Secretariat won Preakness with a bold move
It was 50 years ago, on May 19, 1973, when Secretariat, one of the greatest racehorses of all time, won the Preakness on his way to the Triple Crown. Bill Nack, one of the greatest racing writers of all time, chronicled Big Red’s journey into thoroughbred legend.
The horse lived 19 years; lame from a painful degenerative disease, he was euthanized on Oct. 4, 1989, at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. Nack, who wept that day for Secretariat, died in 2018 at age 77 at his home in Washington.
I’ve been treated to the long transcript of an interview Nack gave in 1998, on the 25th anniversary of Secretariat’s Triple Crown, and it’s a marvel: rich in detail about the colt’s physical qualities, his brilliant workouts as a 2-year-old, his victory as a 3-yearold in the Kentucky Derby; and full of the wonder Nack experienced when he saw Secretariat, with Ron Turcotte aboard, rocket to the Preakness lead at Pimlico.
“The Preakness was, in its own way, really bold, more exciting than the Derby,” Nack told Josh Pons, who recorded the interview at his family’s horse farm, Country Life, in Harford County. “Whereas the Derby had a pulse to it, the Preakness had an electricity that shot through the place the minute [Secretariat] took off around the first turn.”
Last out of the gate, Secretariat trailed the Preakness field until the first turn, where he suddenly roared past two horses — Ecole Etage and Torsion — then held the lead over Sham, ridden by Laffit Pincay, as they raced through the backstretch.
Nack, along with Clem Florio, the Baltimore handicapper and racing writer, watched in amazement as Secretariat made that fast move from the outside. Letting a colt speed to the lead in the first turn, as a strategy for winning at Pimlico, was unheard of. Florio thought Secretariat’s jockey had lost his mind.
“‘Turcotte has gone crazy,’” Nack heard Florio exclaim. “‘This is suicide at Pimlico.’ But, as Turcotte used to say, ‘[Secretariat] goes around turns like a hoop around a barrel.’ He loved turns. He almost went
faster on turns than straightaways. Maybe it was because he was so short-coupled [having a relatively short back for a thoroughbred] and his center of gravity was able to handle it.
“My most vivid memory of that moment was not the beginning of the move, which was electric enough that people were gasping, but when he went by Sham and literally blew by him. You could see Pincay look over and go after him, but it was two and a half lengths late. He left Pincay’s jock spinning on the ⅞ths pole. He flew to the lead and the rest of it was just sailing.”
Secretariat won the Preakness by two and a half lengths.
“I’ll never forget the scene,” Nack said. “The racetrack was dappled with shadows and sunlight, the way the sun sets in the west and throws that long shadow, and Secretariat is running into the sunlight and out of the sunlight and into the sunlight. It was like watching a movie of a horse running. It had that cinematic effect.
“I was ecstatic after that race, and I ran downstairs [from the press box], and
Turcotte comes back and everybody’s hugging. It was a magnificent performance. People say it’s the greatest Derby that ever was, but others will say it’s the greatest Preakness that ever was because of that one move, just the way it was done, and the electricity that was in the air after it. There was nothing like it.”
Nack had spent many days with Secretariat and his handlers in the months leading up to the Triple Crown races. He even traveled in the van with the horse from Baltimore to New York for the Belmont Stakes. After the horse’s stunning, 31-length victory there — a race still regarded with awe — Nack wrote a book about him.
In the Pons interview, Nack described Secretariat as “an aesthetic wonder” with both sudden power for acceleration and tremendous stamina for the long race.
“Had he not had cannon bones [below the knee] like tree trunks, he’d have broken down,” Nack said. “And those big, sturdy cannon bones crept right up into a big flat knee. And a beautiful forearm [upper part of the front leg] and, of course, that shoulder
was just extraordinary. … He was a series of parts that made up a propulsion system, the heart of which we didn’t even know about, which was the heart.”
Secretariat was a prodigious consumer of oats — 14 or 15 quarts a day — who had “a bigger tank” than other horses of his generation.
“He was an engineering marvel,” Nack told Pons, describing the horse’s astonishing win in the Belmont. “It was the economy that used to get me. He never even swished his tail [a sign of fatigue] at the end of a mile and a quarter in [1 minute, 59 seconds], at the end of a mile and a half in [2 minutes, 24 seconds]. I mean, you’d think there’d be some sign of deterioration in the stride. Never. That’s what was so remarkable. When you look at [video] clips of him, he might have been slowing down to a last quarter-mile in 25 [seconds] at the end of the Belmont, but there was no visible sign that he was weary.”
Secretariat, he said, “moved with authority, moved with clarity,” and right into legend.