Secretariat (33 page)

“He really took off with me,” Turcotte said.

Secretariat moved to Shecky Greene in a rush.

They all swept for home, Sham scooting along the rail, saving ground and banking toward the straight more than a length in front, cutting the corner and pricking his ears. Turcotte came to the corner on the outside, already wide with room to spare between him and Sham, but Turcotte wanted to race down the middle of the racetrack. He wanted more room for error, more space to straighten out the red horse if he bore in, as he had done in the Wood Memorial behind right-handed whipping. He did not want to be lapped on Sham in the stretch. So he swung the red horse wider at the corner, and for a moment the colt seemed to lose momentum. Turcotte raised his stick and lashed him once right-handed.

Secretariat moved to Sham at the top of the lane.

This was what the thousands had been waiting for. They were all on their feet—deafening and growing louder as Secretariat and Sham raced through the top of the straight. Turcotte pumped and pumped again. He was riding hard. He threw all his weight and strength into building the colt’s momentum, driving his arms and torso forward at the forward thrust of Secretariat’s reaching stride. Sham was in front by a length beyond the quarter pole. Pincay had still to draw his stick. He had been hand-riding Sham, and he was confident passing the quarter pole and into the upper stretch, which is where he thought he felt something on his right. He did not hear or see it; rather he felt it there, and so he looked under his right arm and all he recalls seeing were the blue and white checked blinkers and the massed brown of Secretariat’s neck. He was about a half length away.

Pincay drew his stick.

Secretariat then changed leads for the fourth time in the race, from left back to right at the top of the lane, and now he moved to Sham, picking up momentum again. He cut the margin to a half length and then a neck as they drove to the three-sixteenths pole. Turcotte and Pincay rode furiously, alternately pumping and going to the whip. They switched their sticks from the right to the left hand. They muscled Sham and Secretariat down the stretch, two of America’s strongest riders leaning and lifting together, while the dome of the grandstand rocked with noise at the sight of it. Slowly, digging in relentlessly, Secretariat gained ground on Sham through the upper stretch, and by the three-sixteenths pole he had come to Sham to swallow him and then they were nose and nose. Together they drew away from the field. Churchill Downs vibrated to the spectacle of it.

Down near the finish Eddie Sweat grabbed his khaki hat and waved it as he saw the two colts battling toward him.

“Come on with him, Ronnie! You got ’em! Come on with him, Ronnie! It’s all over now!”

And it almost was. The two raced as a team for 100 yards, between the three-sixteenths pole and the eighth pole. There Secretariat had Sham in trouble and Pincay knew it. He continued using the stick as Turcotte reached and flashed his whip in front of Secretariat’s left eye, warning him not to lug into Sham. Then Turcotte went to hand-riding him again, scrubbing on him. Past the eighth pole Secretariat was still reaching out. Even now, despite the fatigue, his form never deteriorated. Slowly at first, then methodically, he pulled away. He opened a length and then two lengths as they drove to the wire. The red horse was drawing off in the final yards, in command now, when they raced past the finish line.

Secretariat won by two and a half lengths, and as he crossed the wire there was a welling of strong cries, rebel cries from the southern crowd, while all over hands began gesturing to the infield board.

The board was flashing 1:59
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, a new Kentucky Derby record by three-fifths of a second. It had been a magnificent performance.

The whole place seemed to erupt at once. In the box seats Penny and Lucien and Jack and Elizabeth grabbed hands and kissed jubilantly, while in the press box two wage slaves ran into one another, colliding and clasping arms, and spun dancing past the mimeograph machine. The Downs entered into a state of ecstatic turmoil, with many horsemen and horseplayers stirred by what they’d seen.

The crowd on the lower level cheered in volleys as Turcotte pulled Secretariat to a stop and started riding him back past the clubhouse. Turcotte was standing high in the saddle, and the clapping followed him as he made his galloping way around the clubhouse turn to the front of the grandstands. For the second year in a row, too, Penny and Lucien descended together toward the winner’s circle, traversing the racetrack and waving to acknowledge the ovation. Eddie Sweat, with his beige hat back on his head, met Secretariat as he had met Riva Ridge the year before, on the racetrack near the gap that led to the winner’s circle.

All Sweat would recall was looking up and seeing Turcotte gesturing above him. By nature Turcotte was not a person given to theatrics, but he reached for his riding helmet and doffed it in his right hand, like a matador, and the crowd rose howling for more. The flourish was eloquent, saying that Secretariat had answered all the questions—he had redeemed himself, as Lucien would say—and that he was all horsemen had been saying he was since Saratoga. Reporters and photographers and television men jostled around him.

“One more time!” the photographers yelled to Turcotte. So he doffed his helmet again. And again.

Around him jockeys steered their horses to the unsaddling area in front of the grandstand. Pincay rode Sham to the mouth of the paddock tunnel and Martin met him there, grabbing the reins. Martin’s face was white and severe, pulled as tight as a mask. Pancho had been right. He had been right all along. Sham was ready to run a tremendous race, the race of his life. Sham, too, had broken the Kentucky Derby record, finishing eight lengths in front of Our Native in 1:59
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. He would have won most any other Kentucky Derby. His fate was to be born in the wrong year, the year of Secretariat. Martin spoke briefly to Pincay, who went to the jockeys’ room.

“He ran perfectly,” said Pincay. “He just got tired, I guess. He wasn’t really that tired, he was trying, but you know, the other horse. Maybe next time. When the other horse came up on my horse, my horse gave him a good fight. I switched my stick to the left and I could see he really wanted to come on. But he slowed a little. He showed a little sign of tiredness at the sixteenth pole.”

In the clubhouse Sigmund Sommer appeared dazed. “Secretariat beat us fair and square,” he said.

Down on the racetrack, Secretariat was breathing heavily, and a detailed map of veins and capillaries crisscrossed the rolling landscape of his neck and shoulders. His fingers working excitedly, Sweat unfastened the blinkers and clipped a chain and leather lead shank to the bridle. He took the colt to the gap in the fence leading to the winner’s circle. Prematurely, someone came forward and draped the blanket of roses on Secretariat’s withers, while behind Turcotte saw someone reach out and touch the colt in the flanks. Secretariat jumped at either the touch of the hand or the blanket, driving Sweat into a hedge. In the excitement and confusion of the moment, Sweat felt he was being strangled in the retaining rope being manned by the troops of the National Guard. Extricating himself, though suffering painful rope burns on the back of his neck, Sweat settled Secretariat down quickly.

The Meadow Stable party was collecting in the winner’s circle. Mrs. Carmichael was there, among others, and above them all towered the lanky Hollis Chenery, his face wreathed in a smile reminiscent of his father’s. Turcotte and Sweat took Secretariat into the circle for pictures, and following the ceremonies Turcotte slid off the colt and moved to Penny Tweedy. He leaned forward and kissed her on the right cheek, and she wrapped a long, braceleted arm around his shoulders, drawing him forward. Lucien grabbed Turcotte’s right hand with his right hand and patted it happily with the other. For a moment there it looked like the reunion of a family that hadn’t been together for a long time, and in a way it was.

As Sweat led Secretariat away, returning up the racetrack to the barn for the routine urine and saliva tests, the crowds lining the route started up again as they went by. Sweat returned the salute. Holding the lead shank and checkered blinkers in his right hand, he thrust his left fist high in the air. Even in Kentucky they cheered. Behind him, the victory celebration, as portable as the glasses of champagne in their hands, began ranging all over Churchill Downs; in the hours to come it would move from television cameras at the winner’s circle to the directors’ room and to the press box and thence out to Barn 42. Lucien and Penny came to the box with drinks in their hands, and they appeared gratified yet curiously subdued, as if living a dream that was anticlimax to the nightmare.

“Well, that’s one Bold Ruler that can go a distance,” Penny announced to laughter. “Oh, I feel marvelous, and I have a lot of happy co-owners. They were all saying, ‘Go-go-go-go.’ Lucien’s done a fantastic job getting this horse ready—to withstand the pressure of everything that’s been said since the Wood and just to keep his cool and do his job and get his horse ready and just stick to that one objective. Lucien’s a perfectionist, a man who cares intensely about his work. Yet he’s a very tough fellow inside. He has tremendous strength.” Penny spoke well in public. She understood what newspapermen needed—clarity and color dressed up in complete sentences—and she knew how to say clearly what was on her mind.

“Ronnie rode him beautifully,” she said. “My! He did. Of course Ron took some heat after the Wood, but he didn’t lose the faith. I thought he rode a magnificent race. He just kept his horse out of trouble, saved ground on the first turn, and only got into him when they hooked Sham.”

No, said Lucien, standing with her and Jack Tweedy before the gathering of reporters, the outcome was no surprise to him. “I thought he was going to run good because he trained good for the race. Naturally you do worry because of the last race. I had more pressure on me than I ever had in my life. Everybody was scaring me to death with that Bold Ruler stuff.” He told reporters he thought the colt had a “good chance” to win the Triple Crown the second time around, and said he thought he would bring a sharper Secretariat to the Preakness Stakes. “I hope to go there and win it this time. I think he’ll be even finer for the Preakness.”

Actually, the race seemed to impress Turcotte more than it did the others in the Meadow Stable. Though he was not saying it publicly, Turcotte believed following the Kentucky Derby that Secretariat was the greatest horse he had ever ridden or seen. Asked by a reporter to compare Secretariat and Riva Ridge, he declined to do so as a matter of personal policy. Most of the good horses Turcotte had ridden—Arts and Letters, Tom Rolfe, Damascus, and Northern Dancer—were standing at the stud, where one day Secretariat would be competing with them for the breeding dollar and the best broodmares in America. A jockey could only stir ill will, and profitlessly so, by proclaiming publicly that one man’s horse was superior to another’s. So he held his opinions on such matters to himself.

“He broke good and dropped back on his own,” Turcotte said at the press conference. “At the first turn I didn’t want to steady him behind those horses so I eased him to the outside. He picked up those horses on his own. He felt from the start as though he was running well enough to win. He did all the running on his own until we challenged Sham. Then I asked him. When I saw Sham at the turn for home, I was concerned because he was running easy and I didn’t know if we could catch him. When I asked him to run there, he really got down to business. They were rolling but I was flying.”

Turcotte’s public thoughts and comments shielded his feelings of wonder at what he had seen and experienced in the Derby. Seeing the teletimer and the fractions and thinking about the way that Secretariat had won it, he was awed by the performance. He could not recall having known anything quite like it. The colt had always been prodigal of his gifts, showing great speed, intelligence, and a high sense of fearlessness and competitive drive. So Turcotte had decided long ago that Secretariat was a very good horse, but on this May afternoon he glimpsed an even more extraordinary dimension, something that set Secretariat distinctly apart from all the other horses he had ever known. There was great strength and stamina underlying the speed, and a rare depth of it, and beyond that there was method in the way he used it all and put it all together. He could race to the front in a burst of speed. He could come off the pace in a sprint around the turn. And in the Derby, he demonstrated how to cut up a field of horses with precision, one at a time, and grind them down slowly. All around the clubhouse turn and down the backside, as Secretariat gained speed and picked up horse after horse, Turcotte kept wondering how long this could last, thinking the colt might run himself empty by the turn for home. Yet, as he measured and moved past the horses, he felt Secretariat doing it so easily. So he let him do it some more. What made the deepest impression on Turcotte was that there was never a loss of form at any time, coordination remained perfect, the action of the legs synchronized and never rubbery, even under the severest stress of the final drive.

Analysis of the fractional times and Secretariat’s position throughout the race merely reinforced Turcotte’s original conception of the way the colt had run, though more dramatically than he had imagined. Not only had he shaved three-fifths off Northern Dancer’s two-minute mark, but he came to Sham and drew away from him through a final quarter mile timed in 0:23. Thus Secretariat raced every quarter mile in the Kentucky Derby faster than the preceding quarter. His final splits were 0:25
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, 0:24, 0:23
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, 0:23
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, and 0:23. No one could remember when a horse had ever done that over a distance of a mile and a quarter. Secretariat literally went faster and faster from start to finish, traveling thirty-six miles an hour down the stretch the first time, more than thirty-nine miles an hour the second. All the important fractional records became his, too, after that slow first quarter. He stood all the old notions of pace on their ears. After passing the finish line the first time, he raced the last mile of the Derby in 1:34
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, two seconds faster than the first mile of the Derby, and the last three-quarters of a mile in 1:10
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, almost two seconds faster than Shecky Greene raced the first three-quarters. The final half mile in 0:46
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was a full second faster than Shecky ran the opening half, and the final quarter was two-fifths faster than Shecky’s first quarter. For thirty-two years, ever since Arcaro followed Ben Jones’s orders, Whirlaway had the record for the fastest closing quarter in Derby history, 0:23
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. Only two Derby winners had ever run the final quarter mile faster than 0:24—Whirlaway and Proud Clarion, who ran 0:23
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in 1967, a record that stands as testimony to the fact that racehorses usually slow down through the final 440 yards of a mile-and-a-quarter event, not sprint faster and faster through it.