In the stands, disbelief turned to utter, open-mouthed silence. The roaring ceased the way a tap cuts a jet of water. Even the race announcer paused, as if he, too, could not comprehend what he was seeing. Some in the crowd began to weep — women and girls wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the name Ruffian and the circle-and-cross symbol of womanhood, men and boys who had a moment before cheered Foolish Pleasure’s apparent surge.
By gamely continuing to run, Ruffian had made the injury many times worse. On the track, men linked hands under the stricken horse and lifted her into a horse ambulance.
Ruffian thrashed and threw off the temporary cast they later put on her, along with another following surgery at Dr. William O. Reed’s equine hospital. Lying on her side on a padded floor, she came out of the anesthesia and tried to run — from the pain, perhaps, or to catch Foolish Pleasure. She spun round and round in a circle, like a butterfly with its body pinned to the ground. “The same thing that made her win,” said her vet, “made her die.” Burly hospital staff trying to restrain her were tossed about as if they were made of balsam.
Finally, the question was put to the distraught Barbara Janney: do we operate again? And the answer came back: end her suffering. In a rare and private ceremony at Belmont the next evening, they buried Ruffian. She was bound in white like a mummy, and a great hydraulic lift gently laid her in her grave, twelve feet deep and square, her head pointing toward the finish line. Looking on were the grief-stricken Whiteley, exercise riders, stable hands, Vasquez in a dark suit. An assistant trainer put on Ruffian two blankets she had worn, along with some flowers. The trainer fussed with the blankets, made them smooth, then the machines covered her with earth and a horseshoe wreath was laid atop her grave.
At the park there stands a stone marker listing Ruffian’s victories. And sometimes people send flowers to Belmont with instructions that they be placed by the obelisk. The senders no doubt remember, with sadness and with joy, how the beautiful black filly erected sails between those long, elegant strides and rode the wind at her back.
Great horses are “freaks,” say trainers. They use the term with affection to describe horses whose physical gifts, courage and intelligence combine to let those horses do what they do so well. In the case of Secretariat and Phar Lap, the gift was a literal great heart, an uncommonly big and powerful engine buttressed by other intangibles the horse world ends up calling class or spirit.
I like the fact that — so far, anyway — you cannot predict or orchestrate such physical genius.
Conformation faults aside, it is still true that every foal out of no-name sires and dams has promise. Secretariat’s high-priced progeny, meanwhile, carry no guarantees. Certain Thoroughbred lines, such as those of Eclipse and Northern Dancer, generate more of their kind. But not always. In any one mating, the mare matters as much as the sire. In any given race, longshots can come in. Jim Elder won a gold medal in show jumping for Canada at the 1968 Mexico Olympics on a six-year-old horse, Immigrant, plucked from a New Jersey riding school. Of the three other horses on that team, one was a Thoroughbred bought off the track for $500; another had been spotted in a field.
As ruinous as the track has been for countless trainers, riders and owners — most of whom must win, after all, to live well — for the rest of us without a serious stake it can be a place of hope and surprise. I do not bemoan the five bucks gone when my longshot drifts home last, but when the horse comes in I am over the moon. Some horses always come in.
No listing of great horses, however brief, would be complete without the magnificent English chestnut who never lost a race. Almost seventeen hands high, Eclipse was unusual in his conformation, with hindquarters an inch higher than his withers and a long slim neck. Paintings of the horse look bizarre, as if an amateur had gotten the proportions all wrong.
Winner of at least eighteen races before he died in 1789, Eclipse sired the greatest line of winners the world has ever seen: of the horses who won 170 major races around the world in 1979, 82 percent could be traced back to Eclipse. Northern Dancer may one day eclipse Eclipse, but until then the colt born during an eclipse of the sun will remain king of Thoroughbred sires.
Eclipse was first owned by a duke, then bought by a sheep farmer unable to handle him — the farmer, in fact, gave serious thought to gelding him. At the age of five Eclipse was leased to an Irish-born army captain named Dennis O’Kelly and only then did his racing career begin. His first race was at Epsom, where he easily won the first of his two four-mile heats.
Emboldened by beer at a local inn, O’Kelly boasted he could predict the order of finish for the next day’s four-horse heat. When someone called his bluff, he wrote a note and asked that it be read aloud after the race. Eclipse won next day by a quarter of a mile and O’Kelly’s words earned a place in the lore of racing. “Eclipse first,” he had written, “and the rest nowhere.”
I chanced upon a book called The Horse, With a Treatise on Draught; and a Copious Index, Published Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in London, 1821. The musty old book referred to Eclipse as “a thick-winded horse” who “puffed and roared so as to be heard at a considerable distance.” Some people had heard about the horse but arrived moments too late for the Epsom trial. They did, though, encounter an old woman who reported seeing “a horse with white legs running away at a monstrous rate, and another horse a great way behind, trying to run after him, but she was sure he would never catch the white-legged horse if he ran to the world’s end.”
Horses are the most valuable animals on the planet — her owners tried to save Ruffian out of sympathy and affection, because she was Ruffian and because her worth as a breeding mare was almost incalculable. Consider, too, the finest racehorse ever bred in Canada: Northern Dancer. In the early 1980s, his stud fee was $300,000 and rising. At forty mares a season, his annual fees neared $12 million. At the peak of the buying frenzy, one of Northern Dancer’s yearlings (Snaffie Dancer — a dud, it turned out, as racer and stud) sold for a world record $10.2 million. In the spring of 1982, Northern Dancer’s owners spurned an offer of $40 million from a French syndicate. “There are some people,” Charles Taylor, the horse’s owner, said then, “who believe that everything has its price — but not Northern Dancer.” In his lifetime, the stallion sired one thousand foals.
He was a horse of immense character and lordliness. If breakfast came late, he would toss his head impatiently and kick the side of his stall. Charles Taylor’s mother used to bring the horse sugar cubes, and when she forgot he nipped her. He bit his handlers and tried their patience and was almost — almost — gelded.
Bernard McCormack, the general manager at Windfields Farm north of Toronto, where the gifted colt was born, talked to me in his spacious office where the light pours in and mementos of Northern Dancer abound. The horse, he said, had a strong, individual temperament right from the start. “He knew he was important. He stood out as a foal. Sometimes foals in the paddock won’t follow the mare. Even at five days they’re dictating where the couple will go. The foal leads! When you see foals that young with that kind of presence, by and large they have ability.”
Later, at stud, said McCormack, Northern Dancer had, if anything, an even greater sense of his own worth: “He had an ego the size of Mount Everest. When people came to see him he would pose for the cameras.”
Northern Dancer came in from the paddock only when he felt like it. “He would make you wait,” said McCormack, “and you wouldn’t go out to the field to bring him in because he’d run you over. But he was Northern Dancer and you make allowances for a horse like that.”
Peter Gzowski, the Canadian broadcaster and author, wrote a book in 1983 on racing, wherein he coined a neat phrase about Northern Dancer as stud: “Somehow, he was able not only to pass on his racing ability to his sons but also to pass on, as it were, his ability to pass it on.” Breeders call the ability of a stallion to pass on his quality stamping the get. The Dancer stamped the get’s
get.
“It’s a story without an end because it’s still being written,” said McCormack. “For that bloodline to dominate into a third generation of horses is the most remarkable thing about him. The rate of fade is the slowest of any great stallion we’ve ever seen. Three and four generations of dilution and it’s still going strong. His blood will remain a cornerstone of the breed and in time 50 to 70 percent of all Thoroughbreds will carry his blood.”
7.3 Northern Dancer holds off Hill Rise in the dramatic finish to the 1964 Kentucky Derby. (photo credit 7.3)
They say of Northern Dancer what they say of only the best racehorses — “He ran a hole in the wind.” He was born at fifteen minutes past midnight on May 27, 1961. As a fifteen-two-hand adult horse he was somewhat short for a Thoroughbred, but his stockiness and bull neck meant no one could call him small. In color he was a bay, with three white stockings and a thick diagonal blaze that ran from his forelock down his long head and into his left nostril.
His sire was Nearctic; his dam, Natalma (daughter of the great Native Dancer), and E. P. Taylor, Charles’s father, made the colt available to buyers at eighteen months for the sum of $25,000. Every year, Taylor offered half the crop of Thoroughbreds born at Windfields. One prospective buyer took the colt to his barn for a closer look … and brought him back.
The colt quickly earned a reputation as “feisty, willful and Napoleonic.” Among the exercise riders he was known as “a very bad ride.” Joe Thomas, then manager of Thoroughbred operations at Windfields, remembered him this way: “The low lad on the totem pole had to ride him and if he didn’t use all his expertise, [Northern Dancer] would put him on his butt. Even at the track he would ‘do tricks,’ bolting, buck-jumping, all sorts of things. He was a handful.” Like many fine athletes, he never got up for practice, just the games.
Northern Dancer was a horse with attitude, but how he could run. Like a fullback with breakaway power. He had his own style, not the classic Thoroughbred flow and grace, but a choppy, churning gallop. “A vest-pocket Hercules,” the Daily Racing Form called him.
When Northern Dancer stepped onto the historic turf of Churchill Downs in Kentucky on May 6, 1964, I was a boy of fifteen. I remember the patriotic stir this horse provoked. It seemed like all of Canada watched the race that day. In 1919, Sir Barton had become the first Canadian-owned (not bred) horse to win the Triple Crown of racing, but no Canadian-bred horse had ever been given much of a chance in the Derby. Northern Dancer, then, stood to make history.
Willie Shoemaker, the legendary jockey who had been riding the colt, switched for the Derby to a California-bred horse named Hill Rise, winner of his last eight races. Shoemaker said the Dancer felt “rubbery” after longer races and would not go the Derby’s mile-and-a-quarter distance.
Horatio Luro’s instructions to Bill Hartack — a jockey known for being aggressive — reflected what the trainer knew of the horse’s spirit. Keep him off the pace for about three-quarters of the race. Move on the far turn, if possible. Give him encouragement, never punishment. When he is hit, warned Luro, “it can turn sour.”
Hill Rise went off as the six-to-five favorite; Northern Dancer was the second choice at seven-to-two. Hartack wore Windfields colors: a blue silk jacket with gold dots on the sleeves, and gold silk over his crash helmet. The Dancer, four inches shorter than Hill Rise, wore number seven.
Out of the gate Northern Dancer settled into sixth, but by the clubhouse turn he was boxed on the rail. Boldly, Hartack took him to the outside and used the whip. But it was little more than a tap and the horse moved into the lead by two lengths, with Hill Rise in pursuit. I have watched that race over and over again: Hartack hit Northern Dancer ten times, always on the left to keep him off the rail. Hill Rise edged forward, and it seemed he might catch the feisty Dancer, but the Dancer hung on, winning, as one announcer put it, “by a long head.”
Northern Dancer would go on to win the Preakness but not, alas, the Triple Crown. At Belmont he came up short, or maybe the jockey held him back too long in that grueling mile-and-a-half race.
Northern Dancer’s time in the Kentucky Derby was a scorching two minutes flat, a new record for that race. It was faster than the eighty-nine Derby winners before him and faster than the thirty-four since — with the exception of the immortal Secretariat, who eclipsed that time by three-fifths of a second. Northern Dancer would win fourteen of his eighteen races and was never out of the money.
One day in November 1996, as the rain turned to sleet, I stood alone by Northern Dancer’s grave at Windfields. A sadness hung about the place. The farm that had produced more stakes winners than any in the world was closing down its breeding program; clients could still breed horses at the farm but only their own horses. Colts would no longer bear the Windfields imprimatur of quality. Charles Taylor was ill (he would die of cancer the following year) and a sixty-year-old era was winding down. (In 1998, Windfields did rekindle its breeding program but in a very modest way.)
I stared at the cold gray granite marker that bore Northern Dancer’s name and dates, sire and dam. Nearctic-Natalma, 1961–1990. A rectangular perimeter of straw protected a bed of roses that would bloom in summer, the same red roses they put around his neck after the Derby. Reluctant to leave, I shivered in the wind and greeted War Deputy, a stallion in a paddock close by. He seemed keener on prancing and baring his teeth than on any show of cordiality. No surprise. He had Northern Dancer blood in him. The best.
Behind me was the foaling barn — crowned by a black weather vane of stallion, mare and foal — where the Dancer was born. Stall number two lies about thirty yards from his grave.
When the great Secretariat died on October 4, 1989 at 11:45 in the morning, his body was conveyed immediately to the University of Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science, performed the autopsy.
“We were all shocked,” he said afterward. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”
Secretariat was special. Ron Turcotte, the Canadian jockey who rode the chestnut stallion many times, remembers being approached before the Belmont in 1973 by the venerable Hollie Hughes, trainer of a Derby winner fifty-seven years beforehand. Hughes looked at the horse, glanced at his workout times and calmly told Turcotte, “Son, you’re riding the greatest horse that ever looked through a bridle. I have seen them all, including Man o’ War. Secretariat is the best.” Hughes offered Turcotte a prediction (You’ll win) and advice (Don’t fall off.)
Some called Secretariat the perfect racehorse. Even the so-called objective voice of science ran out of superlatives in trying to describe him. George Pratt, an MIT scientist and authority on the biomechanics of the equine gait, examined Secretariat at Claiborne Farm and could scarcely believe what he saw: “He looked like he would run through a stone wall. He is a mountain of muscle, a mountain of dignity, a mountain of aristocratic bearing — the most impressive live creature I have ever looked upon.”
7.4 Secretariat racing: “He looked like he would run through a stone wall.” (photo credit 7.4)
Only the comment about aristocratic bearing missed the mark. What endeared Secretariat to so many was his playfulness. Turcotte often visited him at the farm after the horse had been retired to stud, and he was certain Secretariat recognized him. The still imposing horse would gambol across the paddock, stop at the fence and stick out his tongue. Turcotte would shake it and say, “Hello,” and the horse would then rub his face against his old jockey.
William Nack, a writer who followed Secretariat’s career with particular passion from beginning to end, spent forty days hanging around Secretariat’s stall, talking to grooms, trainers and likely th
e horse himself. One day Secretariat grabbed Nack’s notebook with his teeth but dropped it agreeably when the groom asked him to. Another time, after the groom had raked the shed, Secretariat got everyone in the barn laughing when he grabbed the same rake with his mouth and commenced to pull and push it across the floor.
“Secretariat,” Nack wrote, “was an amiable, gentlemanly colt, with a poised and playful nature that at times made him seem as much a pet as the stable dog was.” Yet he also loved to work and needed hard, fast workouts before a race to burn off the fifteen quarts of oats he ate every day during the season he won the Triple Crown.
Turcotte fondly remembers the horse’s great intelligence, how inclined he was to ham for photographers, how manageable and generous in a race, how handsome, how powerful and yet how kind — “as sweet as a lamb.” He was a horse who loved humans.
But as is often the case at the track, only numbers give the true measure of Secretariat. Here are some to ponder: 25 1/5; 24; 23 4/5; 23 2/5; 23. These were Secretariat’s quarter-mile splits when he won the Kentucky Derby in 1973, coming from dead last and accelerating in each successive quarter mile en route to the fastest Derby time ever. He then won the Preakness, again in record time (though a malfunctioning timer failed to make it official), before winning the Belmont by thirty-one lengths.
Finally, there is this number: ten thousand. That many pilgrims a year used to go to Claiborne Farm to see Secretariat and pay homage. A farm owner observed that Secretariat was no longer a horse; he had become a legend. But by October 1989, the eighteen-year-old horse had laminitis, a life-threatening hoof disease and his prospects were bleak.
Wild About Horses Page 19
