He went six furlongs in 1:09 4/5 and 1:59 for 10 (faster than his winning Derby time) and kept going, widening, sailing as if on holy rails. If you are reading this, you know about the Belmont. He set stakes records in both the Derby and Preakness, and both stand today. Two weeks later in the Preakness, he lagged from the gate at Pimlico and then circled the field in the first turn, an arrogant move – there is no other word – that presaged a dismissive victory, again by 2 ½ lengths, but more easily. He rolled into the lead four wide on the far turn and pounded away to a 2 ½-length victory, his face covered – yet oddly accentuated - by a blue-and-white checkerboard blinker hood that would become his Kareem’s goggles - so ever-present that it reveals, not conceals. On May 5 of 1973, Secretariat won the 99 th Kentucky Derby, a 3-2 favorite despite having lost his final prep race, the Wood Memorial (almost certainly due to a mouth abscess discovered after the race). In the hands, the heart, the soul of a small man who sat hunched in irons with something otherworldly pumping blood beneath him. In a life that inspired women (and girls) generations younger and showed them a future that had been mostly just a concept. In a rhythmic voice that reached to describe perfection and nearly matched it. In a photograph that silently transports its viewer.
In the words that became a book, that became a documentary, that became a movie.
Together they have ferried the story across time. Big Red, long interred in rich Kentucky earth after a career less than 16 months in length, has grown bigger.įive of them, all born in the years from 1922 to 1941, two in the Midwest, two in New York, one in Canada. The story stood tall in its own moment, deservedly and meaningfully but it has since undergone that rarest of sports metastases: A moment already seen, forever becoming must-see. It has been 50 years since Secretariat won the Triple Crown (the first in 25 years at the time prelude to a longer drought that would commence just five years later) and passed into a singular racing afterlife with his ethereal Belmont. They are the keepers of the legend, the tellers of the tale.
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