Secretariat (15 page)

Secretariat won it by one and three-quarters lengths, Stop the Music finishing second.

Penny met the red horse at the top of Victory Lane, just as Mrs. Phipps had met Bold Ruler after his Futurity victory sixteen years before.

The crowd, pressed against the iron fencing, clapped and whistled over flower boxes as Secretariat walked down the path toward the winner’s circle. He moved docilely along it, unruffled by the gathering commotion of the moment, by the people waving and clustering around him. Turning his head, he dabbed his nose on Penny’s blue and brown print dress, leaving a speck of mud on it. Penny wiped it off.

“He had to lose so much ground on the turn!” she said to Turcotte.

Across the jockeys’ room, Turcotte sat on the bench in front of his locker, betraying none of his concern about the race, answering questions in a cool, curt way. It had not gone as well as he had expected. Secretariat had tired at the end of the race, and that plainly worried Turcotte, raising questions in his mind whether the colt would go a mile, whether he might be a stretch-running sprinter: when horses win with bursts of late speed, passing horses around the turn and through the stretch, they create the sometimes mistaken impression that the longer the distances, the better they will perform. That is not necessarily so. There are stretch-running sprinters who would not have the stamina to run farther than six furlongs.

Turcotte had to hustle him in midstretch, hit him left-handed. But the colt had not won off, as he had in the Hopeful. Stop the Music was gaining on him. “I felt like he might hang going a mile and a half,” Ron said. “The race left me in doubt about his going a mile.”

Tired or not, Secretariat had won his fifth straight race, running just two-fifths behind the track record of 1:16 flat, and had earned the largest purse in his life, $82,320. Up in the trustees’ room after the race, Penny called her father’s room at New Rochelle Hospital. She spoke briefly to Chenery’s nurse.

“We won!” Penny said, hearing the nurse’s voice.

“Yes. We know.” She said she believed Chenery understood.

Penny said, “This is a birthday present for Dad and I hope he understands. Tell him happy birthday.”

Chenery was eighty-six that day.

For others close to Secretariat, though, this was not a day for toasts and celebrations.

The doctors believed at first that Bull Hancock had pleurisy. He became ill on the hunting trip to Scotland, after leaving Saratoga, and they flew him home to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. On August 28—opening day at Belmont Park—he underwent surgery. They found cancer. He died seventeen days later, on September 14.

Graveside services for Bull were held at four-thirty on Saturday afternoon, at about the same time Lucien was saddling Secretariat in New York for the Futurity—and among the family of mourners in Paris Cemetery were Bull’s sons, Arthur III, an independent breeder with a farm down the road from Claiborne, and twenty-three-year-old Seth, who would now assume the business of running the empire of Claiborne Farm, as Bull had assumed it from his father, and his father had assumed it before him.

Chapter 16

By late afternoon of October 14, the one hundred first running of the Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park, bettors gathered in search of the horse that could beat Secretariat going a flat mile. Life in the nearby suburbs may be as predictable as the appearance of the yellow school bus at eight o’clock in the morning, but nothing is odds-on in Long Island City.

The pattern had been set. Lucien gave Ron no instructions in the paddock as Secretariat and eleven other horses circled the walking ring. The tactic of giving Secretariat time to pull himself together had been working flawlessly, and neither man wanted to tinker with it. For the first time in his life, Secretariat would be running as an entry with Ed Whittaker’s Angle Light, also trained by Lucien, who won his first start by three-quarters of a length, his second by six. He finished fourth in the Cowdin Stakes, tiring, but now he was back again. Lucien’s opinion had changed since Saratoga: he no longer regarded Angle Light as Secretariat’s equal, and throughout that fall, Penny would remember, Lucien assured her that Angle Light had “cheap speed”—could not sustain his speed under pressure—while also warning her not to underestimate the horse. Since he trained both, according to the rules, they would have to run as a single betting interest. Together, they went off as 2–3 favorites.

Breaking from the four hole, staying with the field in the first jump, Secretariat thrashed about as usual and immediately dropped to last. He had just one horse beaten as Angle Light swept Chuck Baltazar through an opening quarter mile in 0:22
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, then through a blazing half mile in 0:45
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. Angle Light was leading by two as he passed the half-mile pole at the turn, and Secretariat was running ninth behind Stop the Music under John (Gentleman John) Rotz. Secretariat raced along in 0:47, then just settled into the drumbeat of his stride. Ron kept him outside the horses once again, about fifteen feet off the rail, and he dashed past Zaca Spirit in several bounds. The colt was running his third quarter in 0:23
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, even losing ground, and it was sweeping him into the hunt midway at the turn. Angle Light chucked it on the bend, looking for a hole in the fence before the straight, and Puntilla made the lead with Linda’s Chief lapped on him in second. They ran as a team, as did Secretariat and Stop the Music turning for home. When Secretariat moved to Stop the Music on the turn, Rotz sent the little bay with him, not letting the red horse loose. Turcotte later said that Stop the Music drifted out on him, bumping him twice.

They moved to the lane as a team, head and head on the outside, turning for home with a quarter mile to go. The drive was on. Together, Secretariat on the outside and Stop the Music on his left, they moved to Linda’s Chief and Puntilla down the straight. Coming to the three-sixteenths pole, with about 350 yards to run, they were four abreast. It was an eyepopper.

Suddenly, Turcotte raised his right hand and lashed Secretariat once. A second later the red horse, who had been running on his right lead, switched to his left lead. He dropped to the left toward Stop the Music, bumping him and sending him into Linda’s Chief. Turcotte loosened his left line and snatched him sharply with his right, pulling him off the bay, who seemed to suck back at the buffeting, as if intimidated by it. Once Turcotte had Secretariat straight, he went to riding him again, and the colt pulled away as Turcotte rode him strongly to the wire. He won it in a drive by two, lengthening his lead through the final yards and running the mile in 1:35 flat, just two-fifths of a second slower than the stakes’ record set by Vitriolic, one of the Bold Rulers who failed to light up the sky as a three-year-old. Stop the Music, recovering from the contact, came on again and finished second. Moments after the horses crossed the line, the roar went up. On the tote board in the infield, the inquiry sign was flashing. The stewards called it, suspecting a foul, and quickly went down the elevator to their offices, ready to talk to jockeys and to see the film.

Turcotte went to see the stewards to explain his side of the race. Still in his blue and white silks, he stood before the stewards in their carpeted office complex and told them that Stop the Music started the contact sports on the turn for home.

“Stop the Music bumped me twice around the turn,” he told them. He further said that the colt switched leads near the three-sixteenths pole and came in on the Greentree Stable colt. “I might have bothered him some, but I grabbed my horse real quick. I hurt my horse more than his.”

“We’ll look at it,” said one steward.

The films do not show what, if any, interference the little bay might have caused on the turn. They do show that Secretariat swung into Stop the Music near the three-sixteenths pole, bumping and forcing him into Linda’s Chief, and that Turcotte hauled him off immediately.

The second roar from the crowd of 31,494 persons was louder than the first. Secretariat’s number, 1A, and Stop the Music’s number, 5, had been blinking off and on to show the order of their finish was under inquiry. If the lights stop blinking and the numbers stay lit, it means the order of finish remains as it was in the race; if the lights of the two numbers go dark, it means that the stewards have changed the official finish of the race. The lights went out. Turcotte sat stunned in the jockeys’ room wearing precisely the look of a man who had just lost 10 percent of an $87,900 purse, slowly shaking his head and staring in silence at the new order of finish, then the replay of the race on television. About twenty riders gathered in a circle around the set, looking and watching while Secretariat settled down at the turn and began his move.

The stewards placed Secretariat second, moving Stop the Music into first, and left behind not only hundreds of groaning favorite players—Secretariat would have paid $3.40 to win for a $2.00 bet—but the general belief that the best horse lost by Order of the Stewards. “I was surprised that the stewards were so strict with us for what seemed like a minor impediment,” Penny said. “Our horse had so clearly won.”

Nathaniel J. Hyland, the steward appointed by the Jockey Club, said simply that the stewards, when deliberating over an inquiry, do not speculate whether a horse might have won if a foul had not occurred. That Secretariat would have won (which was the consensus) was beside the point. The point was that Secretariat had committed an infraction, bumping a horse and bothering him, and evidence of that and that alone justified bringing his number down.

Despite the official order of finish, despite his sudden loss of $8700, Ron Turcotte was buoyed by the colt’s performance and enormously encouraged by it. “He ran his best race to date,” he said that afternoon while dressing to go home. “You never know until you try a mile, but after what I saw today—yes, he’ll go on in longer distances.” He knew he was not riding a stretch-running sprinter. The red horse, coming off his six furlongs in 1:10
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, zipped the last quarter mile in 0:24
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.

Through autumn, while Secretariat rose to dominate the nation’s two-year-olds and each race added more extravagantly to his reputation, Riva Ridge went on sliding toward Laurel, Maryland, last stop before The Meadow and a winter’s rest. On September 20, seven weeks after finishing fourth in the Monmouth Handicap, Riva Ridge hooked a buzz saw in the 1971 Kentucky Derby winner, Canonero II, in the Stymie Handicap at Belmont Park. Riva Ridge set a sizzling pace through most of the mile and an eighth, frying himself to a golden brown by the eighth pole, and Canonero ran off to win by five and tie the world’s record of 1:46
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for the distance. Riva Ridge, carrying thirteen pounds more than Canonero, finished second. Ten days later, he finished fourth in the mile-and-a-half Woodward Stakes, more than six lengths behind his archrival Key to the Mint.

Just six months ago he had been the reigning champion of his generation in Florida, the best three-year-old in America, the luminary of shed row. After the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes, and the Hollywood Derby, he was everyone’s three-year-old of the year, the leading contender for Horse of the Year. By September 20, he was just Riva Ridge—fourth, second, and fourth in his last three starts. He was a tired pug whose managers had found too many fights for him, and they did not let up. Lucien entered him in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at two miles. That was for October 28, the day of the rich Laurel Futurity at Laurel Race Course in Maryland, the first time Secretariat would run a mile and one-sixteenth.

Riva Ridge’s groom, Eddie Sweat, took Secretariat to Laurel within a week of the race. Sweat had been working for Lucien since the early 1950s, and he was Lucien’s most trusted groom, the one to whom he gave the most responsibility. Sweat not only mucked out stalls and groomed and fed his horses, he also drove Lucien’s red van, chauffeuring horses cross country. He delivered Secretariat to Laurel that fall. Charlie Davis, who regularly galloped Riva Ridge, also went with Secretariat to Laurel, replacing Gaffney, who couldn’t afford to leave his job as a mutuel clerk to exercise the colt. The move to Laurel divided the Meadow Team, as Penny came to call it. Lucien went to Maryland for the Futurity. Turcotte, given his choice, opted to ride Secretariat instead of Riva Ridge, applying his rule to stay with a two-year-old rather than an older horse. Henny Hoeffner stayed behind, to train the stable of horses in Lucien’s absence and to saddle Riva Ridge. Penny chose to stay in New York, too, and watch the old golden boy try to get the two miles of the cup.

Penny’s life had become a swirl of activity ever since Riva Ridge won the Flash, and the centrifugal force of it was pulling her away from home and drawing her closer to the farm and horses, to her new career in racing. She had wanted a career in the sport, and first Riva Ridge and now Secretariat were demanding her time, thought, and presence. Her involvement in the racing stable had been gradual, not precipitate, so it only slowly altered her relationship with her husband. In late May 1971, she actually considered putting her career with the horses before the wishes of her husband when Roger Laurin had decided to quit and she wanted to be in New York to look for a new trainer. But that would have meant being away from home in Denver for their anniversary. She stopped short of asking him. “It would have precipitated a terrible fight, so I didn’t,” she recalled. “There is a subtle thing, a point at which I started saying I have to go to New York because of this or that and I can’t be with the family for such and such an occasion. Wives work around the demands of their husbands and children. I stopped doing that. I started saying, ‘What I have to do is important, too, and I will do it even if it means missing something.’ ”

When Riva Ridge was racing to the two-year-old championship in the fall of 1971, Penny said, she sat down with her husband one day and asked him whether he could tolerate her moving to New York for six months. The Chenery house in Pelham was empty—with her mother dead and her father hospitalized—so she would have a place to live. “I wanted to follow Riva’s career and try to organize the stable so there would be an orderly transition into the estate, and Jack sort of gave an equivocal answer: ‘Well, that might work, but what are John and I going to do out there?’ ” John was their youngest child, then ten.

Jack Tweedy found a job in New York, partly to accommodate her involvement in racing, and she joined him in Pelham in April 1972, just before Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby. They moved to a rented home in Cold Spring Harbor later that year, then into the house in Laurel Hollow on September 1, 1972, the week after Secretariat won the Hopeful.

With the rise of Secretariat, the intensity of Penny’s involvement naturally quickened. After years of raising four children and responding to the demands of that way of life, she was now asserting her independence, putting herself and her career first. “Once I stopped putting Jack first in terms of plans, I stopped putting him first emotionally,” she said. “And that has really been the cut-off point. The more involved I got with racing, the less room there was for him in my life.” The day of the Gold Cup conflicted with Parents Day at Saint Paul’s, where young John was going to prep school. “Jack went up alone and he was quite resentful that I wouldn’t go with him, and I said, ‘There will be other Parents Days but there won’t be other Gold Cups.’ ”

So Penny remained in New York, reading Lucien’s instructions on riding the horse to jockey Jorge Velasquez in the paddock. She smiled and read them softly to Jorge, the small white paper in her hand, and he listened like a graduate student in theology. The strategy didn’t work. Nothing would have worked by then. Riva Ridge stayed close to the pace and then tired, drifting back to nowhere, to third place, eighteen lengths behind Autobiography, three lengths behind archrival Key to the Mint, who would be named the three-year-old champion. So the fall of the bay and the rise of the red horse continued. Forty minutes earlier that afternoon at Laurel, Maryland, Secretariat ran the race of his young life.

He came to the Futurity light on his feet, up on his toes, just where Lucien put him when he sent him five-eighths in 1:00 flat in a workout at Laurel, a racetrack not as fast as Belmont Park. Five other colts, including Stop the Music and Angle Light, went to the post with him, and for the first time in his life he ran in the mud, over a sloppy surface. But nothing seemed to bother him, to discourage him or make any impression on him.

Secretariat went his own way again, just as he had in his other starts, trying to pick up speed out of the gate and falling back to last as the field made the first turn. Ron, sensing that the racing strip was less tiring on the outside, parked himself there and waited. Rocket Pocket, a horse with a quick turn of early foot, dashed to the lead and led past the opening quarter by three, running it in 0:22
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. He was not dragging it. Secretariat passed the pole in 0:25
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, thirteen lengths to the rear. The leader kept up the pressure through the half, racing it in 0:45
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, while Secretariat was just getting with it through a half in 0:47
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, his second quarter mile in 0:22
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, three full seconds faster than his first. He was beginning to roll. Turcotte could feel him pick it up and relax down the backstretch.