On June 9, 1973, at Belmont Park on Long Island, a chestnut colt named Secretariat ran the final race of American horse racing’s Triple Crown — and produced a performance that no one who saw it has ever forgotten. The Belmont Stakes, at a mile and a half, was expected to test Secretariat’s stamina; instead, he destroyed the field, running the first mile faster than any horse in Belmont history and finishing 31 lengths ahead of his nearest rival in a time of 2 minutes, 24 seconds — a track record that stands more than half a century later. The crowd of 69,000, which had come to see a coronation, witnessed something closer to a miracle. Secretariat became the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years — the ninth in history, and in the judgment of most racing historians, the greatest racehorse ever. June 9, 1973 remains the single most famous afternoon in American sports.
The Horse Who Was Expected to Be Great
Secretariat arrived in 1973 with the heaviest burden in sports: certainty. Foaled in 1970 at Meadow Stable in Virginia, owned by Penny Chenery, he was a son of Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal — a pedigree of bluegrass royalty — and was so beautifully conformationed as a yearling that skeptics worried he was too perfect to be sound. His two-year-old season confirmed everything: he was Horse of the Year at two, an almost unheard-of honor. His three-year-old spring was the stuff of national serial drama: he won the Kentucky Derby in record time, then lost the Preakness amid a stewards’ inquiry over another horse’s rough riding — a defeat that made the Belmont, three weeks later, a referendum on his whole career and, in the overheated coverage of the day, on the sport itself.
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What happened at Belmont was beyond the script. Secretariat broke well and, instead of settling off the pace, simply ran away from the field — steadily, implacably, with jockey Ron Turcotte barely asking him. The television cameras lost the other horses. The stretch call became one of broadcasting’s immortal moments: announcer Chic Anderson counting the margin in mounting disbelief — “Secretariat is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine!” — as the lead grew to twenty lengths, then twenty-five, then thirty-one. He crossed the wire alone, 2 minutes and 24 seconds after the start, a full two and a half seconds faster than any horse before or since at the distance. Turcotte said afterward that he never once used the whip.
Life After the Crown
Secretariat’s fame was total and immediate: he appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated in the same week — the only athlete ever to manage it — and received more fan mail than any human sports figure of the era. His later career was anticlimactic; he was retired to stud in 1974, and his stud record, paradoxically, was mediocre — his daughters became champion broodmares, but his sons rarely matched him, a genetic irony the racing world still discusses. He died in 1989, at nineteen, of laminitis, and was buried whole at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky — an honor usually reserved for the most exceptional, his casket said simply “Secretariat, 1970-1989.” His heart, famously, weighed nearly three times the equine average: 22 pounds, the anatomical footnote that made the legend biologically true.
Legacy
Fifty-three years on, the Belmont record stands untouched — the oldest of American racing’s great records — and Secretariat remains the standard against which every great horse is measured. The sport has not produced a Triple Crown season like 1973 since: three races, three performances, each better than the last, before a national television audience discovering that it loved horse racing. “He was,” Penny Chenery said, “the horse of a lifetime.” June 9, 1973 was the day the lifetime delivered its proof — 31 lengths of it, in 2 minutes and 24 seconds, before a crowd that knew it was watching the best there ever was.
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