Secretariat (horse)

• 1. Introduction

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  In June 1973, at Belmont Park, thousands of bettors who had wagered on a Thoroughbred named Secretariat never cashed their winning tickets. He had won by such a staggering margin that the payout barely covered admission. Some people just wanted a souvenir of what they had watched.

  A chestnut colt with three white socks, Secretariat grew into a horse whose stride made veteran sportswriters lose their composure mid-sentence. A track veterinarian measured his body down to the half inch, trying to understand what made him different. Decades after his death, a pathologist's rough estimate of the size of his heart became one of the most argued-over numbers in horse racing.

  How did a horse almost lost in a coin toss between two breeders end up holding speed records that still stand today? Why do people say his greatest legacy runs through his daughters rather than his own sons? And what exactly made his heart so unusual that scientists still cannot agree on it?

• 2. An Unlikely Deal

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  Penny Chenery, then known as Penny Tweedy, had taken over her family's Meadow Stable in 1968 after her father, Christopher Chenery, became ill. The breeding that produced Secretariat was officially credited to her father's Meadow Stud, but Penny arranged it herself. She sent two mares, Hasty Matelda and Somethingroyal, to be bred to the stallion Bold Ruler in 1968, then sent Somethingroyal again in 1969 alongside a mare named Cicada.

  Bold Ruler's owners, the Phipps family, rarely sold his foals or charged a stud fee. Instead they struck foal-sharing deals: breed two mares to the stallion, keep one resulting foal, and let the other mare's owner keep the second, with a coin toss deciding who picked first. When Cicada failed to conceive in 1969, only one foal was due for 1970. That meant the coin-toss winner would end up with just one horse total, while the loser would get two. Chenery later said both owners privately hoped to lose. The toss was held in the fall of 1969, in the office of New York Racing Association chairman Alfred G. Vanderbilt II, with Arthur "Bull" Hancock of Claiborne Farm as witness. Ogden Phipps won and chose the 1969 filly out of Somethingroyal, later named The Bride. Chenery was left with the 1969 colt out of Hasty Matelda, plus the still-unborn 1970 foal of Somethingroyal.

  That unborn foal's sire, Bold Ruler, had already led the North American sire list several times and had won the Preakness Stakes and Horse of the Year honors in 1957. His dam, Somethingroyal, was a daughter of Princequillo and had never won a race herself. Her own dam, Imperatrice, was a stakes winner that Christopher Chenery had bought at auction in 1947 for $30,000.

  On Easter Monday, the 30th of March 1970, at 12:10 in the morning, Somethingroyal foaled a bright red chestnut colt with three white socks and a narrow-striped star at Meadow Stable in Doswell, Virginia. The colt stood within 45 minutes and nursed half an hour after that. Stable manager Howard Gentry, who was present for the birth, called him "a very well-made foal" and "as perfect a foal that I ever delivered." Gentry's nephew Robert, who also worked the farm, remembered the colt as an instant leader among the other foals: "He was a clown and was always cutting up, always into some devilment." When Penny Chenery first saw him, she wrote a single word in her notebook: "Wow!"

  That fall, Chenery worked with the Meadow's longtime secretary, Elizabeth Ham, to name the newly weaned colt. Their first submission to the Jockey Club, Sceptre, Royal Line, and Something Special, was rejected. In January 1971 they tried again with Games of Chance, Deo Volente, and Secretariat. Ham suggested the last name after her old job with the secretariat of the League of Nations, where she had once worked for the diplomat Norman Davis.

  The Bride, the filly Ogden Phipps chose in that coin toss, never won a race herself. She later became a producer of stakes winners of her own.

• 3. Built To Run

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  Fully grown, Secretariat resembled his sire's damsire, Discovery, and stood as a massive, powerfully built horse. Trainers and veterinarians called his conformation "nearly perfect," and one Australian trainer who saw him said, "He is incredible, an absolutely perfect horse. I never saw anything like him." His chest grew so large that handlers needed a custom-made girth just to saddle him, and his hindquarters were correspondingly massive and well-muscled.

  A sloped croup, extending the length of his femur, let his hind legs reach far underneath him at full stride, increasing his driving power. A long back, deep girth, and well-formed neck also gave him excellent heart-lung efficiency, according to those who studied him.

  The New York Racing Association's veterinarian, Dr. M. A. Gilman, tracked Secretariat's growth from age two to age three. His chest width went from 16 inches to 16.5. His girth grew from 74 inches to 76. His body length increased from 68 inches to 69.5, and the height of his hindquarters rose from 53.5 inches to 55.5. Even his cannon bone thickened slightly, from 8.25 inches to 8.5 inches.

  While training for the Preakness Stakes, his stride was measured at 24 feet 11 inches, unusually long even for a horse of his size. That stride let him unleash what observers called "devastating" speed. His combination of muscle and cardiac capacity meant he could out-run rivals at almost any point in a race.

  Before the Gotham Stakes in April 1973, Secretariat weighed 1,155 pounds. After completing the grueling Triple Crown, his weight had dropped by only 24 pounds, to 1,131. He was known for his appetite, eating 15 quarts of oats a day during his three-year-old campaign, and he needed workouts fast enough that they could have won many ordinary stakes races just to keep his muscles in shape.

  Claiborne Farm's Seth Hancock once tried to describe him in human terms: "Now make him six-foot-three, the perfect height. Make him real intelligent and kind. And on top of that, make him the best-lookin' guy ever to come down the pike. He was all those things as a horse." Yet when Secretariat first showed up at the racetrack, almost none of that promise was obvious to the people training him.

• 4. Proving The Doubters Wrong

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  Exercise rider Charlie Davis was not impressed when he first got on Secretariat. "He was a big fat sucker," Davis said. "I mean, he was big. He wasn't in a hurry to do nothin'. He took his time." Jim Gaffney, the colt's other regular exercise rider, felt differently after his own first ride in early 1972, describing "this big red machine under me, and from that very first day I knew he had a power of strength that I have never felt before." It was Gaffney who gave the colt his now-famous nickname, Big Red.

  Trainer Lucien Laurin took over the colt's winter stable at Hialeah in January 1972 and was, at first, unconvinced. He told Penny Chenery that her "big Bold Ruler colt don't show me nothin'. He can't outrun a fat man." In early workouts, Secretariat ran a quarter mile in 26 seconds against stablemates who managed 23, still learning to run and needing, in Laurin's words, to lose his baby fat.

  Groom Eddie Sweat provided most of the colt's daily hands-on care and came to know him better than almost anyone around him. "I guess a groom gets closer to a horse than anyone," Sweat told a reporter. "The owner, the trainer, they maybe see him once a day. But I lived with him, worked with him."

  On the 6th of June 1972, Secretariat wore blinkers for the first time and ran a half-mile workout in 47 seconds. On the 24th of June he ran a "bullet," the fastest workout of the day, covering six furlongs in 1:12 on a sloppy track. Laurin then called Chenery at her home in Colorado and told her the colt was finally ready to race.

  On the 4th of July 1972, at Aqueduct Racetrack, Secretariat made his debut as the modest favorite and was immediately bumped hard by a horse named Quebec cutting across the field. He recovered, ran into traffic on the backstretch, and still closed from tenth place to finish fourth. Eleven days later, with a new jockey up, he broke poorly again but rushed past the field on the turn to win by six lengths.

  He kept winning through the summer: the Sanford Stakes by three lengths, the Hopeful Stakes by five after passing eight horses in the stretch, and the Belmont Futurity by a length and a half. In the Champagne Stakes that October, he crossed the line first but was disqualified to second for interfering with another horse, Stop the Music, on the turn. He beat that same horse by eight lengths in his very next start, the Laurel Futurity.

  Secretariat won the Eclipse Award as champion two-year-old male, then narrowly edged the undefeated filly La Prevoyante for the 1972 Horse of the Year title, a rare honor for a horse so young. Only one horse since then, Favorite Trick in 1997, has won Horse of the Year at age two.

  In 1973, he would face his stiffest test yet: three grueling races in five weeks, against colts nobody expected him to beat as easily as he had beaten these.

• 5. Five Weeks That Made History

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  In January 1973, Christopher Chenery, founder of Meadow Stable, died, and the taxes on his estate nearly forced his daughter Penny to sell Secretariat. Instead, working with Claiborne Farm, she syndicated the colt for $6.08 million, a world record that surpassed the $5.44 million paid for Nijinsky in 1970. The deal sold 32 shares at $190,000 apiece, with one condition attached: Secretariat had to retire from racing by year's end.

  Secretariat's first 1973 race, the Bay Shore Stakes on the 17th of March, saw him boxed in by rivals until jockey Ron Turcotte squeezed him through a narrow gap to win easily. In the Gotham Stakes on the 7th of April, with no other speed horses entered, Laurin let him set his own pace, and Secretariat matched the track record for a mile in 1:33.

  Then, in the Wood Memorial, Secretariat finished a surprising third behind Angle Light and Sham, a defeat later blamed on a large abscess in his mouth that made him sensitive to the bit. The loss set off press speculation that his blocky, sprinter-like build, inherited from Bold Ruler, meant he lacked the stamina for the Kentucky Derby's longer distance. Some rumors went so far as to claim he was unsound.

  On the 5th of May 1973, a crowd of 134,476, then the largest in North American racing history, packed Churchill Downs. Breaking last out of a chaotic start, Secretariat cut to the rail and ran each of his five quarter miles faster than the one before it, in splits of :25, :24, :23, :23, and :23. He pulled away from Sham in the stretch to win in 1:59, a track record that still stands, becoming the first horse ever to run the Derby in under two minutes. Sportswriter Mike Sullivan later described "a disruption in the corner of your eye" just before "here Secretariat came," adding, "It was like he was some other animal out there."

  In the Preakness Stakes on the 19th of May, Secretariat again broke last, then made a leaping, last-to-first move on the first turn that Daily Racing Form photographer Raymond Woolfe captured on film, later immortalized in a bronze statue at Belmont Park. Turcotte called it the proudest decision of his career: "I let my horse drop back, when I went to drop in, they started backing up into me. I said, 'I don't want to get trapped here.' So I just breezed by them." He covered his second quarter mile in under 22 seconds. Secretariat, Sham, and Our Native finished in the same order as the Derby, a first in racing history, with Our Native again eight lengths back in third.

  The Preakness clock then became its own controversy. A malfunctioning infield teletimer showed 1:55, the Pimlico clocker hand-timed the race at 1:54, and two Daily Racing Form clockers insisted it was 1:53, which would have broken the track record. Officials kept 1:54 as the record for nearly 40 years, until a Maryland Racing Commission review, requested by Penny Chenery, changed the official time to 1:53 on the 19th of June 2012.

  By early June, Secretariat had appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated in the same week, a genuine national celebrity. Writer William Nack described him as a horse who "suddenly transcended horse racing and became a cultural phenomenon," a welcome distraction from Watergate and the Vietnam War. Chenery hired a secretary just to answer his fan mail.

  Only four horses dared face him in the Belmont Stakes on the 9th of June, and bettors made him such a heavy favorite, at 1-10 odds, that the track did not even take bets on him to finish third. Secretariat and Sham ran the first quarter mile in :23 and the next in :22, the fastest opening half mile in the race's history. Sham tired badly after six furlongs and finished last. "This horse really paced himself. He is smart. I never pushed him," Turcotte said, convinced the colt somehow knew exactly how far a mile and a half was.

  Secretariat kept widening his lead through the stretch as CBS announcer Chic Anderson made a call that outlived the race itself: "Secretariat is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine!" He crossed the line 31 lengths ahead of the field, shattering the margin-of-victory record of 25 lengths that Count Fleet had set in 1943, in a final time of 2:24 flat, still the American record on dirt. Blood-Horse editor Kent Hollingsworth could barely process it: "I don't believe it. Impossible. But I saw it. I can't breathe. He won by a sixteenth of a mile! I saw it. I have to believe it."

  Secretariat became the ninth Triple Crown winner and the first in 25 years, since Citation in 1948. Among the crowd of 69,138, bettors were left holding 5,427 winning tickets they never cashed, since a $2 wager had paid out just $2.20.

  Three weeks later, instead of resting, Secretariat was shipped off to the Chicago area for another race.

• 6. Life After The Crown

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  Mayor Richard Daley declared the day of Secretariat's arrival "Secretariat Day" in Chicago, and a crowd of 41,223, the largest at Arlington Park in three decades, greeted him with sustained applause on the 30th of June 1973. Running for a purse of $125,000, Secretariat broke poorly but gathered momentum on the final turn to win the Arlington Invitational by nine lengths in 1:47 flat, just off the track record. Writer George Plimpton suggested that with a better start, "Secretariat might have posted a time that would have stood a century." As in New York, fans in Chicago left $11,170 worth of winning tickets uncashed.

  At Saratoga, nicknamed "the graveyard of champions," Secretariat faced older horses for the first time in the Whitney Stakes on the 4th of August. On the 27th of July he had worked a mile in 1:34 on a sloppy track, fast enough to have broken Saratoga's record. On race day, though, he broke poorly and was beaten by a length by Onion, a four-year-old gelding trained by Allen Jerkens. The upset was later attributed to a viral infection. "We knew he had a low-grade infection," Chenery said. "But we decided he was strong enough to win anyway, and we were wrong." Sportswriter Charles Hatton wrote that Secretariat "looked bloody awful" in the days afterward, needing "supernatural recuperative powers" to recover in time for his next start.

  On the 15th of September, in the newly created Marlboro Cup at Belmont Park, Secretariat ran against a field of five champions who had combined for 63 stakes wins between them. He drew away in the stretch to beat his own stablemate, Riva Ridge, setting a world record on dirt with a time of 1:45. "Today he was the old Secretariat and he did it on his own," Turcotte said. The $250,000 purse, then the richest on offer, made Secretariat the 13th thoroughbred millionaire in racing history.

  Two weeks later, with the track sloppy from rain, Secretariat filled in for Riva Ridge in the Woodward Stakes. He led into the stretch before Prove Out, another Allen Jerkens trainee, pulled away to win despite carrying seven more pounds under the race's weight rules. Prove Out's time was the second-fastest mile-and-a-half ever run on the Belmont dirt.

  Just nine days after that, on the 8th of October, Secretariat moved to turf for the Man o' War Stakes and set a course record while beating Tentam, who had held a world turf record of his own that same summer. "When Tentam came up to him in the backstretch I just chirped to him and he pulled away," Turcotte said afterward.

  His final race came on the 28th of October 1973, in the Canadian International Stakes, run over one and five-eighths miles of Woodbine's turf course in Toronto. Jockey Eddie Maple rode in Turcotte's place because of a suspension. Roughly 35,000 fans turned out in cold, wet, windy weather, and Secretariat built a 12-length lead around the far turn before easing up to win. Bettors again left many winning tickets uncashed as souvenirs, these printed with his nickname, Big Red, instead of his official name.

  Secretariat made his last public appearance at Aqueduct Racetrack, paraded before a crowd of 32,990 with Turcotte riding him in Meadow Stable's silks. "It's a sad day, and yet it's a great day," Laurin said. "I certainly wish he could run as a 4-year-old. He's a great horse and he loves to run." He finished his career with 16 wins in 21 starts, three seconds, one third, and total earnings of $1,316,808, a single-season record for 1973.

  At Claiborne Farm, an entirely different career now awaited him, one measured not in lengths but in offspring.

• 7. Bloodline And A Big Heart

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  At Claiborne Farm, Secretariat's early sperm samples showed signs of immaturity, so in December 1973 he was bred to three non-thoroughbred mares just to test his fertility. One of them, an Appaloosa named Leola, produced his first foal in November 1974: a chestnut colt named First Secretary, spotted like his dam.

  His first official foal crop, born in 1975, numbered 28, and its best runner, Dactylographer, won the William Hill Futurity in 1977. That same crop included Canadian Bound, who became the first yearling ever to sell for over a million dollars at the 1976 Keeneland July sale, fetching $1.5 million, then went on to fail completely as a racehorse. For several years afterward, as rival sire Northern Dancer's offspring grew more fashionable, the market value of Secretariat's foals declined.

  He eventually sired real stars, including General Assembly, who set a Travers Stakes track record in 1979 that stood for 37 years; Lady's Secret, the 1986 Horse of the Year; and Risen Star, who won both the Preakness and Belmont Stakes in 1988. Overall, Secretariat sired 663 named foals, of which 341 became winners and 54 became stakes winners.

  Despite fathering no leading sire son of his own, Secretariat became the leading broodmare sire in North America in 1992, his influence carried almost entirely through his daughters. One daughter, Weekend Surprise, produced both the 1990 Preakness winner Summer Squall and the 1992 Horse of the Year A.P. Indy. Another, Terlingua, produced the influential sire Storm Cat, whose own descendants include Giant's Causeway, a three-time leading North American sire.

  Through Storm Cat and A.P. Indy, Secretariat's bloodline runs into the pedigrees of 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah and 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify. Every one of the 19 horses that ran in the 2025 Kentucky Derby descended directly from him, out of more than 600 registered foals in total.

  At Claiborne, Secretariat's paddock bordered those of two other stallions, Drone and Sir Ivor, whom he mostly ignored, and Spectacular Bid, with whom he became genuinely friendly, the two horses sometimes racing each other along their shared fence line.

  In the fall of 1989, Secretariat developed laminitis, a painful hoof condition, and when a month of treatment failed to help, he was euthanized on the 4th of October at age 19. He was buried whole at Claiborne Farm, an honor usually reserved only for a winning racehorse's head, heart, and hooves.

  Pathologist Thomas Swerczek performed the necropsy but did not weigh the heart at the time, later recalling only, "We just stood there in stunned silence. We couldn't believe it. It was just this huge engine." Years afterward, having also necropsied Sham, whose heart weighed 18 pounds, Swerczek estimated Secretariat's heart had weighed around 22 pounds, roughly two and a half times the average horse's 8.5 pounds.

  Scientists call an unusually large equine heart the "x-factor," a trait some believe traces back to the 18th-century racehorse Eclipse, whose own heart weighed 14 pounds when he was necropsied in 1789. Pedigree researchers found that Secretariat's dam line does connect back to a daughter of Eclipse, though whether the x-factor is real, or whether it explains his speed, has never been proven.

  Within a generation, 263 roads across the United States would be named after him, more than for any other athlete.

• 8. An Enduring Icon

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  In 1974, Secretariat was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. In 1999, ESPN ranked him 35th among the 100 greatest North American athletes of the 20th century, the highest ranking of any nonhuman on the list. Blood-Horse magazine, along with panels from the Associated Press and Sports Illustrated, all ranked him second only to Man o' War among the century's greatest racehorses.

  The U.S. Postal Service issued a 33-cent stamp titled "Secretariat Wins Triple Crown" in 1999, part of its Celebrate the Century series, unveiled at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky, on the 16th of October that year. The artwork, painted by Kazuhiko Sano, closely echoed the cover of Time magazine's the 11th of June 1973 issue.

  On the 2nd of May 2007, Secretariat became the first animal inducted into the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. In 2013, the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inducted him too, 40 years after his win at Woodbine. In 2016, Sports Illustrated ranked his Triple Crown victory 13th among the 100 greatest moments in sports history, and in a 2005 ESPN Classic countdown, his Belmont run placed second only to Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point basketball game.

  Penny Chenery remained an advocate for retired racehorses until her death in 2017. In 2010 she created the Secretariat Vox Populi Award, voted on by racing fans and named for "the voice of the people." The first winner was that year's Horse of the Year, Zenyatta; the second went to Rapid Redux, a former claiming horse who won 22 consecutive races at smaller tracks. In 2012, the award went to Paynter, who was fighting laminitis, the same disease that had killed Secretariat.

  Illinois created the Secretariat Stakes race in 1974 to commemorate his Arlington Park appearance, and the University of Kentucky's football uniforms still carry the blue-and-white checkers of Meadow Stable's racing silks.

  Secretariat's birthplace in Doswell, Virginia, is preserved as a National Register of Historic Places site now known as The Meadow Event Park, with markers showing his 25-foot racing stride and the stall where he lived as a yearling.

  A life-size bronze statue by John Skeaping, commissioned in 1974, stood at Belmont Park's walking ring until 1988 and now sits in the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. Newer statues have since been unveiled at the Kentucky Horse Park, in Ron Turcotte's hometown of Grand Falls, New Brunswick, and at Keeneland. In 2010, Walt Disney Pictures released a film simply titled Secretariat, starring Diane Lane as Penny Chenery and John Malkovich as Lucien Laurin.

  Secretariat still has no entry of his own in Merriam-Webster's dictionary. The word "foal" does, though, and its example sentence, quoting a 2023 newspaper, notes simply that Secretariat, foaled in 1970, became the ninth Triple Crown winner, setting records that still stand today.