I can close my eyes and see the scenes unfolding one by one:
The morning of May 2, Thursday, two days before the witching hour, when a hand-wringing Lucien and Penny, still agonizing over Secretariat’s stunning defeat in the Wood Memorial eleven days before, sent him out for a last, crucial morning workout at the Downs. As the colt flew down that stretch, sizzling a final 220 yards in 0:113/5 seconds, Turcotte’s blue and white jacket was billowing like a parachute on his back. Later, Sweat, a rub rag dangling from his back pocket, was whistling as he led Secretariat back to the barn and washed him off with soap and water, the colt’s golden coat shining wetly in the sun.
The late afternoon of May 5, Derby Day, when the backstretch silence was broken as the loudspeakers blared, “Horsemen! Bring your horses to the paddock for the Derby!” And there was Secretariat, Eddie leading him, walking around the clubhouse turn toward the paddock, the colt’s head bobbing, his mouth grinding on the bit, until he strode into the straightaway past the clubhouse seats, where thousands pressed forward to see him, and he stopped and raised his head and stared a few seconds at the mammoth stands and raucous crowds, still as a piece of statuary, before dropping his head and walking on.
At the top of the stretch at Churchill Downs at 5:38 P.M., the hour had come round at last: Secretariat was battling his arch rival, Sham, and they were nose and nose through the first 100 yards into the lane when Secretariat began to pull away, slowly but inexorably, and Sham began melting down the wick of that fiery pace as 130,000 people sent up a roar and Secretariat bounded home alone in 1:592/5—the fastest Kentucky Derby ever run—the first horse ever to shade two minutes for the mile and a quarter. In the doing, he pulled off the unprecedented feat of running each successive quarter-mile split faster than the preceding one—0:251/5, 0:24, 0:234/5, 0:232/5, and 0:23 flat—literally running faster and faster as the race went on.
He electrified the crowd that afternoon, and I can hear their echoes in that hallowed grandstand yet today. Secretariat had been voted the nation’s Horse of the Year as a two-year-old in 1972, and he had already shown himself to be a horse of gusting speed and highest quality, but the Kentucky Derby was his first transcendent moment as an equine athlete, the performance by which he joined the racing gods—the likes of Man o’ War and Count Fleet, Citation and Native Dancer, Swaps and Dr. Fager—and announced that he belonged in their pantheon. The Preakness reaffirmed his Derby brilliance, while his pièce de résistance, the Belmont Stakes, left him spinning in an orbit all his own, alone.
By the close of the 2009 Triple Crown season, a total of 1,382,316 thoroughbreds had been born and come of age in North America since 1970, the year of Secretariat’s birth, and not only did he still own the Kentucky Derby record by himself, no horse had come remotely close to equaling his world record at Belmont—a mile and a half in 2:24 flat.
He was sui generis, to be sure, an inspiration not only for documentarians and big-screen movie makers, but also for journalists and novelists and would-be poets.
Charles Hatton had been the dean of American turfwriters for decades before the rise of Secretariat, and he had seen them all since the era when Man o’ War and Sir Barton strutted their stuff on the racing stage; in the end he declared Secretariat to be the most capable racehorse he had ever seen. Nothing delighted Hatton more than seeing the colt fly through his morning workouts. The week before the Belmont Stakes, on the morning Secretariat worked a mile in the astonishing time of 1:344/5, faster than the best older horses were racing in the afternoons, New York Times columnist Red Smith climbed to Hatton’s eyrie above the giant Belmont grandstand and asked how fast the colt had worked.
“The trees swayed,” Charlie told Red.
Upon the colt’s retirement, it was Hatton who penned the most lyrical farewell:
Weave for the mighty chestnut A tributary crown Of autumn leaves, the brightest then When autumn leaves are brown Hang up his bridle on the wall, His saddle on the tree, Till time shall bring some racing king Worthy to wear as he!
It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.
They swung out the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north. It was one of those hours when time is measured not by clocks but by contractions; the intervals between were getting shorter. In a small wooden barn set off at the edge of a nearby field, beneath a solitary light in an expanse of darkness, a mare was about to give birth. The men were rushing to the barn to help her.
The man behind the wheel was Howard M. Gentry, sixty-two years old, for almost twenty years a manager of the Meadow Stud in Doswell, one of the most successful breeding farms in America. Sitting with him in the front seat was Raymond W. Wood, a railroad conductor, fifty-four years old, Gentry’s long-time friend and neighbor, for years his steady companion at straight pool, and himself a modest breeder of thoroughbred horses.
It was the night of March 29, 1970, not the kind of night for anyone to leave the velvet green warmth of a pool table and rush outdoors. The weather had been bleak all day—the sky perpetually overcast, a drizzle falling through the morning and afternoon, and a fog that clung to the farm and the uplands and the bottomlands of Caroline County. A wind, mounting occasional gusts, blew out of the north from Washington. The temperature had been in the high forties during the day, but by evening it had dropped into the thirties, and sometime past eleven o’clock, when the call came, it was almost freezing.
Gentry instantly recognized the voice of Bob Southworth, the nightwatchman at the foaling barn. In a characteristic monotone Southworth told him what he had been waiting to hear. “Mistah Gentry! You better come on down here to the foalin’ barn in the field. That mare’s gettin’ ready to foal.”
That mare is what put an edge on the moment for Gentry. He had delivered hundreds of foals in the years he worked around thoroughbreds, but that mare was not just another broodmare carrying a foal by just another sire. Down in Barn 17A, the two-stall foaling barn near the western border of the farm, an eighteen-year-old broodmare named Somethingroyal, a daughter of the late Princequillo, was going into labor for the fourteenth time in her life. She was carrying a foal by Bold Ruler, the preeminent sire in America, year after year the nation’s leading stallion. It was a union of established aristocracy.
Somethingroyal was the kind of mare breeders seek to raise dynasties. She was the dam of the fleet Sir Gaylord, probably the most gifted racehorse of his generation, the colt favored to win the 1962 Kentucky Derby until he broke down the day before the race. She was the mother of First Family, a multiple stakes winner in the mid-1960s. In 1965 she bore her first Bold Ruler foal, a filly called Syrian Sea, winner of the rich Selima Stakes in 1967. Another Bold Ruler filly, The Bride, was a yearling, and tonight Somethingroyal was having her last Bold Ruler foal: the stallion was dying in Kentucky.
So Howard Gentry felt more anxious than usual to get the foal delivered. The foal would be virtually priceless, and Gentry hoped the delivery would be easy. Gentry had stopped to see Somethingroyal earlier that night, just before he went home for supper at six. She didn’t appear to be near labor then, but when he and Southworth made the rounds two hours later, as they often did together during breeding season, her condition had begun to change. Labor seemed imminent. The mare was “waxing heavily,” as Gentry called it, with milk congealing at the tips of her nipples like beads of candle