Secretariat

On his back, Bailes spoke and Secretariat peered back at him, but he didn’t buck, just watched Bailes as Ross took him around the ring. He never turned a hair in menace. Nor did he on August 17, the first day Ross turned Secretariat loose with Bailes on him. The prospect had concerned Bailes. What worried him was that Sir Gaylord had been tough to break as a yearling in training, and he wondered whether Secretariat, his half brother, might be the same—it sometimes ran in a family. But Secretariat behaved with unusual aplomb for a yearling. Bailes walked, stopped, started again, rubbed Secretariat’s sides with his legs, and eased back on the reins. Three days later he clucked to the colt—a kissing sound—and Secretariat moved off in a jog, a slow trot. The tempo of the schooling continued to pick up, but always one move at a time.

Bailes urged Secretariat into a canter, then a slow gallop, for the first time on August 24, and during the next eight days the colt walked, jogged, and cantered in the indoor ring. He learned how to canter easily both ways with facility.

That was the key: Bailes cantered the colt clockwise and counterclockwise in the one-furlong shed, teaching Secretariat to use the left and right leads, or strides, a crucial part of any yearling’s training. It is important because a horse—when he canters, gallops, or runs—leads each stride with one front leg, just as a swimmer doing a sidestroke leads each stroke with one arm. A horse will tire leading too long with one foreleg. In races, horses that appear to be tiring will often come on again by simply changing leads. On a racecourse, running counterclockwise in America, horses learn to lead with their left foreleg going around a turn—that is, while turning left—and to switch to the right lead on the straights.

Dr. Olive Britt, a Virginia veterinarian, gave the colt a physical examination for a $200,000 life insurance policy on August 26. He passed. Five days later, the final stage of his indoor training ended, and he was moved outdoors for the rest of his schooling.

That began on September 1, when Ross walked him from the stall and Bailes hopped aboard. Bailes walked him in company with two other yearlings to the training track, a one-mile cushion of soft sand that wraps like a cinch around the training complex. The track runs past a series of interlocking wooden fences and paddocks, past old hurdles that Chris Chenery built for jumping horses years ago. Secretariat walked, jogged at the sound of clucking, and broke into an easy canter that first day, his ears playing, his eyes looking around, a youngster as nosy as he was when he was just a weanling. On a grassy plot called the “filly field,” Bailes walked and jogged him through figure eights, teaching him to respond to reins, to guidance at a touch, to pressure on the lines. Week by week the training increased in speed and duration; on September 3, the colt walked a quarter mile, jogged three-quarters, and cantered a half, and after several days Bob Bailes noted in the training log: “Secretariat very good size, well-made colt, good manners.”

Training was interrupted routinely. There was a break when the colt was wormed, and he galloped a complete mile, once around the track, for the first time on September 13. It was a slow mile, one of five in the course of as many days. Then again the training stopped when he was inoculated against VEE, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis. The colt was lolling about in a lush playpen at The Meadow to prevent aftereffects from the medicine when Bailes and Gentry heard the news from Belmont Park: homebred Riva Ridge, with Ron Turcotte up, raced to a handy victory in the $75,000-Added Futurity Stakes September 18. The youngster hounded the pace from the break, dashed to the lead at the turn for home, and won by a length and a half. The victory was worth $87,636 to the Meadow Stable, and it made Riva Ridge the leading two-year-old in America.

Two days later, the chief delegates from the stable victory party arrived at The Meadow, their faces beaming in the afterglow of the Futurity. There was Penny Chenery Tweedy, who had been making strong, decisive gestures in taking over the running of the Meadow Stable; Elizabeth Ham, who began with Christopher Chenery in 1937 when she answered his want ad for a secretary; and the new trainer for the Meadow Stable, a volatile little French Canadian named Lucien Laurin.

Racing had not yielded its riches easily to Laurin’s touch in the early years, leaving him a mediocre riding career under sheds from West Virginia through New England and Canada. It was a difficult circuit: low purses, sore and crippled horses banished from Long Island, small tracks, and living day to day. He began there.

Laurin was born about fifty miles north of Montreal, in Saint Paul, Quebec. He left school early to work at Delormier Park, a half-mile oval in Montreal, where he first exercised horses and finally, in 1929, became a jockey. He was only moderately successful, reaching a professional zenith of sorts when he rode Sir Michael to victory in the King’s Plate in Canada in 1935. His career as a rider bottomed out one summer morning in 1938 when he walked into the jockeys’ room at Narragansett Park, took off his jacket and hung it behind him, and sat down to play a game of cards. A while later he was summoned to the stewards’ office.

Laurin went downstairs to see the stewards—officials who wield enormous power on racetracks as watchdogs. They have the power to disqualify horses in a race, thus altering the order of finish, and they mete out suspensions, usually with the crisp denouement: “By Order of the Stewards.”

The steward put a battery device on the table in front of him. Jockeys have been caught using such illegal gadgets to shock their horses into sudden bursts of speed. “What are you doing with this in your jacket?”

“What am I doing with what in my jacket?” Lucien asked.

It was hopeless. Laurin would later insist that he was framed, that the battery had been planted in his jacket. The final ignominy came when two policemen escorted him from the racetrack. “I was playing cards and some son of a bitch put it in my pocket. That’s the truth,” he said. He was ruled off the racetrack.

So he went to work at Sagamore Farm, galloping and exercising horses for Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt liked his way with horses and his way of riding. Convinced that the jockey was innocent of any wrong-doing in the Narragansett affair, Vanderbilt moved to get the suspension lifted. In 1941 it was lifted, though Vanderbilt maintains he does not know whether his influence had anything to do with clearing Laurin.

Laurin rode only briefly on his return, turning instead to training horses. He wound his way up to the rear staircase of that artful profession, up through the leaky-roof circuit with the cheap horses, up along the eastern coast from Charlestown to New Hampshire and to the day a New York owner, J. U. Gratton, sent him some horses that he trained successfully. “I couldn’t do anything but win races for him.” So Gratton brought Laurin to New York, and introduced him to businessman Reginald Webster. That made all the difference. For Webster, Laurin had the finest horse he ever trained, his only champion, Quill. She was a daughter of Princequillo and was the American two-year-old filly champion of 1958, a winner of $382,041. She made his name as a trainer.

Lucien Laurin had come a long way in racing, building up steadily if unspectacularly his reputation as a shrewd conditioner of the thoroughbred horse. He finally found his way to Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga, and ended up making a substantial living on that most competitive of racing circuits in America, working for Reginald Webster and then for America’s master breeder and horseman, Bull Hancock. In 1952, in partnership with two other men, Laurin invested in the purchase of a farm in Holly Hill, South Carolina, where for years he ran a training center. He bought his partners out and prospered. He bought a home in Malverne, Long Island, and a home in Florida.

Now he was sixty years old, with silver hair and an elfin grin and traces of French Canada in his voice. He was a man given to uniform pleasantness—courteous, charming, and jovial. He worried visibly, openly, muttering to himself and wiping his face with a hand as if fatigued, thumb and fingers sliding down the bridge of his nose. He sighed a lot.

At sixty, on the brink of retirement, he was at Chris Chenery’s farm in northern Virginia with a potential two-year-old champion in his barn at Belmont Park, the winner of the Flash Stakes and Futurity.

One thing Lucien Laurin had never had was the big horse, the champion two-year-old colt who had a shot at the Kentucky Derby, the ability to win the Triple Crown. Laurin had won the 1966 Belmont Stakes with Amberoid, but Amberoid was a nice horse, not a champion. The Derby, as it had for Hancock, Chenery, Vanderbilt, and Mrs. Phipps, had always fallen out of Lucien’s reach. Nor had he ever won the Preakness, or many other major races. Now, at the twilight of his training career, he had Riva Ridge and was standing at the moment outside the yearlings’ stalls, looking at next year’s Meadow two-year-olds, when Meredith Bailes led Secretariat toward the gathering—Lucien, Penny Tweedy, Miss Ham, Howard Gentry, and Bob Bailes. In the notes she took that day, dated September 20, Penny Tweedy wrote under Secretariat’s name: “Big (turns out left front—LL), good bone, a bit swaybacked—very nice—lovely smooth gait.” (LL meant Lucien Laurin.) But if his left fore turned out slightly and he was a trifle swaybacked to the eye—he quickly grew out of that—Secretariat raised Laurin’s eyebrows when Bailes brought him forward, stopping him.

Lucien Laurin did not know it then, but he was moving gradually toward a time in his life that would strain his capacity for understanding, wrench his beliefs in what he had learned about long odds and about a sport shot through and through with chance. After more than forty years on the racetrack, he was about to go to the races.

Through September and October of that year, as Secretariat galloped around the Meadow training track—he went as far as a mile and an eighth with other yearlings galloping beside him, getting used to company—Riva Ridge was doing what no horse had ever done for Lucien Laurin.

On October 9, the day that Secretariat galloped three-quarters of a mile at the farm, Riva Ridge bounced to the lead in the one-mile Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park, opened a four-length lead in midstretch, and won off by seven. First money was $117,090. Riva Ridge was an exceptionally fast horse, even if he did not look it. He had a small head, long legs, and a narrow chest—but Turcotte recalled him as almost deerlike in the way he moved, as if skipping effortlessly. All the two-year-olds were at his mercy now.

In the Pimlico-Laurel Futurity in Maryland on October 30, the day Secretariat galloped a mile and an eighth, Riva Ridge lay off the pace going a mile and a sixteenth—the farthest he had ever run—moved to the front as he wished, and ran away to win by eleven. He earned $90,733. His dominance of the two-year-olds was undisputed. Two weeks later—a day after Secretariat breezed his first quarter mile at The Meadow—he went head and head with Ask Not and Last Jewel in about 0:26—Riva Ridge beat seven others in the Garden State Stakes in New Jersey, winning by two and a half lengths and earning $176,334.

At last Lucien had his big chance for the Triple Crown. Riva Ridge won seven of nine races, $503,263 in purses, and following his last start of the year in the Garden State Stakes, was named America’s champion two-year-old in a combined staff poll of members of the National Turfwriters Association, the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, and staff members of the Daily Racing Form.

Eight days after Riva Ridge won the finale, Laurin returned to The Meadow and again saw Secretariat. Laurin said he wanted the colt sent to him in Florida sometime in January, along with other horses. That was on November 21, 1971—the day Secretariat was taken from training and turned out to pasture. Bailes had hopes for Secretariat—he liked his smooth and easy way of moving and his size and strength—even though he gave no signs of speed in excess or precocity. “He was a big lazy dude, a kind of sleepy colt,” Bailes would recall.

Life wound down for Secretariat at the farm during the cold months. He spent part of that winter in a two-acre paddock that rimmed the training track.

Secretariat was being readied for the race track on January 10. Wing Hamilton, an equine dentist, dressed up Secretariat’s teeth, knocking off the sharp edges and filing them down. For two days, January 18 and 19, he was loaded onto a van and driven around the farm to prepare him for the jolts of the journey south on January 20.

Bob and Meredith Bailes, Garfield Tillman, and Charlie Ross arose early that morning, and arrived at the training track at 6:15. They took the colt’s temperature as a precaution, rubbed his legs with a liniment to cool them, and dressed them in protective cotton bandages. He was led briefly around the walking ring outside his stall, the last chance for exercise before the long ride. Then the blue and white van rolled into the training center. The loading began when two fillies, Ask Not and All or None, were led to the front of the van. Meredith Bailes took Secretariat onto the rear, hooking a hay rack beside him in his narrow but ample stall.

Then at 7:20, with the doors fastened and the engine fired up and roaring, the colorful van and its cargo slipped off to Route 30, which divides The Meadow, and within minutes it was plunging south toward the Carolinas.

CHAPTER 8

By the morning of January 20, 1972, Secretariat had lived almost twenty-two months at The Meadow, but there was more than that behind him as the van rolled south past Richmond and more around him than the James River rushing toward Hampton Roads.

Behind him were the land, lineage, and ancestry stretching back through generations of blooded horses, rows of stone and creosote fencing, ships plunging the Atlantic, trains whistling through the Alleghenies, horsecars and vans rolling down the Catskills, straw beds, Gettysburg, the Aga Khan, gavels slamming, years of grass and snow on fields melting in a pool of a hundred Aprils draining into Stoner Creek, the ‘58 Suburban Handicap, and the passing of an old order.

Toward the end of August 1958, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt headed for Sagamore Farm to see Discovery for the last time. Through the “Iron Horse,” Vanderbilt had become an enormously influential breeder. Miss Disco was not the only daughter of Discovery to bear an American Horse of the Year at the stud. Another daughter of Discovery, Geisha, foaled Native Dancer, Horse of the Year in 1954, winner of twenty-one of twenty-two starts. Discovery, twenty-seven years old that year, was debilitated in his old age when Vanderbilt came to see him, and on the morning of August 28, 1958, he was destroyed at Sagamore and buried in the farm’s horse cemetery on a small rise of ground near the training track.

A year later, on May 26, 1959, groom Snow Fields, Lawrence Robinson, and Bull Hancock were standing in the breeding shed at Claiborne Farm. Nasrullah was in his third year as the nation’s leading sire, the year his runners would earn $1,434,543 on American racetracks. Bold Ruler, his fastest son, was standing his first year at stud at Claiborne, a five-year-old who was just getting started. Nasrullah was only nineteen, and he was expected to stand at stud several more years. Princequillo was grazing in a paddock nearby.

Snow Fields cocked his ear and listened out the door of the shed.

“You hear that?” said Snow.

“Hear what?” said Bull.

“Nasrullah’s nickerin’, Mr. Arthur. Somethin’s wrong.”

“Hell, he’s nickered before. He nickers all the time!”

Robinson and Snow looked at each other, saying nothing for a moment, and finally Snow told Hancock that Nasrullah never nickered in the paddock.

“The only time you hear him nickering is when he comes to the breeding shed,” Snow said.

Snow and Larry Robinson walked quickly past the stallion barn and the row of hedges and to the lush acreage belonging to Nasrullah. He was still whinnying but he was sweating profusely, too, obviously in distress. Someone rushed off to call Dr. Floyd Sager. Sager arrived just in time to see Nasrullah walk away from the fence and topple over. Sager rushed to him—the most valuable stallion in America—but he was dead. Sager, seeing the autopsy report, could hardly believe it.

Nasrullah died after the left ventricle of his heart, one of the chambers through which blood passes in and out, burst like a tire with a blowout, torn to shreds. The heart kept pumping, but blood continued pouring from it and filling the thoracic cavity. He died by suffocation.

As Nasrullah lay dead in the field, Bold Ruler went wild, screaming and running up and down the wooden fence that ran between his paddock and Nasrullah’s. Fields was startled: “It was his daddy lyin’ there. It’s the only day I ever saw Bold Ruler fret. He was hollerin’ and pawin’ and runnin’ up and down that fence—Nasrullah, you see, never nickered, but he nickered that day.”

Bull Hancock’s decision to bring Nasrullah to America was perhaps the most momentous ever made in the history of American bloodstock, for the rugged bay stallion altered the breed in this country, infusing the domestic strains with the Nearco fire. The Nasrullahs were fast and they could stay the classic distances, like Bold Ruler and Nashua and Bald Eagle. He represented a milestone in financial investment in racing blooded horses, the beginning of big profits from what were only the most modest investments. An original $10,000 investment in a share of Nasrullah ultimately became worth about $700,000.

Now Nasrullah was dead at Claiborne in the paddock near the stallion barn. He was buried in a grave behind the farm office across from Kennedy Creek, along a gravel walkway that runs behind it shaded by a hedge ten feet high. He was the fifth horse buried there. The other headstones next to his, each a foot and a half high, were carved with the names of Claiborne stallions who had died before him:

SIR GALLAHAD III (1920–1949)

JOHNSTOWN (1936–1950)

GALLANT Fox (1927–1953)

BLENHEIM II (1927–1958)

And then:

NASRULLAH (1940–1959)

In 1964, the year Northern Dancer won the Derby and the Preakness but faded in the one-and-one-half-mile Belmont Stakes, the little bay Princequillo had a heart attack.

Princequillo was conceived in France, born in England, raised in Ireland, shipped to America as a yearling, and raced in claiming races as a juvenile. He won at the longest of American distances—the farther the better—and even then he stood for only $250 at Ellerslie, and Bull could not get enough mares to breed to him. Chenery’s Hill Prince helped change all that. Princequillo was the leading American sire in 1957, the year his offspring won $1,698,427—a world record until Bold Ruler broke it in 1966—and in 1958, they won $1,394,540. But his impact would be felt most forcefully as a broodmare sire—as the father of mares such as Somethingroyal. He first led the broodmare sire list in 1966, when his 191 daughters produced horses that won $2,007,184. Princequillo was the country’s leading broodmare sire for seven years, at last count, and he finally cracked the 1957 record of Mahmoud—whose daughters produced offspring winning $2,593,782—when his daughters’ offspring earned more than $2,700,000.

Princequillo declined after his heart attack, but he had the poise and sense to take it easy, never galloping or exerting himself in the paddock. There was nothing anyone could do for him but feed him and hope that death would come easy. He was relieved of stud duties that year.

The son of Prince Rose–Cosquilla died on July 18, at about nine o’clock at night, falling behind the hedge where the graves were lined up, and he was buried there with the others next to Nasrullah. His was the sixth headstone, and it, too, was carved in stone:

PRINCEQUILLO (1940–1964)

Snow Fields said he first began to sense something wrong with Bold Ruler in 1970. It was the smell of decay, and thinking it might be a dead rodent in Bold Ruler’s stall, he looked around for it, but found nothing.

A foulness hung about the horse, filled the stall, and eventually pervaded the barn, making Snow wince at the thought of it years later. Snow bathed the stall with a disinfectant more than once, dousing it more heavily each time, the corners and the sides, but to no avail. It was an odor that Snow Fields would never forget. It was the smell of death.

Dr. Walter Kaufman, the Claiborne Farm veterinarian, had given the horse antibiotics, and his distress cleared up, but it came back again.

There had been bleeding, just a trickle in the beginning, then a heavier flow. Bold Ruler had undergone tracheotomy to ease his breathing. A lighted tube had been inserted in his throat, but that exploration revealed only swollen and inflamed tissue, not the cause of it. Bold Ruler was losing weight steadily when it was decided, in early August, to van him to Lexington for exploratory surgery under general anesthesia.

It was a malignancy, deep in the nasal passage and hanging just below the brain. And when Dr. Irene Roeckel told Kaufman that it was not benign—Kaufman had been waiting, like a father, at the medical school for the biopsy report—he called Bull Hancock at Saratoga. Bull told the Phippses.

Gladys Phipps, nearing eighty-seven, ordered her horse destroyed if there were any signs of pain. Those close to the stable said she had a source at the farm, an unknown source, with whom she spoke regularly for reports on the condition of her cripple. They weren’t going to fool her, not at this late hour. In an effort to relieve and finally save the horse, she and her son Ogden agreed to send him to Auburn University to undergo a series of unusual and expensive cobalt treatments. Between the time x-rays were first taken and the time Bold Ruler arrived at Auburn, the tumor had grown to the size of a tennis ball and blocked nearly the whole of his nasal passage.

Eight times in eight weeks they bombarded him with cobalt, precision bombings since the tumor lay so near the brain, and each time he was knocked unconscious under general anesthesia. Robinson stayed with him, sleeping in a trailer at the university.

Bold Ruler’s condition improved substantially. He ate well, recovering quickly from the anesthesia, and comported himself with calm throughout his two-month stay at Auburn. By the end of the treatments, the mass had diminished in size, and the horse’s weight had increased by fifty pounds. Vanned back to Claiborne Farm in October with Robinson, Bold Ruler showed new life and new vigor, his spirits lifting. While there was hope he would continue to stand at stud, there was no definitive prognosis, only guarded opinions and speculation.

Gladys Phipps lived just long enough to learn that Bold Ruler had been returned to Claiborne and that growth of the mass had been retarded. A week after he returned to the farm, she died at the age of eighty-seven on her Long Island estate.

By the late spring of 1971, a full book of thirty-seven mares had been bred to Bold Ruler. The stallion had been behaving well since the cobalt treatments. Then his illness recurred sometime in June. Though he continued eating well, Bold Ruler started losing weight. X-rays taken in May had been clear, but now in June there was trouble again.

Eight months after Mrs. Phipps died, Miss Disco was destroyed “due to the infirmities of old age,” according to the farm files. The dam of Bold Ruler was twenty-seven.

Bold Ruler continued declining through June, his general health and vigor deteriorating. An entry in the farm veterinarian log, made June 25, noted: “The horse has lost considerable weight, and appears uneasy and unhappy. Considerable foul-smelling discharge from the nostrils. Horse not moving well. Appears stiff and sore.”

A piece of tissue, cut from the horse’s neck, was sent for a biopsy to the University of Kentucky. The report, dated July 8, read in part like an order for execution: “This tumor is the same as the first biopsy specimen but appears more anaplastic and malignant.”