Legend of Secretariat looms larger than ever
50 years after winning Triple Crown, famed horse’s feats still awe-inspiring
George Cusimano heard the big, red horse coming more than he saw him.
Sitting atop pacesetter Ecole Etage in the early stages of the 1973 Preakness Stakes, Cusimano had to know Secretariat would move on him eventually. But around the first turn in the 1 3⁄16mile race? That did not compute.
“Like a freight train,” Cusimano told reporters afterward, trying to capture how it felt, how it sounded, to be passed by the most awesome racehorse anyone had ever encountered.
Secretariat’s victory at Pimlico Race Course on May 19, 1973, was just one chapter in a story that still resonates five decades later.
The horse last ran in October of that year, and he died in the fall of 1989. But the outlandish things he did live on in the sense-memories of those who watched, listened to or even smelled him. The charisma that put him on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated the week after the Preakness never perished.
Which is why people who love racing doubt there will be another horse like Secretariat, who was bred in Ashland, Virginia.
A few — the magical filly Zenyatta winning her first 19 starts from 2007-10, American Pharoah floating above the dirt on his way to the first Triple Crown in 37 years in 2015 — have captured the public imagination this century. But thoroughbred racing is nowhere near as close to the heart of American sporting culture as it was 50 years ago.
Some smart analysts consider Flightline, the 2022 Horse of the Year, the greatest on-track talent since Secretariat, but he hardly made a ripple among casual fans who watch the Triple Crown series and little else.
Against that backdrop of relative indifference, Secretariat’s stature only grows.
When ESPN counted down the top 50 athletes of the 20th century, he was the only nonhuman on the list. Earlier this month Kentucky Derby patrons lined up to take photographs beside a bronze statue of Secretariat outside the gates at Churchill Downs.
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He is the racehorse, just as Babe Ruth was the baseball slugger and Michael Jordan the basketball assassin.
“That’s exactly right,” said NBC analyst Randy Moss, who has covered racing for more than 40 years. “I think it’s too different a time for it to happen again.
“Zenyatta was very popular but not Secretariat-like.”
Records stand
Numbers tell part of the story. In track and field, the world record in the 100-meter sprint was 37-hundredths of a second slower in 1973 than it is now. In swimming, the world record in the 100-meter freestyle was more than four seconds slower.
In horse racing, Secretariat still holds the fastest times in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, the three jewels of the Triple Crown. Some modern horses look as powerful as he did, dwarfing his contemporaries, but they’re still slower. “It’s unfathomable,” Moss said. The spectacles Secretariat produced that spring are just as enduring: his romp at the Derby after a third-place finish in his final prep race had created doubts and, of course, his 31-length runaway in the Belmont.
Sandwiched between those titanic efforts, his win in the Preakness was perhaps a touch more obscure, but it’s a race connoisseurs love to this day. The move Secretariat put on around the first turn, exploding from the back of the pack to the front in 15 seconds, was one of the freakiest things he ever did.
Many observers, including Secretariat’s trainer, Lucien Laurin, thought jockey Ron Turcotte had moved too soon and might pay for his impatience. Hall of Fame jockey Laffit Pincay Jr. loved what he saw from atop Secretariat’s chief rival, Sham, figuring Secretariat would be a sitting duck by the stretch run.
“Well, you saw what happened,” Pincay said recently.
Turcotte did not like the slow early pace set by Ecole Etage, so with the slightest movement of his hands — he equated it to pulling a shirt collar straight — he asked the rocket ship he was aboard to launch. Once Secretariat fired, no horse, not even a game Sham, had the juice to catch up.
“You just don’t do that,” veteran Pimlico handicapper Clem Florio muttered as he processed what he had just witnessed.
Trainer Shug McGaughey, 72, was part of a remarkable Preakness duel 34 years ago when his horse, Easy Goer, lost to Sunday Silence by a nose. Still, he did not hesitate when asked to name the most memorable Preakness of his lifetime.
“Well, I think Secretariat’s,” he said. “It was so exciting because we got kind of a new look when he went to the lead like that.”
“One of the most remarkable races I’ve ever seen,” Moss said. “I was just a young teen, and I still remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, what is he doing?’ And the horse was able to overcome it. It was so unconventional and so improbable that he would still win.”
Pincay and Don Brumfield, who rode third-place finisher Our Native, left Pimlico feeling they had lost to a once-in-a-lifetime talent.
“None better,” Brumfield said recently.
‘Showoff ’
With his awe-inspiring performance in the Belmont still three weeks away, Secretariat had a firm hold on the public imagination. Beyond his furious speed, he was stunning to look at with his bulging muscles and bright chestnut coat. He played naturally to the crowds that gathered just to watch him work out.
“He was a showoff,” Secretariat’s late owner, Penny Chenery, remembered when she visited Pimlico in 2013.
She felt terrible anxiety in the days before the Preakness, knowing that her previous Derby champion, Riva Ridge, had faltered in Baltimore. Secretariat, however, coasted above it all.
The late William Nack, as elegant a wordsmith as ever graced the sportswriting profession, chronicled many sublime performers. But he knew none would surpass Secretariat, whom he followed on a near-daily basis in the spring of 1973.
As Nack, who died in 2018, retold the tale in his Washington sitting room on the 40th anniversary of Secretariat’s Preakness, the horse stared down at him from a portrait on the opposite wall. Little moments stood out as if they’d happened the week before — the roar patrons at Pimlico let out when Secretariat paused to defecate in the saddling area before the Preakness, the celebratory honks on Interstate 95 when Nack flashed a handmade sign telling passing drivers it was Secretariat riding beside him in the van back to New York.
America was in love with a horse.
“It was so much fun,” Nack said. When he wrote about Secretariat’s death, he put himself in the story, using the last days of the mighty animal to meditate on his own mortality.
He had not cried since the death of his father: “Now here I was, in a different hotel room in a different town, suddenly feeling like a very old and tired man of 48, leaning with my back against a wall and sobbing for a long time with my face in my hands.” Secretariat meant that much. He also lives on in stories swapped by everyday racing fans, recalling where they were those Saturdays in May and June of 1973.
Smart bet
David Landau was a student at Milford Mill High School when he attended the Preakness with his pal Howard Hyatt. Just before post time Hyatt told him he’d bet his life savings, $400 earned scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, on Secretariat.
Landau recalled that his friend’s face appeared “ashen” as Secretariat approached the first turn in last place.
“What have I done?” Hyatt muttered.
His hue brightened in a hurry as Secretariat burst past the five horses in front of him. That $400 investment netted him $120 in winnings.
The friends would go on to work at Maryland racetracks as ticket takers and meal servers and to watch other great racehorses. But none stamped their memories quite like Secretariat.
“I have never followed a horse that so many fans grew to love … and still do,” said Landau, now a legal search consultant living in Potomac. “When I watch replays of each of his Triple Crown victories ... I still can’t help but smile.”