Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ