Secretariat. William Nack

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СКАЧАТЬ II’s first sons to reach the races in America was Whirlaway, winner of the 1941 Triple Crown, the fifth horse to win it.

      Hancock’s fortunes as a breeder soared. In 1935, horses bred by Hancock won more races—392—and more money—$359,218—than the horses bred by any other breeder. He led the breeder lists for the next two years. Hancock was not racing his homebreds. Following a policy adopted originally by his father in 1886, he sold his yearlings at auction every year. Through the years, he developed a reputation as a breeder knowledgeable about bloodlines, both foreign and domestic, who could recall in minute detail the distant reaches of a pedigree.

      By then his son Arthur was a student of breeding, too. “I grew up at Claiborne and when I was twelve, my father was paying me fifty cents a day to sweep out after the yearlings,” he once said. That was in the summer of 1922, the year before he left the public school system in Paris and went to Saint Mark’s Academy in Southborough, Massachusetts, a bastion of righteous Episcopalianism, where he subscribed to the Daily Racing Form, the industry’s trade newspaper and the horseplayer’s bible. He transferred to Woodberry Forest, a Virginia school, and there picked up his nickname, Bull, by which he would one day be known throughout all the major world marketplaces for the blooded horse. His central ambition was to be a thoroughbred breeder.

      In the summers of his youth, when his jobs went beyond sweeping out after the yearlings, he worked with the broodmares, the stud horses, the yearlings, the farm veterinarian, alternating jobs summer after summer. He went to Princeton, played baseball and football, and earned letters. He was a six-foot-two raconteur with a reverberating baritone voice.

      At Princeton he studied eugenics, French, and genetics. And when he graduated in 1933 he returned to Claiborne, as his father had returned to Ellerslie almost forty years before, to become his father’s assistant. He learned, as his father learned, from the grass up—about the care and feeding of the yearlings and the broodmares and the stud horses, starting from the beginning. He learned about the land, too, walking it so often that one day he would know every tree and plank on it.

      “I never wanted to be anything but a horseman,” Bull once said. “I just never thought of anything else.”

       CHAPTER 4

      Claiborne Farm was no empire of prepotent young stallions and mares of promise when Bull Hancock returned to it in 1945, the year the air corps released him after his father suffered the first of several heart attacks.

      Bull was thirty-five then and much had begun to wane since he became his father’s assistant. What he came back to was a farm with a twilight presence to it—old stallions and old mares and an aging, ailing owner who would not let go. Arthur Hancock, Sr., had been the leading breeder again in America, but there had been no infusion of fresh bloodstock. Breeding blooded horses is an enterprise that flourishes most vigorously with recurrent transfusions of young horses and mares of quality, with the culling of the failures and the replacement of the aging stock with younger animals. Stallions and mares—with some notorious exceptions—usually produce their finest offspring before they reach the age of fifteen.

      In 1945, Blenheim II was already eighteen years old and beyond his prime, though he later sired several excellent runners. Sir Gallahad III, whose influence as a broodmare sire was growing, was a ripened twenty-five and only four years away from Valhalla. The younger stallions were not successful. In general, the 250 mares living on the farm, most of them owned by Claiborne’s clients, who boarded them there, were well bred but not exceptional producers. Hancock was unenthusiastic about the quality of Claiborne’s own mares. “We had gone twelve years without replacing stock,” he once recalled. “He [Arthur, Sr.] had sold everything. When I took over he had about seventy-five mares and I didn’t like any of them, except two. I started rebuilding. I made up my mind that my children wouldn’t have to go through what I did.” And by 1950, when he was refreshing the bloodstock with mares like Miss Disco, he already had two sons. The oldest was Arthur B. Hancock III. And the youngest, an infant at the time, was Seth.

      The rebirth of the Hancock breeding dynasty actually began to take place six years earlier, launched by an event so inconspicuous that it stirred only the mildest notice of a day. It occurred when the Georgian Prince Dimitri Djordjadze and his wife Audrey, a Cincinnati heiress, decided to retire their little bay colt, Princequillo, and arranged to have him stand at stud in Virginia.

      Almost two decades earlier, in 1928, two figures connected with the Belgian turf purchased a weanling—a colt by the stallion Rose Prince out of a mare named Indolence. The cost was 260 guineas. The weanling, shipped to Belgium, was named Prince Rose.

      Prince Rose became the greatest racehorse in the Belgium of his day—probably the best that had ever run in that country—and one of its greatest sires. He had the bloodlines: Prince Rose’s sire, Rose Prince, was by Prince Palatine, a son of Persimmon, who was himself a son of one of the greatest sires in thoroughbred history, the undefeated St. Simon. As a direct male-line descendant of St. Simon, Prince Rose descended in what is called “tail male” from St. Simon, a potentially valuable genetic trait. The St. Simon male line produced an unusual number of superior horses.

      As Prince Rose was establishing himself as Belgium’s leading sire, the American representative in France for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Laudy Lawrence, obtained the horse from Belgium on a three-year lease. Lawrence brought the horse to France in 1938 and installed him in his Haras de Cheffreville. In the spring of 1939, he bred Prince Rose to his mare Cosquilla, a daughter of Papyrus, winner of the Epsom Derby. She conceived. The breeding occurred in a turbulent time. War was coming to Europe. The German armies were menacing France. Pregnant, Cosquilla didn’t stay there long. She was dispatched across the English Channel, while in foal, to be bred in England the next spring.

      In early 1940, as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Cosquilla gave birth to her bay colt at the Banstead Stud at Newmarket, near Suffolk, about ninety miles outside of London. The air war over England began in July of 1940, and later that summer or fall—after the colt had been weaned—he was sent to Lawrence’s farm in Ireland. Then, in 1941, he and a number of yearlings were shipped across the North Atlantic, by then a lair of submarines, to New York. The colt disembarked as a refugee of sorts.

      Named Princequillo, he was broken at the Mill River Farm in New York and put in training there. Prior to leaving the country again, Lawrence leased Princequillo to Chicago owner Anthony Pelleteri. One of the clauses of the lease permitted Pelleteri to run Princequillo in claiming races—in which the horse could be bought or “claimed” for a specific price—even though Pelleteri did not own him.

      Pelleteri raced Princequillo for the first time under a $1500 claiming tag. No one took him.

      He then ran the colt back for a $2500 claiming price, and again there were no takers.

      Pelleteri then raced Princequillo for $2500 in his fourth start, winning with him then, and that was the last time Pelleteri had him. Trainer Horatio Luro, acting for the Boone Hall Stables of Princess Djordjadze, claimed him for the price. Luro ran him as a claimer, too. Aside from his pedigree, there was no apparent reason for anyone to believe that Princequillo would develop into the best longdistance runner in America in 1943. But he did, running best beyond a mile and an eighth.

      In 1943, the spring classics were dominated by Count Fleet, an extremely fast horse who raced to easy victories in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes and became the sixth horse in history to win the American Triple Crown. He won the Belmont Stakes by twenty-five lengths, the longest margin by which it had ever been won. Princequillo began his three-year-old year modestly. He won an allowance race in New Orleans, not a major racetrack compared with those in New York, then lost two others there, but he quickly became sharp. On СКАЧАТЬ