08/30/2024
Well this I never knew. Pretty cool.
Thought you might enjoy:
The Story of ‘First Secretary’
No one knew for sure if Secretariat would produce offspring. Lab results found the Triple Crown winner and Throughbred legend had "immature s***m in differing amounts." So the Claiborne Farm staff decided to test breed the stallion. By chance, they chose a nurse mare named Leola, an Appaloosa. Secretariat was fertile, and the breeding took.
Several Appaloosa enthusiasts contacted Claiborne Farm to buy the mare and her unborn foal. John and Lynn Nankivil of Winona, Minnesota, prevailed with an undisclosed amount of money and purchased Leola and the chance that she carried a colored c**t. Even before the foal's birth, several breeders had purchased breeding rights to Secretariat's first foal, without knowing if Leola would produce a c**t.
On the cold Minnesota night of November 15, 1974, Leola produced Secretariat's first foal, a blanketed Appaloosa clone of the great Thoroughbred. First Secretary grew to a full 17 hands, an inch taller than his sire. And like his sire, First Secretary owned a rich red coat, three white socks and a blaze.
The foaling made national news, and even forced President Gerald Ford to apologize for a remark he'd recently made at a Republican fundraising event. He'd said that his critics, like Secretariat, were "fast on their feet but not producing much."
Secretariat had produced something for the Appaloosa world. First Secretary's November birthday made him ineligible to race, so instead his owners used him as a stud. He sired 247 foals including 39 race starters and 33 point earners. First Secretary lived into old age and died in 1993 after suffering from colic.
p.s. - Initially Claiborne refused to acknowledge the paternal parentage of the foal, offering to allow the person who bought it to register the foal with the Appaloosa Horse Club as sired by an "unknown Thoroughbred." The buyer of the c**t countered that they would only do that if they were allowed to register the c**t as sired by an "unknown Thoroughbred Triple Crown winner." (Secretariat was at that time the only American Triple Crown winner alive.) Claiborne finally relented and First Secretary was allowed to be registered as a son of Secretariat.
