Secretariat

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Bold Ruler continued declining through June, his general health and vigor deteriorating. An entry in the farm veterinarian log, made June 25, noted: “The horse has lost considerable weight, and appears uneasy and unhappy. Considerable foul-smelling discharge from the nostrils. Horse not moving well. Appears stiff and sore.”

A piece of tissue, cut from the horse’s neck, was sent for a biopsy to the University of Kentucky. The report, dated July 8, read in part like an order for execution: “This tumor is the same as the first biopsy specimen but appears more anaplastic and malignant.”

Nothing more could be done. Bold Ruler grew pathetically ill. One side of his face became paralyzed. By then he had reigned seven years in succession as America’s leading sire, his performers having already earned $13,067,364. He was only seventeen years old, and he should have had several more years at stud.

Finally an orange van was rolled up to the office and parked along that gentle incline of a ramp where horses load and unload at Claiborne. Bold Ruler would be destroyed there and taken to Lexington for autopsy. The spot was near the office, the horse cemetery, and the breeding shed, beneath a large grove of trees.

Bull Hancock left almost immediately, as he always did when a horse was about to be put down, getting in his car and driving out along Kennedy Creek and out the stone gate. “Don’t even tell me about it,” Bull told Robinson, before leaving. “I don’t want to know anything. Just put him down and say no more to me.”

On July 12, 1971 (three weeks after Secretariat walked in caravan toward the training center from the yearling barn), Snow clipped a lead chain on Bold Ruler and, with Lawrence Robinson alongside, walked the horse from his stall. Leading him toward the van, they walked along the path past the breeding shed—and Bold Ruler raised his head and nickered.

“That rascal thinks he’s goin’ to the breeding shed,” Robinson told Snow.

They walked him to a gate leading to a grassy patch of land behind the shed and toward the gravel surface of the unloading area. They took Bold Ruler inside the van. There, Dr. Kaufman, with a hypodermic needle containing a heavy dose of a potent barbiturate, went into the van with the horse. Dr. Kaufman injected the drug into Bold Ruler’s jugular, emptying the syringe, and then jumped hurriedly from the side of the van. For the next several seconds they all stood there—Kaufman, Snow, Robinson, and the van driver—and waited. Forty-five seconds later there was a tremendous crash, rocking the van, and then silence.

He was buried behind the office with Princequillo and Nasrullah and all the others. The stone read:

BOLD RULER (1954–1971)

There were tributes, like that from thoroughbred breeding writer Leon Rasmussen, who wrote an obituary that opened: “The king is dead….”

CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_0a0fb222-9056-5c01-ba9c-892e539f2dd5)

The van door opened in Florida on that January day of 1972, and Secretariat first stepped foot on the racetrack at Hialeah Park.

Like Bold Ruler, Secretariat emerged into a new kind of world, insular, superstitious, and perpetually on the make, a world forever in bivouac—whole armies of grooms and hot walkers, exercise boys and trainers and jockeys’ agents, feed men peddling alfalfa and medicine men with horse aspirins weighing sixty grains, clockers and jockeys—ready on a moment to move on to other tracks, north to Maryland, New York, New Jersey, or Chicago.

Flies on all the windowsills, rows of stalls in rows of barns, hooves clicking on cement, metal gates clanging, springs whining, liniments and alcohol for rubbing, a pint of whiskey holstered like a wallet in the pocket, tips hot at six o’clock in the morning, lukewarm at three, cold at dinner over ham hocks or enchiladas.

As a young two-year-old—plump as he was off the farm—Secretariat had begun to grow into an aesthetic marvel of anatomical slopes and bulges, curves and planes that were stressed and set off by the color of his coat, a reddish gold that ran almost to copper. His shoulders were deep, his bone of good length, and there was no lightness of bone under the knee, as Miss Ham once suggested there might be. He had a sloping rump, the imprimatur of the Nearco tribe, and an attractive face and head. The quality of his head and face set him apart at once from many other Bold Rulers, including Bold Ruler himself. His sire was coarse about the head, with the jug-headedness common to trotters, and he transmitted this trait to not a few of his offspring.

Secretariat didn’t inherit Bold Ruler’s lengthiness; he was shorter of back, more barrel chested and muscular in his physical development. But he had what Bull Hancock regarded as a mark of quality in all the Bold Rulers that could run. “You can pick the Bold Rulers out on their conformation,” Bull once said. “I see the same musculature as Nasrullah. They all had an extra layer of muscle beside their tail running down to their hocks. It is a good sign when you see it in a Bold Ruler. It means strength and speed.”

All he had was physique in the beginning, the look of an athlete. Lucien Laurin was wary of appearances. In his years spent on the racetrack, he had seen too many equine glamor boys come and go. To Laurin, Secretariat was just another untried thoroughbred.

To jockey Ron Turcotte, he was a potential mount, no more than that. The day after Secretariat arrived from the farm, Turcotte was at the barn at Hialeah, where he worked mornings exercising horses for Laurin. He walked up the shed to see Riva Ridge, and glancing down the barn, two stalls away from his Kentucky Derby favorite, he saw the white star, the ears pricked forward, and the neck a mass of red. Secretariat was glancing back at him.

Turcotte went to the stall, took a closer look, and called up the shed to Henny Hoeffner, the assistant trainer. It was the first time Turcotte ever saw Secretariat, whom he described as “a pretty boy.”

Penny Tweedy, when she first saw him said, simply, “Wow!”

But the game is a horse race, not a horse show, and the axiom among horsemen is: “Pretty is as pretty does.” Secretariat, in the opening weeks, did not do much.

He didn’t awe the clockers with the bursts of speed that Bold Ruler loosed at Hialeah as a youngster. There were no quarter-mile workouts in 0:22, no leveling off into a flat run, all business, from the quarter pole at the top of the stretch to the wire. He was still the overgrown kid.

Ron Turcotte was with Lucien Laurin one morning at Hialeah when four two-year-olds were led from the barn and began circling them, grooms holding the bridles.

Turcotte jumped aboard Secretariat that morning for the first time, guiding him out to the racetrack with the others in Indian file, reaching the dirt track and turning right, counterclockwise. Laurin told them to let the youngsters gallop easily, side by side, in a schooling exercise designed to accustom them to having other horses running next to them. The drill was the same as Secretariat had done two months earlier, under Bailes, at the farm. The four colts took off at a slow gallop around the mile-and-an-eighth oval, galloping abreast. The riders stood high in the saddles, going easily, Secretariat almost lackadaisically. The red horse plopped along in casual indifference, his head down, a big, awkward, and clumsy colt, Turcotte thought. Galloping past the palm trees and the infield lake, jockey Miles Neff, riding Twice Bold, reached his stick over and slapped Turcotte on the rump. Turcotte yelled. There was laughter on the backstretch. With Charlie Davis riding inside him on All or None, Turcotte leaned over and jammed Davis in the butt with his stick. Davis almost went over All or None, screaming. This was not all intended for fun. Exercise boys often do this to get young horses accustomed to quick movement, to shouts, to noise, to horse racing.

The colt next to Secretariat drifted out and banged against him and the red horse countered with a grunt.

He didn’t alter course, drifting back and taking up the same path he had before the bumping. “He was just a big likable fellow,” Turcotte said. “His attitude was ‘Stay out of my way.’ ” But they didn’t. The colt beside him came out again, sideswiping him a second time.

Turcotte remembered the same drill a year before on Riva Ridge. The rangy bay was timid, shy, and leery of all contact. If Riva Ridge had been sideswiped like that when he was a young two-year-old, he would have leaped the fence to get away. Not this one.

Ron Turcotte liked him instantly because he was “a big clown,” likable and unruffled among crowds, a handsome colt who relaxed while on the racetrack, who behaved himself, going as kindly as if out in the morning for a playful romp in the Florida sun.

Secretariat became the most popular of the baby two-year-olds to gallop, and one after another the exercise boys and jockeys who worked for Laurin climbed on him. There was Cecil Paul, a thirty-year-old jockey from Trinidad, who jumped aboard one morning and remembered hearing Lucien tell him, “He’s a nice colt, Mr. Paul, and he’s just a baby. You take care of him.”

Mr. Paul galloped Secretariat frequently on those balmy mornings. On his back went Miles Neff, too, the jockey who was about to retire after thirteen years of knocking about on racetracks, and off went he and the colt into an easy gallop.

Neff especially liked the way he moved, feeling something a rider feels after straddling many horses over many years. Part of it had to do with size and strength, but some of it was just a feeling, a sense. “This is your best two-year-old, Mr. Laurin,” Neff said one morning, as he slid off Secretariat.

As the days chased one another like colts in a pasture, Secretariat’s bearing, his ease and kindliness, increased his popularity among the exercise boys until they were actually competing for his stirrups. Gold Bag, a youngster owned by Lucien Laurin, was quicker on his feet but he was headstrong—rank and speed crazy—often trying to run away with riders in the morning. Twice Bold pulled so hard on the reins that riders used to dismount rubbing the soreness in their arms. All or None, the filly, would buck, jump, kick, spin, and wheel; no one wanted to ride her. “Everyone wanted to gallop Secretariat,” Turcotte said. “All you had to do was sit there.” As the days passed, Cecil Paul felt the youngster getting stronger, more rhythmic in his strides, and felt him begin to take hold of the bit.

That was pivotal. Turcotte also felt the colt lean against the bit, fall into it, grab it in his mouth, and run against it in a communion transmitted from mouth to hands through the lines stretched taut between them.

“You want to make him think he’s doing something, so you sit against him, take ahold of him, and make him think he’s doing everything on his own. You have to build his ego. You have to give him confidence,” Turcotte said.

Not even confidence came easily for the red horse. In late February Laurin boosted Turcotte on Secretariat for a quarter-mile workout, not an easy gallop but a speed drill, in company with Gold Bag, Twice Bold, and a colt named Young Hitter. It was time to teach them how to run, how to level out and reach for ground, something all horses have to learn.

“No race riding, boys!” Lucien called out to the four as they walked their horses to the racetrack that morning, through Sunny Fitzsimmons Lane and out the quarter-mile bend under the spanking brightness of the morning. The four riders reached the racetrack and moved into a gallop around the turn. They headed for the three-eighths pole at the top of the stretch, then pulled to a stop, lining up abreast and walking several yards. Then they clucked to their horses and went into a jog, picking up speed slowly.

Nearing the quarter pole, the four riders chirped again and the horses started leveling and reaching out, bodies lower to the ground. Twice Bold, Gold Bag, and Young Hitter accelerated rapidly, gathering speed from a gallop to a run as they raced past the quarter pole at the top of the straight.

Turcotte picked up Secretariat’s reins and chirped to him, trying to give the colt a feel for the game, not yelling, but urging quietly. He sensed bewilderment in the colt, so he gathered Secretariat together and gave him time to steady himself and get his legs under him, synchronized and meshing. The three others blew away from him. Far up the racetrack, as Secretariat battled along by himself down the stretch, Turcotte saw the three more precocious horses far down the lane as the colt started to find himself and gather momentum.

They all dusted Secretariat easily that morning, beating him by about fifteen lengths and racing the quarter mile in 0:23. Secretariat finished in about 0:26.

Periodically, as Secretariat worked out in Florida, Penny Tweedy would ask Laurin about the red horse, and he hardly reflected buoyant hope.

“He hasn’t shown me much,” Lucien would say. Or, “He’s not ready. I have to get the fat off him first.” Or, “I have to teach him to run. He’s big, awkward, and doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

Secretariat was beaten more than once in workouts that winter at Hialeah. Gold Bag beat him again. So did Twice Bold and All or None, the filly. So did a colt named Angle Light, a two-year-old bay owned by Edwin Whittaker, a Toronto electronics executive. He wasn’t beaten by fifteen lengths again, but the crowd of young horses did beat him by five lengths another time.

Riva Ridge remained the luminary of the Meadow barn. The champion worked sharply for the seven-furlong Hibiscus Stakes March 22, and when he won it briskly coming off the pace, Laurin honed him for the Everglades Stakes—the same race won by Citation twenty-four years earlier—on April 1. That was the day Turcotte sensed a change in Secretariat during a workout. The track was muddy that morning when Laurin put Turcotte on the red horse, Neff on Angle Light, and Charlie Davis on All or None. The filly had thrown Turcotte earlier, so Laurin put Davis, a strong and experienced exercise boy, on her.

He told them he wanted them to work an easy three-eighths of a mile.

It was about eight o’clock. It had been raining heavily earlier in the day, but it had lightened to a drizzle by the time the set of horses headed down the backstretch to the three-eighths pole, midway through the turn for home. About seventy yards from the pole, in unison, the riders took hold of the reins and eased their horses toward the rail, keeping them about five feet out. Turcotte could feel Secretariat fall against the bit, heavy-headedly, and he could see a horse on each side of him. He eased down in the saddle. The tempo picked up as the horses raced past the three-eighths pole and banked into the stretch. Suddenly the horse on the inside of Secretariat drifted out, glancing off his side.

Turcotte steadied Secretariat. Recovering from the bump, the red horse started slowing down, easing himself back. Turcotte reached forward with his whip and waved it in front of the colt’s right eye and he picked it up again, slipping back into the breach. He stayed there through the run down the lane, striding hard against the bit to the wire, finishing head and head with the others in 0:36, breathing easily, a sharp move for young two-year-olds in the mud at Hialeah. They had run at a perfect “twelve-clip.” It was a fast workout. Secretariat was learning how to run.

Running times vary considerably from track to track, from condition to condition, and according to the sex and age of the horses, so what is fast is relative. But most horsemen agree that horses are stretching out on a fast track when they run a furlong—a distance of 220 yards or one-eighth of a mile—in 0:12 seconds. When horses string a few 0:12 furlongs back to back, they are moving at what horsemen call a “twelve-clip.”

A twelve-clip is the rate of speed horses must average or maintain to win major stakes races at American middle and classic distances, distances from a mile to a mile and a quarter.

Most horses, even young two-year-olds like Secretariat, Angle Light, and All or None, should be able to run at a twelve-clip for a few furlongs—at least four.

That means they would be running one-eighth of a mile in 0:12, one-quarter in 0:24, three-eighths in 0:36, a half mile in 0:48.

At that rate of speed, a horse would run six furlongs, or three-quarters of a mile, in 1:12, which would win races on some tracks. If a horse strung two more furlongs together at a twelve-clip, he would be running a mile in 1:36, a time that equals or betters the clocking for six of the dozen runnings of the $50,000-added Jerome Handicap at Belmont Park between 1961 and 1972. The degree of difficulty in sustaining a twelve-clip beyond a mile, unlike sustaining it from four furlongs in 0:48 to five furlongs in one minute, increases in quantum jumps. The degree of difficulty increases vastly beyond a mile.

For another furlong in 0:12 would send a horse a mile and an eighth, or nine furlongs, in 1:48, a clocking that would have won every running of the $100,000 Wood Memorial since it was run at that distance in 1952. And another 0:12-second furlong would send a horse a mile and a quarter in 2:00 flat, which was the Kentucky Derby record set by Northern Dancer in 1964; and a mile and three-eighths in 2:12, two and one-fifth seconds faster than Man o’ War’s American record; and a mile and a half in 2:24.

That workout was the first time Turcotte could sense that the big clown had any ability at all, any speed. He fell against the bit and ran with two fast youngsters, handling the mud well, handling it better than Riva Ridge did that afternoon in the Everglades Stakes.

Hemmed in on the rail with no place to go, bumping the rail in the stretch, and never getting near the lead, Riva Ridge finished fourth in the race, the first time he had been beaten since the summer of ‘71. Laurin said he was grateful to get the horse back in one piece. Turcotte was sharply criticized for his ride in the race, and Penny and Lucien talked about firing him and finding another rider. But the big races were coming up, so they decided to keep him on the colt.

It would not be the last time that Turcotte nearly lost a Meadow Stable mount.

It was nearing the time of the spring classics, and Riva Ridge was shipped north to Lexington, Kentucky, for the Blue Grass Stakes on April 27, his final prep race for the May 6 Kentucky Derby. Secretariat and several stablemates were vanned north to Long Island and to Barn 5 at Belmont Park, an indoor shed with a row of stalls that abutted the fence of the clubhouse parking lot. Barn 5 lay just 200 yards from the main track, the biggest oval in America—at one and one half miles in circumference—and there the humdrum of routine began.

In their first workout in New York that year, Angle Light and Gold Bag beat Secretariat badly on a sloppy racetrack, running a half mile in 0:49. Secretariat ran in 0:50

with urging, not a sharp move. A fifth of a second is equal to a length, so Gold Bag and Angle Light beat him by six.

In mid-April, on a gray wet morning when the track was a mire, apprentice jockey Paul Feliciano, who worked under contract for Lucien, hopped aboard Secretariat for a routine gallop on the training track about a quarter mile away.

Feliciano had his feet out of the stirrups, dangling them at Secretariat’s side, when Laurin spotted him and raised his voice in warning.

“Put your feet in the irons!” he yelled. “Be careful with that horse! Don’t take no chances. He plays and he’ll drop you, I swear to God.”

Feliciano’s feet rose into the stirrups, which he was wearing too short, and someone dimly recalled Laurin’s calling to Feliciano, “Drop your irons.” What Laurin wanted Feliciano to do was lengthen his stirrups for surer balance.

The horses moved toward the training track, and Laurin turned to Dave Hoeffner, Henny’s son, and said, “Hey, you want to take a ride to the training track with me?” They slipped into Lucien’s station wagon.

Laurin, muttering and still peeved at Feliciano, told Hoeffner in the car, “I bet that horse throws this kid. He’s frisky and I bet he throws him. The kid’s not listening to what I’m saying.”

Secretariat, and the other horses in the set, strode through the stable area to the gap leading to the training track. They walked onto the muddy surface and began, one by one, to take off at a slow gallop. Feliciano, his reins loose, guided Secretariat near the outside rail and stood up in the saddle as the colt cantered through the long stretch toward the clocker’s shed, passed the shed, and began heading into the first bend. He heard a horse working to his left, on the rail, his hooves slapping and splashing at the mud as he drilled past on the rails.

“I heard the noise. It was a split-second thing. He stopped, propped and wheeled, and turned left and I knew what was going to happen. I think he knew I was going off, too, already slipping, because he turned around from under me. I landed on my face.”

Secretariat, riderless, his head and tail up and his reins flapping across his neck, took off clockwise around the racetrack, the wrong way, racing back toward the gap. Laurin saw him and, in an instant, was speeding out of the training track infield.

The car zipped through the tunnel and reentered the fence at the stable area. Laurin and Hoeffner saw Secretariat standing calmly at the gap by the training track, as if he were waiting for a taxi.

Dave Hoeffner climbed out from the car, walking with stealth toward Secretariat, who stood looking at him curiously. He reached out and grabbed the reins. Laurin immediately took off back to the barn, leaving Dave to walk Secretariat home alone. The colt walked like a prince for a quarter mile.

Paul Feliciano unscrewed his face from the mud at the seven-eighths pole and started walking around the oval toward the stable area.

He did not want to return to Barn 5, where Lucien Laurin was waiting for him. Paul Feliciano, twenty, born and raised on Union Street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, feared Laurin. Earlier, the headstrong Gold Bag had run off with him, as he had done with other riders, and Laurin had ranted at him. Paul had not forgotten the incident, so he had no illusions about what Lucien would say to him.

It was a ten-minute walk to the stable. By then Secretariat was standing in his stall, with blankets stacked up on his back. His back muscles were tied up so badly he couldn’t move. Secretariat wouldn’t leave the barn for almost two weeks.

“That son of a bitch ain’t worth a quarter!” Laurin howled. Paul arrived shortly after.

He would remember only bits and pieces of what was said. “You better listen to me right now, young man! You better pay attention when you’re on those horses! Wake up!” Then Feliciano saw the unmistakable sign of the Laurinian anger, the tipoff that he was in dead earnest. Lucien tilted his hat to one side as he walked away, setting it askew. Turning, Laurin said, “I want to see you in my office.”

In the screened-in porch, just at the top of the staircase by the office, Feliciano stood and listened for five minutes as Laurin reproached and scolded him. He told him at last, “You come by in the morning and pick up your contract and your check.”

“What could I do?” Paul said. “He stopped when that other horse came by and I lost my balance.”

It was no use.

Laurin had told him the same thing after Gold Bag had run away with him earlier, and the next day had acted as if nothing had happened. But this time, Feliciano thought, Laurin had raised such hell, seemed so angry, that he had to be dead serious. Feliciano took that home with him to his apartment in Elmont, despondent and confused. He believed Laurin had given him a good chance to ride all but the best horses. Laurin was known for helping young people start in the game. He certainly had been generous about giving Feliciano good mounts, live mounts, not bums. Now that was finished, and with it any good chance to make it as a jockey. Feliciano wondered where he would go.

The following morning, he walked under the shed of Barn 5, coming early to pick up his contract and look for another job. Lucien, arriving about seven, came into the shed telling Henny Hoeffner what exercise boy to ride on what horse. He looked at Paul, who was waiting for his contract, and said, “Put Paul on that horse to gallop.”

And that was the last Feliciano heard of it.

CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_68a45496-b10d-5458-8917-c16df81ac905)

Jimmy Gaffney drove past the Meadow Stable office in April, waving to Henny Hoeffner from his Oldsmobile, saying hello and jumping from the car and moving quickly, as always, a reedy stick of a man with a hawkish set of eyes, a fine sculpted jaw, and a love for horses.

He was thirty-seven years old. He had just returned to work as a mutuel clerk selling five-dollar place and show tickets in the grandstand section at Aqueduct. The clerks had been on strike for three weeks, but that was over, and once again Gaffney was working his artistry behind the window.

Gaffney was also an exercise boy, riding and working horses in the mornings. He had worked for Lucien briefly in 1963, and they had liked each other. They had gone fishing on Lucien’s boat, and when Gaffney left him several months later, they had parted on friendly terms. Now, seven years later, Gaffney saw Henny as he drove past the Meadow Stable. He stopped to chat, and in the course of the conversation, Henny asked him if he was working. When he said no, Henny offered him a job as an exercise boy and Gaffney took it.

Gaffney joined the Meadow Stable at a time of heightened expectations and morale raised by Riva Ridge, who, on April 27, went to the front not long after the start of the Blue Grass Stakes, shook off one challenge deep in the stretch, and ran off to win by four. That was only the prelude.

Nine days later, in front of 130,564 people at Churchill Downs and millions more on nationwide television, Riva Ridge galloped to the front in the run past the stands the first time, running easily under Turcotte, repulsed three challenges by the gritty little Hold Your Peace, and won the ninety-eighth running of the Kentucky Derby by more than three.

Turcotte, wearing the blue and white silks of the Meadow Stable, had just won his first Kentucky Derby, and he fairly glided on the colt toward the grassy winner’s circle. There was Lucien Laurin beaming, a man on the brink of retirement who woke up suddenly one morning with Riva Ridge in his barn.

There was Penny Tweedy, wearing a white and blue polka-dot dress and a choker of pearls, pivoting through the crowd like a princess newly crowned, her gestures contained but emphatic, her voice husky and assured on television, her manner courteous yet exuberant. She was too good to be true, and the press promptly collapsed at her feet.

On to the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico they went.

To this ecstatic aftermath came Gaffney, and one of the first things Henny Hoeffner told him to do was get on Secretariat. There were less than two months to Secretariat’s first race, and the red horse was just recovering from the tied-up muscles he had suffered the day he backed out from under Feliciano. Groom Mordecai Williams would put a saddle and a bridle on the colt and boost Gaffney aboard, sending both on a walk around the inside of the shed.

Secretariat, with Gaffney on him, walked to the training track that morning, taking the same route Feliciano had taken him the last time. The red horse stopped at the gap and stood there for several seconds, looking to the left and right, raising his head, as horses do when they are looking off into a distance. Gaffney did not hurry him, but let him stand there and watch the morning activity. It was a habit the colt acquired early in life—he liked to stop and see what he was getting into before he got into it—and he did that every time anyone ever took him to the racetrack.

Near the clocker’s shed a quarter mile away, Secretariat began doing his number: he dipped his shoulder and pulled, but Gaffney, riding with long stirrups, rode with him. The colt had been confined for a few weeks, and he was feeling his unburned oats. He galloped off strongly, pulling hard on the bit, but every day Gaffney gave him more rein, exerting less pressure, and after several days the colt relaxed. As he had done at Hialeah he started plopping along easily, moving smoothly and relaxed.

Secretariat soon stopped dipping his right shoulder. Gaffney, putting a special bit in the colt’s mouth with a prong on its left side, worked for days on the problem. Pressing both hands on his mount’s neck, Gaffney kept pressure on the right line, and every time the colt started to dip to the left Gaffney pressed down on the colt’s neck and exerted pressure on the rein.

Gaffney had been riding horses for almost two decades—he had ridden big and small horses, some fast and slow horses, stiff and supple horses—but in Secretariat he sensed the finest running machine he had ever straddled.

That the red horse had never run a race did not temper Gaffney’s public enthusiasm, an enthusiasm rooted in the way he looked and moved to Gaffney. “He was strictly a powerhouse—his movement, stride, and for a horse who is not supposed to know much at his age, he sure knew a lot. He would change strides just right coming in and out of a turn, and he seemed to me so intelligent for a young horse. Nothing bothered him. I had been on a lot of two-year-olds in my life, but this one really struck me.”

Gaffney’s mornings at the racetrack revolved around Secretariat. He rode the red horse steadily, building him up in his own mind, telling stablehands of the youngster’s extraordinary future, boasting about him to grooms and hot walkers and even to his wife, Mary. He began calling the horse “Big Red.”

Gaffney told his mother about the colt, too, and she replied by knitting and sending him a pommel pad—which is inserted as protection under the front of the saddle—with Secretariat’s name knitted in blue lettering across a white background. As if to flaunt his confidence and to reaffirm his instincts, translating them into something tangible, Gaffney purchased two blue saddlecloths, protective pads that prevent the saddle from abrading the colt. He took the saddlecloths—for which he paid four dollars each—to a woman in Queens who did needlework. Gaffney paid her twenty-four dollars to stitch “Secretariat” into the section that hangs, visibly, below the rear of the saddle. He took one of Lucien’s exercise saddles home—it was the saddle he always used when he rode the colt—and for several hours, with his leather-working kit, Gaffney hammered “Secretariat” into it, giving the letters a cursive flourish.

The red horse returned to serious work on the racetrack Thursday, May 18, when he went three-eighths of a mile in 0:37; yet no one but a few clockers—Meadow Stable hands and avid horseplayers—paid any attention. Lucien, for one, had his mind on things of greater moment: the Preakness Stakes, the second race in the Triple Crown series, was consuming all his energy. Penny Tweedy was confident of the outcome, feeling certain Riva Ridge would win it. This only made her disappointment at what happened all the more bitter.

The ninety-seventh running of the Preakness Stakes was a 1:55