Just put him down and say no more to me.”
On July 12, 1971 (three weeks after Secretariat walked in caravan toward the training center from the yearling barn), Snow clipped a lead chain on Bold Ruler and, with Lawrence Robinson alongside, walked the horse from his stall. Leading him toward the van, they walked along the path past the breeding shed—and Bold Ruler raised his head and nickered.
“That rascal thinks he’s goin’ to the breeding shed,” Robinson told Snow.
They walked him to a gate leading to a grassy patch of land behind the shed and toward the gravel surface of the unloading area. They took Bold Ruler inside the van. There, Dr. Kaufman, with a hypodermic needle containing a heavy dose of a potent barbiturate, went into the van with the horse. Dr. Kaufman injected the drug into Bold Ruler’s jugular, emptying the syringe, and then jumped hurriedly from the side of the van. For the next several seconds they all stood there—Kaufman, Snow, Robinson, and the van driver—and waited. Forty-five seconds later there was a tremendous crash, rocking the van, and then silence.
He was buried behind the office with Princequillo and Nasrullah and all the others. The stone read:
BOLD RULER (1954–1971)
There were tributes, like that from thoroughbred breeding writer Leon Rasmussen, who wrote an obituary that opened: “The king is dead….”
The van door opened in Florida on that January day of 1972, and Secretariat first stepped foot on the racetrack at Hialeah Park.
Like Bold Ruler, Secretariat emerged into a new kind of world, insular, superstitious, and perpetually on the make, a world forever in bivouac—whole armies of grooms and hot walkers, exercise boys and trainers and jockeys’ agents, feed men peddling alfalfa and medicine men with horse aspirins weighing sixty grains, clockers and jockeys—ready on a moment to move on to other tracks, north to Maryland, New York, New Jersey, or Chicago.
Flies on all the windowsills, rows of stalls in rows of barns, hooves clicking on cement, metal gates clanging, springs whining, liniments and alcohol for rubbing, a pint of whiskey holstered like a wallet in the pocket, tips hot at six o’clock in the morning, lukewarm at three, cold at dinner over ham hocks or enchiladas.
As a young two-year-old—plump as he was off the farm—Secretariat had begun to grow into an aesthetic marvel of anatomical slopes and bulges, curves and planes that were stressed and set off by the color of his coat, a reddish gold that ran almost to copper. His shoulders were deep, his bone of good length, and there was no lightness of bone under the knee, as Miss Ham once suggested there might be. He had a sloping rump, the imprimatur of the Nearco tribe, and an attractive face and head. The quality of his head and face set him apart at once from many other Bold Rulers, including Bold Ruler himself. His sire was coarse about the head, with the jug-headedness common to trotters, and he transmitted this trait to not a few of his offspring.
Secretariat didn’t inherit Bold Ruler’s lengthiness; he was shorter of back, more barrel chested and muscular in his physical development. But he had what Bull Hancock regarded as a mark of quality in all the Bold Rulers that could run. “You can pick the Bold Rulers out on their conformation,” Bull once said. “I see the same musculature as Nasrullah. They all had an extra layer of muscle beside their tail running down to their hocks. It is a good sign when you see it in a Bold Ruler. It means strength and speed.”
All he had was physique in the beginning, the look of an athlete. Lucien Laurin was wary of appearances. In his years spent on the racetrack, he had seen too many equine glamor boys come and go. To Laurin, Secretariat was just another untried thoroughbred.
To jockey Ron Turcotte, he was a potential mount, no more than that. The day after Secretariat arrived from the farm, Turcotte was at the barn at Hialeah, where he worked mornings exercising horses for Laurin. He walked up the shed to see Riva Ridge, and glancing down the barn, two stalls away from his Kentucky Derby favorite, he saw the white star, the ears pricked forward, and the neck a mass of red. Secretariat was glancing back at him.
Turcotte went to the stall, took a closer look, and called up the shed to Henny Hoeffner, the assistant trainer. It was the first time Turcotte ever saw Secretariat, whom he described as “a pretty boy.”
Penny Tweedy, when she first saw him said, simply, “Wow!”
But the game is a horse race, not a horse show, and the axiom among horsemen is: “Pretty is as pretty does.” Secretariat, in the opening weeks, did not do much.
He didn’t awe the clockers with the bursts of speed that Bold Ruler loosed at Hialeah as a youngster. There were no quarter-mile workouts in 0:22, no leveling off into a flat run, all business, from the quarter pole at the top of the stretch to the wire. He was still the overgrown kid.
Ron Turcotte was with Lucien Laurin one morning at Hialeah when four two-year-olds were led from the barn and began circling them, grooms holding the bridles.
Turcotte jumped aboard Secretariat that morning for the first time, guiding him out to the racetrack with the others in Indian file, reaching the dirt track and turning right, counterclockwise. Laurin told them to let the youngsters gallop easily, side by side, in a schooling exercise designed to accustom them to having other horses running next to them. The drill was the same as Secretariat had done two months earlier, under Bailes, at the farm. The four colts took off at a slow gallop around the mile-and-an-eighth oval, galloping abreast. The riders stood high in the saddles, going easily, Secretariat almost lackadaisically. The red horse plopped along in casual indifference, his head down, a big, awkward, and clumsy colt, Turcotte thought. Galloping past the palm trees and the infield lake, jockey Miles Neff, riding Twice Bold, reached his stick over and slapped Turcotte on the rump. Turcotte yelled. There was laughter on the backstretch. With Charlie Davis riding inside him on All or None, Turcotte leaned over and jammed Davis in the butt with his stick. Davis almost went over All or None, screaming. This was not all intended for fun. Exercise boys often do this to get young horses accustomed to quick movement, to shouts, to noise, to horse racing.
The colt next to Secretariat drifted out and banged against him and the red horse countered with a grunt.
He didn’t alter course, drifting back and taking up the same path he had before the bumping. “He was just a big likable fellow,” Turcotte said. “His attitude was ‘Stay out of my way.’ ” But they didn’t. The colt beside him came out again, sideswiping him a second time.
Turcotte remembered the same drill a year before on Riva Ridge. The rangy bay was timid, shy, and leery of all contact. If Riva Ridge had been sideswiped like that when he was a young two-year-old, he would have leaped the fence to get away. Not this one.
Ron Turcotte liked him instantly because he was “a big clown,” likable and unruffled among crowds, a handsome colt who relaxed while on the racetrack, who behaved himself, going as kindly as if out in the morning for a playful romp in the Florida sun.
Secretariat became the most popular of the baby two-year-olds to gallop, and one after another the exercise boys and jockeys who worked for Laurin climbed on him. There was Cecil Paul, a thirty-year-old jockey from Trinidad, who jumped aboard one morning and remembered hearing Lucien tell him, “He’s a nice colt, Mr. Paul, and he’s just a baby. You take care of him.”
Mr. Paul galloped Secretariat frequently on those balmy mornings. On his back went Miles Neff, too, the jockey who was about to retire after thirteen years of knocking about on racetracks, and off went he and the colt into an easy gallop.
Neff especially liked the way he moved, feeling something a rider feels after straddling many horses over many years. Part of it had to do with size and strength, but some of it was just a feeling, a sense. “This is your best two-year-old, Mr. Laurin,” Neff said one morning, as he slid off Secretariat.
As the days chased one another like colts in a pasture, Secretariat’s bearing, his ease and kindliness, increased his popularity among the exercise boys until they were actually