After a less-than-straightforward comeback victory, Secretariat moved on to the Gotham for the second start of his three-year-old campaign. Steve Dennis continues his unmissable series
The magnificent Secretariat, 1972 Horse of the Year and champion juvenile colt, had made a successful reappearance in the G3 Bay Shore at Aqueduct, and returned to the Queens circuit three weeks later for the second instalment of his Kentucky Derby preparation, moving back up in distance to a mile in the G2 Gotham.
And now for something completely different.
The received wisdom was that Secretariat was a late runner, a closer, using his trademark power to cut down his rivals in the latter stages of a race. In his ten starts before the Gotham, only once – in the Hopeful – had he been recorded as having his head in front before the stretch call.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, of course, but his trainer Lucien Laurin was wary of the potential for the system to break down irretrievably in the rarefied air of a Triple Crown race, and decided to use the Gotham as a workshop for an alternative.
“I think we should send this horse today,” Laurin told jockey Ron Turcotte, quoted in William Nack’s biography of Secretariat. “Let’s see what he can do up there.”
As usual, Secretariat was expected to win. He was a 1-10 shot to beat five rivals, following the late scratch of Step Nicely, who had been third behind ‘Big Red’ in the Champagne and the Garden State the previous year and might have been a potent threat to the favourite.
He was spotting 9lb and more to the opposition, headed by Bay Shore runner-up Champagne Charlie (5-1 on the morning line but 11-1 when the gates opened) and the trailblazing Dawn Flight, who was second-choice on the tote board at 5-1. Dawn Flight, breaking from the inside post, was the one Turcotte had his eye on, visualising a target on jockey Angel Santiago’s back. In the grandstands, the 42,000 who had come to see the show also had eyes for only one horse.
The gates flung wide and Secretariat bulled his way out, rattling the sides of the cage as he sought purchase on the fast track. Dawn Flight broke on top and led the way down the chute towards the backstretch, and Turcotte moved the favourite to the rail and went in pursuit.
After the opening quarter, at the first call, Secretariat nosed ahead, surging between Dawn Flight and the fence and into the clear. Now everyone would see what he could do up there. Turcotte had a hard job getting Secretariat to race evenly, to race comfortably, and the red horse burned through the second quarter in a sizzling 21⅘s. That’s what he could do. And he kept doing it.
Dawn Flight began to gasp for breath and Secretariat left him behind, opening up by three lengths around the turn. He whistled through three-quarters of a mile in 1:08⅕, equalling the track record for six furlongs, a masterpiece of barely restrained power. In behind, though, Champagne Charlie, so nearly his nemesis in the Bay Shore, had detached himself from the posse and was closing him down.
As the time-honoured, pulse-quickening phrase has it, down the stretch they came. Secretariat had the rail and the lead, Champagne Charlie had the sense of purpose. At three-sixteenths, Turcotte went to the stick, once, twice. Something was happening, and the crowd knew it. They let Turcotte know too.
“I could hear the crowd and I thought the stands were coming down,” he said afterwards.
At the eighth-pole Champagne Charlie was a half-length down, yet even as he came so close the tension broke, the crisis passed. Secretariat had more in the tank, up his sleeve, and he began to widen again, a length clear now, a length and a half.
Champagne Charlie had given his all but it wasn’t enough, and Secretariat drew off under a hand-ride to win by three lengths. He rolled over the line in 1:33⅖s, matching the track record set five years earlier by a horse who carried 11lb less.
“I knew he was setting a fast pace, so I let him have a breather,” said Turcotte to the press pack. “That’s when Champagne Charlie came close to us nearing the eighth-pole. I tapped him left-handed and he took off again. He finished real strong, and he had a lot left.”
Up in the press box, the legendary sportswriter Red Smith let his fingers rest on his typewriter. He was deep in thought. He had seen the great ones, Citation, Nashua, Swaps, Native Dancer, and was not noted as a man of hyperbole. The impending deadline tapped politely but persistently on the front door of his reverie, and his fingers moved again, rattling the keys with the rhythm of a galloping horse.
“This one is a smasher, and no mistake,” he typed.
Send him, Laurin had said. See what he can do. Now the whole world saw it. Was there anything Secretariat couldn’t do? Perhaps we would find out in the G1 Wood Memorial, back at the Big A over a mile-eighth in two weeks’ time.
• Visit the dedicated Secretariat website at secretariat.com
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