02/11/2025
His noble heart twice the size of normal
On June 9, 1973, the final race day of the Triple Crown at Belmont Park, the American public was humming with excitement for the race that could determine the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years. Secretariat, for his part, was ready to deliver.
Unlike in his previous races, this time Secretariat did not start from behind. Instead, he bolted from the gate and secured good placement along the inside lane. His long-time rival, Sham, gave him some competition at the start, but by the half-mile mark, Secretariat pulled away. And he just kept accelerating.
“Down the backstretch, with a half-mile to go, Secretariat was clearly giving me a rocket ride,” Turcotte recalled in 1993. “I never experienced anything like it. Faster, faster, faster. Enemy hoofbeats soon disappeared; too far behind us on the track for me to hear. What a race. What a memory.”
By the time Secretariat and Turcotte rounded the final corner they were all alone. The announcer, Chic Anderson, narrated to spectators, “He’s moving like a tre-mend-ous machine…”
Secretariat crushed the competition – first by 10 lengths, then 20, and eventually a gob-stopping 31 lengths – to become horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner since 1948. A famous Sports Illustrated photo shows Turcotte looking back during the final leg of the race to see the long empty stretch that Secretariat had opened between him and his nearest rivals.
Penny Chenery would say about Secretariat in the Belmont race, “Why did he keep on running when he’d passed everybody by almost an eighth of a mile? My gut feeling is that it was his home track and he was ready for that race. I just think he got out there and put away Sham early and just felt ‘Okay, I feel good, I’m just going to show them how I can run.’”
‘Only One Secretariat’
In the decades since Secretariat completed the Triple Crown, his record times remain unsurpassed in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.
In 1974, Secretariat was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. In 1999, he was the only non-human included among ESPN’s 50 greatest athletes of the century and he became the first thoroughbred to be honored with his own U.S. Postal stamp. Outside the paddock at Belmont Park now stands a statue of Secretariat with both his front feet in the air.
Before the Triple Crown races, Secretariat’s breeding rights had been sold by Chenery for $6 million. Part of the agreement was that the thoroughbred would retire from racing after his third year.
After his Triple Crown victory, and a “Farewell to Secretariat” Day at Belmont to a crowd of 32,900, the chestnut horse was flown to Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky. Here, he would sire 582 offspring, including 41 stakes winners. But none of his offspring ever compared to the original.
“A lot of misinformed people thought he could reproduce himself,” Claiborne manager John Sosby told People magazine in 1988. “But it just doesn’t work that way. There’s only one Secretariat.”
Secretariat’s Heart
Indeed, when the great horse was put down in October 1989, after being diagnosed with a painful, incurable hoof condition known as laminitis, medical examiners discovered something incredible.
Dr. Thomas Swerczek, the veterinarian who performed the necropsy, reported that he found that Secretariat’s heart, weighing between 21 and 22 pounds, was the largest he had ever seen in a horse.
“We were all shocked,” Swerczek told Sports Illustrated in 1990. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it.” The main motor of Secretariat, that “tremendous machine,” was approximately twice the normal size.
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