07/09/2023
SECRETARIAT
In one way or another, Secretariat touched the lives of many people in many ways, and they were different for it.
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As they gathered in the winner’s circle, as the speeches were made, Lucien Laurin stood shivering with his hands in his pockets and near tears, pale, bent over, and looking, for the first time, like a man grown suddenly old with his responsibilities. He had endured the most formidable strain of the sport, first with Riva Ridge and then with Secretariat. After forty years on the racetrack—after the years as a jockey fighting weight, after the years of disbarment and then training in the hovels of the sport, after all the years spent building up a practice in New York—he came to the races at the age of sixty and survived. If he had miscalculated in the Wood Memorial, in the Whitney and the Woodward, he did his best and most brilliant work when it mattered, through the Triple Crown, displaying a kind of genius in the weeks before the Belmont Stakes.
He remained through all of this a partisan of Riva Ridge, his first good horse, his first Derby horse, and even in the end he seemed unable to comprehend the dimensions of Secretariat’s greatness. Charles Hatton once estimated that Secretariat was twenty pounds the better horse, but Lucien never seemed to recognize that. Before the Marlboro Cup, Lucien said of Secretariat, astonishingly, “The more I keep training this horse, the more I’m doing with him, the more I’m getting to believe that he’s the greatest horse I have ever trained.” And even after the race, even after Secretariat blew past Riva Ridge with such authority, Laurin told Turcotte and Eddie Maple in the stable office, “I still think Riva Ridge can beat Secretariat.” Turcotte looked at Maple, who smiled and said nothing, and told Lucien, “From a quarter mile to a mile and a quarter, you name the bet. $1000? $2000?”
Excerpt From: SECRETARIAT
~ By William Nack
