Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ