile pole. He was already moving to the lead nearing the five-sixteenths pole. It was a spectacular sweep.
He turned for home two lengths in front, and the rest was simply a mopping up. He widened on Flight to Glory through the lane, winning by five and missing Bold Lad’s track mark by three-fifths of a second.
As Secretariat’s audacity in the Sanford first drew serious attention to him, his run in the Hopeful made him the most exciting racehorse in New York. He had come to Saratoga the winner only of a maiden race at Aqueduct. He promptly won three races in twenty-seven days and returned to Long Island the leading two-year-old in America, the heir apparent to Riva Ridge. The Sanford and the Hopeful turned everything around. No one was saying now that the Meadow Stable could not do it a second year in succession.
Among the believers was Penny Tweedy, convinced by witnessing the Hopeful Stakes that the Meadow Stable owned its second two-year-old champion in succession. “I was perfectly sure that, barring accident, this horse was going on and we were going to have another year like we had last year.”
It was then she began to hope that her father—oblivious to life around him in the hospital, unaware of the existence of Secretariat—would live to the end of the year. “All along I had been praying that he would die because his life had become meaningless. There was nothing left of the man I knew except a shell, a 90-pound shell, and once he could no longer speak there was less and less left.” Chris Chenery had been in New Rochelle Hospital for four and a half years, and during that time he had deteriorated from a 210-pound man to a childlike invalid, bedridden and helpless.
Then suddenly, with the rise of Secretariat, Chenery’s life acquired a new meaning. If he had died in September, the heavy inheritance tax imposed on the estate would have forced the heirs to syndicate Secretariat immediately. Penny believed there would have been irresistible pressure on her to syndicate the horse, since he was a son of the prepotent Bold Ruler, whose sons were already proving exceptional sires. The selling of Secretariat would have been premature in September, the timing of it wrong.
Penny did not feel she could have asked a syndicate for the right to race the horse to the end of 1972 and then through 1973, the first year syndicate members would expect to breed mares to the horse. So she foresaw Secretariat breeding on the farm, not competing at the track, if her father died that autumn. Moreover, off the Sanford and the Hopeful Stakes, she thought the red horse was going to win the same string of rich two-year-old races Riva Ridge had won in 1971—the Futurity, the Champagne Stakes, the Laurel Futurity, and the Garden State Stakes. This would give him the champion two-year-old honors of 1972, giving him a multimillion-dollar value as a potential sire on the bloodstock market. He could not have commanded such a price after the Hopeful Stakes.
She had not learned painlessly the lessons of selling horses at their maximum financial potential. Earlier in the autumn, at the Keeneland yearling sales, she had been offered $1,250,000 for Upper Case, the pretty-boy son of Round Table–Bold Experience. While Riva Ridge was working toward the Kentucky Derby, Upper Case actually developed into one of America’s leading three-year-olds. He won the $100,000 Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park in Florida, then came back and won the prestigious $100,000 Wood Memorial at Aqueduct. Penny turned down the offer and she soon regretted it. Upper Case tailed off on the racetrack; he seemed to lose interest in his work. When he started losing, his value plummeted. “We finally sold him for $750,000, and very gratefully,” Penny said. “I have been playing two games: one is to get the horses to win and the other is to recognize their peak and sell them at their peak.” The trick is to figure out when horses are performing at optimal potential on the racetrack and, if the wish is to sell, to sell then. Secretariat was not yet for sale.
“So I was really just praying in my heart that Dad would last through December. Then we could syndicate Secretariat with the right to race him through 1973; I just didn’t think the chances of being allowed to race him a full year would be any good if Dad died in the fall. They would have sent him to the breeding shed that spring. I wanted him to get to his three-year-old year so I could say, ‘He hasn’t broken down—he’s at the peak of his powers, his full potential—and we shouldn’t retire him now.’ I wanted maximum potential financially from Secretariat because it would enable us to keep the farm and not have to sell the broodmares when Dad died.”
Chris Chenery lived through the fall of 1972, and through the rich series of two-year-old races—from the $144,200 Futurity through the $298,665 Garden State Stakes—the red horse built upon his record in the Sanford and the Hopeful, embellishing it as the distances grew longer. As a son of Bold Ruler, of course, his stamina would always be suspect, and so would his soundness. In fact later, whenever Secretariat first walked or jogged of mornings on the racetrack, he had a kind of crabbed, stiff way of moving that made horsemen wince when they saw him, reminding them of his rheumatic sire, who walked like an elderly man until he limbered up at the barn. Rumors of unsoundness would follow the red horse for months, none of them substantiated. The colt gave no indication of soreness in the way he raced that autumn through the last four races.
Groom Mordecai Williams was leaning against the reins and almost walking on his heels, holding fast to Secretariat, as they rose from the underground tunnel at Belmont Park between the stables and the paddock, and together went to the Futurity.
If trainer Johnny Campo and the others had a chance to beat Secretariat that fall, as it would turn out in the end, the chance was in the Futurity. Lucien had Turcotte work the colt seven-eighths in 1:24 following the Hopeful Stakes, then came back later for a five-furlong blowout in company with Gold Bag, jockey Jorge Velasquez aboard. As the two men took the youngsters to the racetrack, Lucien told them to let the colts ramble.
“Let him run as fast as he can without abusing him,” Lucien told Turcotte. “Don’t kill him.”
Velasquez had a long lead as he broke Gold Bag past the five-eighths pole, and Turcotte let the red horse run to catch him. Turning into the stretch, having cut the lead to five lengths behind Gold Bag, Turcotte lashed Secretariat twice right-handed, and the colt plunged down the straight. He caught Gold Bag at the sixteenth pole and opened six by the time they hit the wire, running the five-eighths in 0:58, the fastest workout of the day at that distance. It was a sensational move.
“Ronnie, you worked too fast,” Lucien scolded. “He’s only a baby and I think you asked too much of him.”
On Saturday it almost made the difference. A crowd of 34,248 people made the colt the odds-on favorite at $0.20 to $1.00, and he ran to pattern at the start. Swift Courier went to the lead down the backside, Secretariat dropping back to sixth. He was not running well. The racetrack was clodding under horses’ hooves, and as he trailed them down the backstretch, hard clods flew up and struck him in the face, causing him to climb with his front legs, rather than reach out with them. So Turcotte swung him to the outside, and Secretariat leveled out, racing the opening quarter in 0:23
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, six lengths behind Swift Courier in 0:22
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. Around the far turn, picking up speed and staying outside, Secretariat moved closer to the pace, passing Gallant Knave as they banked for home. He was rushing the second quarter in 0:22
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, and as Swift Courier turned for home, the colt was looping the field and losing ground. Sweeping into the stretch, Secretariat passed Stop the Music and Crimson Falcon. Then he raced to Whatabreeze and Swift Courier, and coming to the eighth pole, in midstretch, he drove past them and drew out by two. Laffit Pincay, Jr., on Stop the Music, had set out after him, and in the closing seconds he gained some ground. Seeing Pincay, Turcotte went to the whip.
