Before the Legend: Remembering Secretariat’s Magical 1973 Season – America’s Best Racing

Live long enough, and you may see a legend form before your eyes. Deserving immortality, yet also simplified from the reality you knew.

Fifty years since Secretariat won the Triple Crown, he has both grown and reduced. One image often represents his high place in racing history: his Belmont Stakes, the stunning all-alone tremendous machine. And yes, it felt as phenomenal that day as it still looks today.

But when I remember Secretariat, theres an ingredient that our latter-day legend may forget. I remember living with uncertainty.

When Secretariat turned 3 years old, I was a fifth-grader who bought Turf and Sport Digest each month with my allowance and searched each weekly issue of Sports Illustrated dad had a subscription for more timely racing news. We didnt live near any racetrack. Id never seen a Daily Racing Form. There was no internet, no home computer, and not much horse racing on TV. ABCs Wide World of Sports and the CBS Sports Spectacular didnt show Secretariats Kentucky Derby prep races. His progress came to me through the magazines, plus newspaper items that appeared more frequently as the Kentucky Derby drew near.

One day in April 1973, I found a four-leaf clover in the grade school playground yard. It was soon before the Wood Memorial Stakes. I remember standing in that schoolyard, anxious for Secretariats final Derby prep, and thinking a line from a Peanuts comic strip: Good luck, kid, youre going to need it.

I taped the four-leaf clover to his full-page photo from a recent Sports Illustrated article, Oh Lord, Hes Perfect.

Hyperbolic headlines and special clovers cant guarantee success. Third place. I was sad, yet hopeful. The year before, Riva Ridge ran fourth in one of his Derby preps but we saw him impressively win the Derby. I loved Riva. And if he could bounce back after losing, Secretariat might, too.

The Derby broadcast was my familys first time watching him in real time, inhabiting a saddling paddock and a post parade. I can tell you this about Secretariat: he had a presence that grown-ups might call charisma. Our TV was black and white, but he was easy to spot. The Meadow Stable checkered silks and blinkers stood out as they had with Riva Ridge. And Secretariat, known from many photos, already seemed like a friend.

We had hope, but how he came through was a joyful surprise. I hedged my bets at home, inking Secretariat the Great 1:59 2/5 on a Derby photo from Sports Illustrated; at school, drawing him inside the cover of my three-ring binder with Secretariat the Great this time. Quotation marks because it felt bold saying Great so soon. The racing writings I adored made clear that true greatness typically is proven over time and through challenges beyond a 3-year-olds springtime campaign.

Uncertainty wasnt gone. It was just warming up.

He surprised us again in the Preakness, barely settling in last place, then flying by the whole field on the clubhouse turn and cruising in, not asked for anything. Of all the things Secretariat did, thats the one I feel most certain we wont see again!

His triple sweep of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Time magazine covers, the week before the Belmont, also seems unlikely to be repeated. Could he become the first Triple Crown winner since 1948? Was such a thing even possible, anymore? Anyone who cheered American Pharoah in 2015, wondering could he overcome the drought since 1978, knows the same keen hope and sweet anxiety I felt when Secretariat stepped into the Belmont starting gate and whatever was going to happen was about to come true.

Twice, in the past five weeks, he had wowed us. Yet I could not take Secretariat the Great for granted. Sham was a strong opponent. Id seen Majestic Prince and Canonero II enter the Belmont with Triple Crown momentum and lose. History listed many others, in the ages since Citation, who had failed.

June 9, 1973, we would have been delighted if Secretariat won the Belmont by a nose hair. How he did it, setting sprinter fractions and rolling away, had us whooping all the way from the far turn through the gallop out. We could have feasted on that triumph for months. Yet Secretariat was back on TV June 30, winning the Arlington Invitational my first view of a paid workout. In hindsight, however, a poor idea shipping from New York to Chicago and running again just three weeks after the fastest Triple Crown yet known.

I may have felt cocky as well as nervous, crouching near the TV on Aug. 4 when Secretariat trotted out for the Whitney Handicap. Then, shock and puzzlement. Instead of brilliance, a one-length loss. I defended him to neighborhood kids: He had to go to the bathroom! Yes, he had passed manure shortly before entering the starting gate. He hadnt done that in the Triple Crown races or at Arlington. Was something off?

Waiting six weeks between races was a lot, in those days. Much to my disgust, our local TV stations didnt carry the Sept. 15 Marlboro Cup Invitational Handicap. (No cable or satellite, yall only signals within antenna range.) So, I did not witness the redemption, won from beloved older champion Riva Ridge and a field that these days would grace a Breeders Cup Classic. We did receive the Sept. 29 Woodward Stakes. Sigh. The last Secretariat performance I watched in real time was a second, though he finished far clear of all but one runner. On a sloppy day, certainty slid farther away.

Yet there can be consolation in racing often, as they did in the 1970s. Although bound by syndication agreement to retire by Nov. 15, Secretariat had two more chances and made them count. A course-record performance nine days after the Woodward, trying turf in Belmonts Oct. 8 Man o War Stakes. And 20 days after that, a 6 -length tour de force in the Canadian International, back to breathing different air than the field he left behind.

Delighted and bereft, I was left with a question. In those days, the Washington, D. C. International, on turf at Laurel Park, was the U.S.A.s climactic autumn classic. Uh oh. Wood Memorial, Whitney, Woodward if Secretariat went there instead of Canada, would he lose? But people often called it the D.C. International, for short, so maybe hed be OK?

That question remains open. Thirteen days after Secretariat dominated at Woodbine, European corker Dahlia impressively won the D.C. International. I wondered, would Secretariat have beaten her and his W jinx? Fifty years later, it might mean something that Big Spruce ran second in both Internationals beaten 6 1/2 by Secretariat, 3 1/2 by Dahlia. At the time, I respected Dahlias brilliance while shivering with superstition.

And now?

Secretariat, like any true marvel, makes us long to know the unknowable. Fifty years later, I do know this: when a racehorse becomes legend, uncertainty tends to fade. We dont celebrate not knowing. We repeat the highest peaks. And historys memory, like human memory, has only so much room. No wonder the Belmont Stakes is Secretariats emblem. Yet also, it is so far from all he was.

I wish every generation could meet Secretariat the work-in-progress, his unfiltered self animating his beautiful form. They would see him learning in plain sight: schooling us with stumbles that felt worse because he was phenomenal stunning us with dazzling comebacks creating questions along with his enduring image, bounding like inevitability.

The rest is here:

Before the Legend: Remembering Secretariat's Magical 1973 Season - America's Best Racing