The Horse God Built

by Lawrence Scanlan

  The old jocks reminisce in the way that war veterans do: They never talk of actual fighting, only of the jolly stuff before and after battle. Jockey Jerry Bailey (he rode Cigar and retired in 2006) once said that his work is so dangerous that jockeys count themselves lucky if they come through a race unscathed. Imagine what it’s like to be a jockey. Imagine bending your knees as if you were sitting in a chair (without the support of an actual chair), and maintaining that crouch for minutes, your calves and thighs straining while a great deal happens all around you. Other riders and their horses advance and recede; they may jostle and bump your horse, and there is the ever-present risk that your horse will catch the heels of the one in front—with catastrophic results. Your saddle is tiny, the perch precarious, and you’d better have fine balance. You need soft hands to feel the horse through the reins, you need great strength to hold him, and you need dexterity to switch the crop from one hand to the other. You need, above all, guts. Did I mention that your “chair” is five feet in the air and moving along at forty miles an hour?

  “It’s not really if you’re going to get hurt when you become a jockey,” Bailey said, “it’s how many times, how severe, and you hope that you don’t take the big hit, which is being paralyzed.”

  In his official biography, The Will to Win, Ron Turcotte concedes that it was not death he feared on the racetrack, but paralysis. His worst nightmare unfolded in the eighth race at Belmont, July 13, 1978, when he was aboard a filly named Flag of Leyte Gulf. The filly clipped the heels of another and down he went—slung like a stone from a shot, as he later drew the picture. It was the jockey’s last race, number 20,281.

  Ron and Aurele Turcotte take time to pose for a five-minute-sketch artist who—for nine dollars—will capture your likeness and set it on a cartoon horse. “Put a little wrinkle in my forehead,” Ron tells the artist. “It was always there.” Or was it? He seems playful with his brother and his old pals, somewhat wary and bored with strangers. He was a gifted and much-honored jockey, whose fortune, and misfortune, was to ride a perfect horse. When that horse lost the odd race, the second-guessers came out of the woodwork. Turcotte’s face is puffy and pale, and I’m told he battles chronic pain, heart trouble, and all manner of infection, yet there is mischief in those eyes, too.

  Early in his career, Ron Turcotte learned that a young groom was helping himself to the jock’s supply of Chiclets. On another occasion, a groom was nicking his doughnuts. Turcotte’s cure, in the first instance, was to fill a Chiclets box with Feen-a-mint, a laxative, and, in the second instance, to bait a jelly doughnut in the same manner. In the tack room or on the track, Turcotte played for keeps.

  Down the way, the still-youthful Eddie Maple, in black wraparound sunglasses, blue jeans, and a blazer the color of racetrack turf, has similarly been circled by fans clutching shopping bags teeming with Secretariat trinkets. Maple was the last man to ride Secretariat in a race, at Woodbine, in Toronto, more than three decades ago.

  “Why do we still care about Secretariat?” I ask him as he signs.

  “The fact,” he replies, as if reading off a shopping list, “that he was the first horse to win the Triple Crown in twenty-five years, the way he won the Belmont, the fact that he was a beautiful horse.”

  “Was he smooth?” a young girl asks him before handing him her eight-by-eleven poster to sign. Maple asks, and receives, permission to borrow the back of another girl as he affixes his signature. “One of the smoothest horses I ever rode,” he replies while signing, an answer that seems to please both girls immensely. The girls are wide-eyed, and I would bet the house they are Pony Clubbers. In the ample paddocks behind them, dozens of sleek horses and elegantly attired riders are trotting and cantering through their warm-ups. All those horses and riders act as if they are the thing and we are the backdrop, but from the vantage point of the tents, it is the other way around.

  Inside the largest of the white tents, with the Secretariat bronze hidden behind a tall white curtain, several hundred people have gathered to witness the moment of unveiling. Some have lined up in the sun for an hour or more to get choice spots near the bronze.

  Donna Brothers—an ex-jockey whose face and voice would be familiar to anyone who takes in globally televised broadcasts of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont (mounted on a track pony, she interviews the winning jockey right after each race)— acts as master of ceremonies and introduces speakers as they approach the lectern. The lineup is impressive: Secretariat’s owner, two jockeys and an exercise rider, and one of the horse’s biographers.

  Jimmy Gaffney, one of the big chestnut’s old exercise riders, says, “Secretariat was the greatest racehorse that ever lived.” Gaffney started galloping horses when he was sixteen years old and rode horses at tracks all over the country. Age and emphysema and, more recently, throat cancer have put a halt to all that. Until just a few years ago, he worked at the track as a pari-mutuel clerk. If, for example, you put five dollars on Woebegone to win the fourth, a clerk such as Gaffney will punch in the data and give you your ticket—which you will crumple in your fist when Woebegone comes in last.

  Gaffney tells the throng what they want to hear, but I take from the emotion in his voice that he means what he says when he declares, “Secretariat changed my life forever. Every time I had the privilege to get on his back, I felt the incredible, awesome sense of power. It’s a feeling I’ll never forget.” His voice breaks as he declares that while we may yet again see another Triple Crown winner, “We will never ever see another Secretariat.”

  Jimmy Gaffney was among the first to realize that Secretariat would be a great one. He used to brag about the horse on shed row— to fellow riders, to writers like Bill Nack, to his own wife and his mother. His mother sent him a pommel pad (sometimes inserted under the saddle for extra comfort) with secretariat knitted in blue letters on a white backing. Then Gaffney himself bought two blue saddle pads (the quilted cloth on which the saddle sits) and had SECRETARIAT stitched onto them, as well. Finally, he took home the exercise saddle he normally used with Secretariat and, with his leather-work kit, hammered SECRETARIAT into its side. All this naming and heralding long before the horse had won his maiden race.

  Up next is Eddie Maple, who talks about the pressure he faced going into that last race at Woodbine for the Canadian International Championship on October 28, 1973. “I figured,” he says, “this would have been the end of my life if something happened.” He means that had Secretariat lost, a black cloud would have hung over the name of Eddie Maple until his dying day.

  The rider gives way to the sculptor, Ed Bogucki (pronounced Bo-gook-ee), who describes a brush with death while working on the bronze. He was outside when a gust of wind blew down a heavy ladder, which would have crowned him had it not crashed onto Eddie Sweat’s bronze head instead. The sculptor thanks his “black angel,” but strangely, no one from Sweat’s family is here. In fact, I do not see a single black face amid the hundreds here.

  Ron Turcotte gets laughter and applause when he thanks Penny Chenery for holding the event on his birthday—his thirty-first. (He is, in fact, five days away from his sixty-third birthday.) He thanks the owner for putting him up on “the greatest horse who ever lived. I could talk about him all day long,” he says. “He was a charming horse, a lovely horse, and we used to fight over who was going to get up on him.”

  Turcotte makes an interesting point about the blinkers that Secretariat wore. The horse did not actually need them, but he came to associate them with work, and this was a horse who loved to work. The blue-and-white blinkers, like the number 1A on the saddle pad he wore in the Kentucky Derby, would come to identify him. Today, reveals Turcotte, he is getting more mail about Secretariat than he did in 1973.

  Last to speak is Penny Chenery, who remembers the exhilaration of the Belmont. “I would love to know what he was thinking that day,” she says. “Why did he keep on running when he’d passed everybody by almost an eighth of a mile? My gut feeling is that it w
as his home track and he was ready for that race. I just think he got out there and put away Sham early and just felt ‘Okay, I feel good, I’m just going to show them how I can run.’ He was in the zone. There was no acceleration, no deceleration. It was the same stride. You had the feeling that he could just keep on going.”

  Chenery thanks the horse’s trainer, Lucien Laurin, who, she says, “made all of us. He made Ronnie, he made Jimmy, he made me.” She observes, as she has many times before, that perhaps only a “tough-minded” trainer like Laurin could have brought out the greatness in a horse like Secretariat.

  “The other, really important part of his life,” says Chenery, “was Eddie Sweat.” She explains that either Eddie or exercise rider Charlie Davis (“they were great buddies,” she notes) would sleep outside the horse’s stall when Secretariat was shipped from track to track. “I’m sure,” Chenery says, “they were a very important part of his sense of well-being.” It seems a great pity that Charlie Davis is not here, either.

  Finally, to fanfare, the tall white curtain falls away from the thirty-foot-high scaffolding and there are gasps and applause from the audience. Ed Bogucki’s fifteen-hundred-pound creation is life-size and up on a pedestal, so the horse we would have looked up to at least figuratively now looms over us literally. A battery of strategically placed floodlights on the scaffolding illuminates the upper portion of the bronze, but everything below is cast in shadow. The effect, strangely, is to make the horse seem more real, a step closer to flaming into being. The most striking aspect of the piece are Secretariat’s eyes. Eddie Sweat’s eyes are cast in shadow, and Ron Turcotte looks to be squinting. The horse’s eyes, on the other hand, are wide and blazing.

  The bronze jockey has a tight grip on the reins, and Eddie Sweat has his right hand on the horse’s side and a firm grip on the chain at the horse’s mouth. But Secretariat appears so muscled, so taut and ready to explode, that even frozen in this bronze pose he looks like he could carry us all into the next life.

  In 1937, when Ed Bogucki was five years old, he clipped a photo of Man o’War from Life magazine. Growing up in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Polish immigrants, the boy was revealing a gift for fine art and an intense interest in animals.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” he would say fifty-four years later, “but I just felt there was something that was going to be done. I just liked him very much. I don’t know what it was, maybe destiny.”

  That year, 1991, the Kentucky Horse Park invited Bogucki—who was by then a prominent name in the world of equine art—to create bronzes of both Man o’War and Secretariat. The park invited fifteen artists to contribute art for a show that would be called “Man o’War and Secretariat: Thoroughbreds of the Century.”

  Fred Stone, a California artist, contributed a watercolor he had done in 1982. The work, called The Final Thunder, shows groom Will Harbut out in a paddock, holding and facing a still-robust Man o’War, who looks out to the viewer with keen interest. Above them, illustrious horses race toward that great finish line in the sky. Inspiration, says Stone, came from the 1948 Vaughn Monroe song “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” The idea behind the watercolor, Stone later explained, “is that the old man and the horse are standing out in the sun just before they died.” Groom and horse died within a month of each other. The artist’s aim was to depict the close relationship between that man and that horse.

  For the art show at Kentucky Horse Park, Stone did a watercolor called The Final Tribute. This one likewise deploys the ghostly horse in the sky (Ron Turcotte up in the clouds, the distinctive 1A on the saddle pad, Secretariat wearing the Derby wreath of roses). The watercolor feels a little over the top, not least because it puts the poor jockey in the hereafter long before his time. On the other hand, the lower portion of the watercolor—depicting a youthful Secretariat in his paddock—is riveting. His tail is aswirl, his mane is up and flying, and the power in his stride has been vividly caught.

  Christine Picavet, a French-born artist now living in New Mexico, saw Secretariat often at Claiborne. “Most of the time when they turned him out,” she told Equine Images magazine, apparently laughing as she told the story, “he would run around the paddock and then come back by the fence and roll in the mud puddle. So, if you wanted to see him clean, you had about five minutes.” He was like a little kid playing in the mud, she said.

  Someone once sent Penny Chenery a photograph of the horse covered in mud, an image that delighted her. She called the photograph “a gloriously human picture of a champion.” On the track, he was all business, Chenery said, but at Claiborne “his personality developed... . He was always doing something.”

  Picavet’s oil on linen shows the horse running freely in his paddock, and he looks to be floating across the grass against an almost impressionistic backdrop of trees. He looks smooth and silky, as fluid as water. You can imagine that sitting on him would be like sitting on a cloud pushed across the sky by a wild wind.

  The artist first saw the horse at Claiborne in the mid-1970s, just a few years after he had retired. She thought him a bit overweight, but he still struck her as one of the most beautiful horses she had ever seen.

  “His body was just perfect,” she said later. “He had the most gorgeous head, so broad and kind. He had incredible hind legs, especially from the hock to the ankle, set well beneath the mass of his hindquarters. It is something you rarely see.”

  Jim Reno, a sculptor from Texas, produced a life-size bronze of Secretariat for that show at the horse park. It stands just outside the entryway. I like what Reno said about the horse more than the work itself, which struck me as stolid. The irony is that less than a hundred yards away, high on a lofty pedestal and surrounded by a moat of water, is the almost one-quarter-larger-than-life-size bronze of Man o’War. I met several Secretariat admirers in Lexington who expressed deep disappointment that the Reno bronze was so flat—as dull as the Man o’War statue was noble.

  In the Man o’War versus Secretariat sweepstakes, it seemed to them, the horse park had weighed in on the former’s side. I had to admit that it felt that way. The Man o’War bronze stands at the end of a long walkway, a little like the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Elysées. The circular moat and the fountains grant Man o’War even more grandeur, and the viewer feels compelled to walk all around the statue and see the horse from every angle. As you walk, you pass bronze plaques that capture moments in his life and bear testimony to his greatness. You look up to the statue and feel only awe. Knowing that Man o’War’s bones lie below him only heightens that sense.

  Secretariat, meanwhile, has a lesser location. He stands off to the side by the entryway and is partly hidden by a low hedge. Even though Man o’War is farther from the gates, you cannot miss him; Secretariat, you can easily miss. He seems, by comparison, small, an afterthought. His polite admirers are disappointed; the less courteous ones are outraged.

  This is what Reno, who saw the horse in the flesh three times, said of Secretariat: “It’s like God said, ‘You just think you’ve seen horses. I’m gonna show you a horse.’ Then he built Secretariat. He just stood out like a diamond—beautiful conformation. He had the look of an eagle; he’d just look right through you.”

  Reno also did a bronze, twenty inches tall and thirty-two inches long, of Secretariat being ridden flat out by Ron Turcotte during a morning workout. Late in July of 1973, Reno had gone to Saratoga to take measurements for the bronze. Reno is a former hot walker (one who walks horses after races and workouts to cool them down), exercise rider, jockey, show jumper, horse breaker, and trainer, so he comes to equine art from a world of hands-on horsemanship. He remembered how effortlessly Secretariat moved, and how he would look off in the distance—“like he could see something far away that we couldn’t—it was almost eerie. There was no question in his mind. He knew he was great.”

  Eddie Sweat held Secretariat while Reno took the three dozen or so measurements he required. The only one he didn’t get was the width across the gask
in (a horse’s so-called second thigh), since Reno’s incursion to that area prompted a kick. Eddie also warned Reno not to touch Secretariat’s ears. “He didn’t like anybody messing with his ears,” Reno recalled.

  Reno’s measuring offered him some insight into the horse’s power and stride. For one thing, Secretariat measured thirty-one inches from his withers (the highest part of the back) to his bottom line (the belly) and thirty-five inches from that line to the ground. And while his shoulder measured twenty-seven inches, his head was twenty-five inches. On almost all horses, those measurements are all the same. (Humans, Reno pointed out, have a similar synchronicity: We are all eight heads tall—multiply the height of your head by eight and, invariably, that’s your height.) Secretariat also had four more inches on his legs than is normal, yet despite that length of leg, he had an extremely short cannon bone, at nine inches. (The cannon is the long, straight bone above the horse’s fetlock, or ankle.) Reno believed that the horse’s long forearm, long shoulder, and short cannon bone lay behind his extraordinary reach and long stride.

  The artist Richard Stone Reeves was commissioned by Penny Chenery in June of 1973—not long after the Belmont—to paint Secretariat. He drove to Belmont Park a week after the race to do some preliminary work on the painting. “I don’t think,” recalled Reeves, “any horse I’ve ever painted posed with more elegance. He seemed to enjoy being brought out into the early-morning sun and stood patiently in various positions for me until I was finished. Then he was reluctant to be taken back to his stall. His groom, Eddie Sweat, was wonderful with him. The two obviously were good friends and Eddie was just as patient as Secretariat.”

  Reeves’s oil on canvas, fourteen inches by eight inches, shows Eddie in his porkpie hat on the left, holding the lead shank in his right hand, with the remaining length folded neatly into his left. Eddie’s focus is all on the horse, and he is holding the shank at chest level, presumably to keep Secretariat’s head up and off the tempting grass below. A horse blanket lies on the ground between horse and man, and the gorgeous young horse has his head turned to the painter with a slightly resigned look, as if his pal Eddie has asked him to do this thing, to stand and pose, and he, as any good friend would, has complied.