Secretariat (35 page)

“He’s a kind horse, too,” Pancho said. Penny held her hand out again and Sham nuzzled the palm of it.

“Yes, he is a kind horse,” she said. Then they chatted pleasantly a few moments, and Penny turned to leave.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “It was so nice to meet you.”

“It was nice to meet
you,
” said Pancho.

“Let’s hope we both have racing luck in the Preakness—a good race,” she said.

Smiling among his jugs of mineral water, Martin nodded his head and said, “Yes—good luck.”

It was four-thirty the morning of May 19. Eddie Sweat awoke in the fold-up bed in the tack room at the end of the shed, the door open but the screen door shut, and he rolled his feet out of bed and sat at the edge of it. He had dreamed that Secretariat had been beaten by Sham, and the dream felt real.

There were twelve hours to post time, then ten. Lucien arrived at the barn bleary eyed from the night before, a magnificent bacchanalian evening put on by the Maryland Jockey Club, which dispensed hundreds of pounds of roast beef and lobster and shrimp and oysters Rockefeller.

“Hey, Lucien?” someone asked. “How did you digest your lobster?”

“The lobster went down fine,” said Lucien. “It was the whiskey that has stayed with me.” Looking around and seeing Secretariat, Lucien said quietly, “I hope he had a better night than I had.”

Laurin spent more than an hour relaxing at the barn and talking with newspapermen and television commentators, among them CBS’s Frank Wright, a trainer by profession, and Jack Whitaker, who was resting his chin on the palm of his right hand and looking at the red horse.

Outside the steel fence, as the morning light grew harsh toward noon, cars edged bumper to bumper for the parking lots, and on narrow streets the processions of Bermuda shorts and T-shirts moved to the grandstand gates. The running of the Kentucky Derby had been widely celebrated, having riches, rivalry, and redemption as its elements, and the Preakness was a renewal of the same gaudy combat. The talk of Secretariat as a superhorse, set aside discreetly following the Wood, was renewed with more vigor than ever in the wake of the Derby. There was heightened public awareness that this might be the year of a Triple Crown winner. So through the morning Pimlico was filling with a record crowd of 61,657 persons, almost 13,000 more than had ever come to see a race at this historic racecourse. They were much like the Kentucky Derby crowd, many of them young and exuberant. Those who spread their blankets on the infield lay listening to the rock band near the far turn, while overhead the sky was a dogfight of Frisbees borne on winds that blew off what, in better times, H. L. Mencken called the “immense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay.” It was a Secretariat crowd.

But Lucien Laurin had lost with odds-on favorites too many times to speak as if he had a lock on any race, especially one he’d lost three times in the last seven years. Earlier in the week, when someone had innocently suggested that the Preakness appeared to be a match race between Secretariat and Sham, he snapped, “They thought it would be a match race between Riva Ridge and Key to the Mint last year, and we were lucky to be third and fourth.” So on Preakness Day Lucien spoke in modified expressions of certainty. In the clubhouse he paced nervously between dissolving points of interest, from the box seats to the knots of well-wishers in the clubhouse to the bar in the rear. Total strangers grabbed his hand, wishing him the best, as did those he knew—owners and breeders, trainers and racetrack operators, journalists.

In the press box the scholarly Andrew Beyer of the
Washington Star-News
was making bold assertions, predicting that Secretariat would run the fastest Preakness in history. The young handicapper out of Harvard had already concluded that Secretariat had run a far faster Kentucky Derby than even the record-smashing final time suggested. Beyer had been trying to bring some scientific method to bear on the quality of a horse’s performance, in a sport that tried to pick winners by a variety of methods, from astrology to numerology to the Ouija board. The method involved first determining the speed of a racetrack—how fast it is—and assigning a “speed figure” to the horse’s performance, a figure reflecting his running time relative to the surface over which he ran. Secretariat’s speed figure for the Derby—his running time relative to the speed of the racetrack that day—was an unprecedented 129, according to Beyer’s calculations, the highest he had ever assigned a horse. Curious, he employed the method to determine the quality of Secretariat’s Derby performance relative to the quality of half a dozen other Derby winners’ performances.

Beyer studied the results of all the races run on the half dozen Derby Days in the past, and he discovered that there were similarities between the distances and conditions of the races run year after year. On Derby Days there was always, say, a four-and-a-half-furlong race for two-year-old maidens, a $15,000 claiming race at seven furlongs, a one-mile allowance race for three-year-olds. These were constants. By comparing the running times of horses of similar class on different Derby Days, Beyer was able to determine how fast the racetrack was for one Kentucky Derby relative to another. When he compared the times of all races run on Derby Day in 1964, the year Northern Dancer ran his record mile and a quarter in 2:00, to all the races run on Derby Day in 1973, he decided that the track in 1964 was
X
times faster than it was in 1973—that is, the two-year-old maidens were running
X
times faster, as were the $15,000 claimers and the allowance horses. And so on.

Applying this finding, Beyer concluded that, at a distance of a mile and a quarter, the racetrack at Churchill Downs had been a full second faster in 1964 than it was in 1973. Thus he concluded that while Secretariat beat Northern Dancer’s track record by three-fifths of a second—a margin equal, roughly, to three lengths—Secretariat would have actually run a full second faster than that in 1964, or 1:58
2
/
5
, and would have beaten Northern Dancer not by three lengths but by eight. In 1969 he would have defeated Majestic Prince by eleven. Even further back were Canonero II and Riva Ridge.

Now Beyer was at work to determine the speed of the Pimlico Race Course on this May 19, 1973. He studied the running times of the day’s races as they were run, the maidens and the claimers and the allowance horses. Beyer found that the track was about as fast as it was at Churchill Downs two weeks before. Assuming Secretariat would perform as well in Baltimore as he had performed in Kentucky, Beyer figured he would run the same speed figure of 129 over the one and three-sixteenths miles of the Preakness.

“How fast will he run, Andy?” a reporter asked him.

“1:53
2
/
5
,” said Beyer, without hesitating. Canonero’s track record was 1:54.

Behind the grandstand of Pimlico Race Course it was quiet at Barn EE. At 4:40, exactly one hour to post time, Eddie Sweat was methodically at work ducking in and out of Stall 41. Barricade ropes had been set up around the barn and security guards were manning them. The curious had gathered, speaking in whispers, to see Secretariat. The red horse was in the rear of Stall 41, remote and sullen as usual, moody and in a bad humor as the afternoon wore on. There was an increasing sense of restlessness. A plane circled overhead pulling a banner reading: “Win the Million Dollar Lottery.” A kind of reverential stillness had descended at five o’clock. Sweat had already changed into clean clothes and now he was in the stall with brushes and rags. Davis stood outside nearby. In and out, Sweat emerged from the front of the stall and walked to the wall of the shed, retracing his footsteps, then crossed the aisle again. This time, before dipping under the webbing, he took the blue bridle and white nose band off a nail by the door. Billy Silver hollered. It was 5:10, half an hour to post.

Moments later, from down the shed, came the leggy and dappling Sham. A retinue was at his side—Isadore carrying the blinkers, Lalo Linares moving blockily, like a bodyguard, the pony and the pony boy and groom and Pancho, who was striding along with a cigar in his mouth, his arms swinging, his shoes polished to a sheen, his hair brushed back, and his face wearing a look of unusual intensity. They walked by Secretariat’s stall, where Sweat was standing with the colt, but no one looked over at him, and no one spoke. They walked with an air of solemnity, hooves and heels clicking, heads down and then up, faintly military in the bearing they affected into battle, proud and defiant and intense as they passed the barn and angled left down the walking path.

“Vaya con Dios,”
someone said to Pancho.

He looked up and nodded gravely. He was attending the vindication of the finest racehorse he had ever trained. Behind Pancho, Sweat stood at the head of Secretariat. He joined them in a file down the walking path behind the stable area leading to the racetrack about a quarter mile away.

They passed behind the rows of barns, Secretariat about six lengths behind Sham, down the sandy pathway along the side street roaring with the sound of engines. A motorcycle dashed in and out of traffic, the engine backfiring in a rapid, fiery explosion, while horns honked up the street.

On they walked. Secretariat had his neck bowed, turned into Sweat, rolling the steel bit in his mouth, then nibbling at Sweat’s hand, which was holding the lead shank. The blue and white checked blinkers trailed after him. Davis rode nearby on Billy Silver, looking back now and then to check Sweat and the colt. Stable workers from Pimlico lined the route.

Leaving the path at the end of the row of sheds, they all rose flush against the roaring blue afternoon, turning right and passing along a line of buses. Secretariat and Sham walked past them to the racetrack and the gap in the fence at the top of the straight. Coming to the gap, Secretariat stopped. He looked at the racetrack, as he usually did, at the infield and the footballs soaring and the flags snapping and the shirtless at the fence watching for him. Secretariat waited another moment, raising his head to see the distance, and Sweat didn’t rush him. He waited, too, looking at the colt and talking to him. Then he stepped off through the gap and turned right for the long walk down the homestretch, in front of the grandstands. They headed for the wire and the saddling area laid out nearby it on the infield turf course.

On the right crowds of people four-deep lined the fence of the grandstand, pressing against it. They spotted Secretariat immediately, saw him coming around the corner, and the applause began there, the cries of support and exclamation, while along the way cameras snapped and clicked incessantly.

In the grandstand people were on their feet, the applause moving toward the eighth pole as he made his slow way down the stretch. This crowd had come to see him run. A man opposite the three-sixteenths pole, draped alcoholically over the fence, pointed to him and announced, “The best horse in the world. The best horse in the world.”

Everything Secretariat did, every move he made, had a kind of flourish to it. Near midstretch the red horse suddenly stopped, raised his golden tail, and defecated, and the crowd in the grandstands erupted in cheers and applause. Then he strode off imperiously down the stretch again. Seconds later he wheeled to the left, pivoting and bucking slightly, and that, too, drew more howls of delight. He was a fighter robed in a magnificent fur coat, walking down the center aisle to the ring.

At the finish line, Sweat turned him left and walked him across the racetrack to the infield, where the saddling area of each horse was staked out by a large yellow sign on which was printed his number. Lucien and Penny were there, waiting. Lucien looked Secretariat over as Sweat took him to the sign marked 3. Straining on his tiptoes, Lucien began to saddle Secretariat for the Preakness.

Penny laughed looking at Lucien stretched to fit the saddle on Secretariat’s back. “We’re still going to have to get Lucien a stool to saddle him,” she said. Cameramen moved around the colt, and Secretariat pricked his ears at the shutter clicking. “Look at that ham,” Penny said. “Look at that ham put up his ears.”

Lucien lit a cigarette and waited for Turcotte. Ron, chewing gum, came across the track and met Laurin by the horse. They had already spoken about the race and the horses in it that morning at the barn. They had decided on no specific strategy. There were five other horses in the race—The Lark Twist had been scratched—and two of them had early speed. One of the two, Ecole Etage, had recently shown sharp early foot and was expected, like Shecky Greene before him and Angle Light before him, to go to the front and set the pace. Turcotte had also figured that Pincay and Martin might want to send Sham to the front, for Pimlico favored horses with early speed. Turcotte and Laurin laid no elaborate plans. Turcotte wanted to leave Secretariat alone, as he had done in the Derby, and react to the race as it developed. The turns at Pimlico were supposedly sharper than those at Churchill Downs, but Turcotte was not concerned about that. He felt he knew the racetrack. He had been leading rider at Pimlico in the fall of 1963, when he first started riding, so he was not intimidated by the so-called sharpness of the turns and the narrowness of the course.

“I wasn’t worried about the turns because he always goes around them like a hoop around a barrel,” Turcotte said. There was that spectacular run around the turn in the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga, and he had handled the turns well on the one-mile oval at Churchill Downs.

Pincay spoke with Martin in the paddock, and he would recall thinking that Pancho’s belief in Sham had not diminished one whit since the Derby. Pancho had told Pincay he thought Sham was beaten at Churchill Downs because of the incident at the starting gate. But somehow the explanation didn’t sit well with Pincay. It did not convince him because, he thought at the time, it was difficult making an excuse for a horse who’d run a mile and a quarter in 1:59
4
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5
. He never disagreed openly with Pancho, but he remained suspicious of the excuses. Pincay was no longer as confident as he had been prior to the Derby, yet he felt Sham had a strong chance at Pimlico. He believed the colt had been improving steadily, getting more and more fit race after race. Moreover, the Preakness was the shortest of the Triple Crown classics, and he thought that could be a problem for a horse like Secretariat who finished strongly. Of the last twenty-five winners, beginning when Citation raced to a front-running victory in it, thirteen had been no worse than third going to the first turn, and most of the remaining dozen were close behind and in quick reach of the pace. Eight horses in history had won the Derby, lost the Preakness, then won the Belmont Stakes. The Preakness had been a spoiler in the Triple Crown series.