I am not a horse-racing fan nor a lover of horses however thoroughly bred into strength and beauty they may be but once a friend of mine and connoisseur of many of life’s artistic achievements, including that of great horse-racing, sent me a piece of marvellous writing which has ever since figured right at the top of my list of the best sports articles I have ever read. It was an article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, Horseman, Pass By, in Harper’s magazine and it told the story of the author’s father and, most of all, the story of Secretariat, Big Red, described by the author as follows: “He is best described not as the greatest horse, nor as the greatest runner, nor even as the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, but as the greatest creature.
The sight of him in motion is of the things that we can present to the aliens when they come in judgment asking why they should spare our world.”
In 1973 Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, the first two legs of the Triple Crown. Then, in the Belmont, he ran the most remarkable horse race ever run or ever likely to be run. “Perfect achievement,” Sullivan quotes Franz Kafka writing in The Aeroplanes at Brescia, “cannot be appreciated.”
But this perfect and incredible race could be, and was, by the immense crowd waiting in anticipation. Sullivan’s description of the race is so good that I devote the rest of this column to it in the hope that at least a few will spare a moment away from more workaday or dire preoccupations to be as enthralled as I was.
“Sham led the field going into the first turn. He was flying. Everyone watching the race knew that he was going too fast. The strategy for Secretariat, for any horse, would have been to hang back and let Sham destroy himself, but Ronnie Turcotte decided to contest the pace. It was, to all appearances, an insane strategy.
William Nack writes that up in the press box, turfwriters were hollering, ‘They’re going too fast!’
“Secretariat caught him just after the first turn, and for the first half of the race it was a duel between the two rivals. Then, around the sixth furlong, Sham began to fall apart. Laffit Pincay pulled him off in distress, and Secretariat was alone. Turcotte had done nothing but cluck to the horse.
“This is when it happened, the thing, the unbelievable thing. Secretariat started going faster.
At the first mile, he had shattered the record for the Belmont Stakes, and at a mile and an eighth he had tied the world record (remember that he was only three years old; horses get faster as they age, up to a point).
“Everyone – in the crowd, in the press box, in the box where the colt’s owner and trainer were sitting – was waiting for something to go wrong, because this was madness. Yet he kept opening lengths on the nearest horses, Twice a Prince and My Gallant.
“Turcotte, turning around, could hardly see the rest of the field. At a mile and three eighths, Secretariat had beaten Man o’ War’s world record. He was, at that moment, almost certainly the fastest three-year-old that ever existed. And still he kept opening lengths. Twenty-nine, thirty. If he was not lapping them, as my father remembered, it would not have taken him long, at that clip, to do so.
“He finished thirty-one lengths ahead of Twice a Prince. His time: 2:24. He had clobbered the world-record time – for a horse of any age – at twelve furlongs, beating it by two and two-fifths seconds. Unprecedented. Unreal. People were crying uncontrollably. Reporters wanted to know what Turcotte had done, why had he so pressured Secretariat, when the race was clearly over? But Turcotte had never showed his whip. He had hardly even touched the horse.
“There is a passage on the tape from the ’73 Belmont that I noticed only after watching it dozens of times. It occurs near the end of the race. The cameraman had zoomed up pretty close on Secretariat, leaving the lens just wide enough to capture the horse and a few feet of track.
“Then, about half a furlong before the wire (it is hard to tell), the camera inexplicably stops tracking the leader and holds still. Secretariat rockets out of the frame, leaving the screen blank, or rather filled with empty track.
“I timed this emptiness – the space between Secretariat exiting and Twice a Prince entering the image – with my watch. It lasts seven seconds. And somehow each of these seconds says more about what made Secretariat great than any shot of him in motion could. In the history of profound absences – the gaps between Sappho’s fragments, Christ’s tomb, Rothko’s black canvases – this is among the most beautiful.”
Sullivan ends this article with a lovely coda:
“And still the old question hangs over it all: Why? Why did he run as he did, with no one forcing him, or even urging him, with no one or thing to defeat anymore, with no punishment waiting for him if he slowed? For this morning, at least, at last, the answer is clear. It requires no faith. He ran that way, I know, because he could, and we cannot.
“One does not, if one is beauty, have to know what beauty is.”
