In swimming, the world record in the 100-meter freestyle was more than 4 seconds slower. 37 seconds slower in 1973 than it is now. In track and field, the world record in the 100-meter sprint was. Zenyatta was very popular but not Secretariat-like.” “I think it’s too different a time for it to happen again. “That’s exactly right,” said NBC analyst Randy Moss, who has covered racing for more than 40 years. He is the racehorse, just as Babe Ruth was the baseball slugger and Michael Jordan the basketball assassin.

Earlier this month, Kentucky Derby patrons lined up to take photographs beside a bronze statue of Secretariat outside the gates at Churchill Downs. When ESPN counted down the top 50 athletes of the 20th century, he was the only nonhuman on the list. Some smart analysts consider Flightline, the 2022 Horse of the Year, the greatest on-track talent since Secretariat, but he hardly made a ripple among casual fans who watch the Triple Crown series and little else.Īgainst that backdrop of relative indifference, Secretariat’s stature only grows. But thoroughbred racing is nowhere near as close to the heart of American sporting culture as it was 50 years ago. Which is why people who love racing doubt there will be another horse like Secretariat.Ī few – the magical filly Zenyatta winning her first 19 starts from 2007 to 2010, American Pharoah floating above the dirt on his way to the first Triple Crown in 37 years in 2015 – have captured the public imagination this century. The charisma that put him on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated the week after the Preakness never perished. But the outlandish things he did live on in the sense memories of those who watched, listened to or even smelled him. The horse known as Big Red last ran in October of that year, and he died in the fall of 1989. Secretariat’s victory at Pimlico Race Course on May 19, 1973, was just one chapter in a story that still resonates five decades later. “Like a freight train,” Cusimano told reporters afterward, trying to capture how it felt, how it sounded, to be passed by the most awesome racehorse anyone had encountered. But around the first turn in the 13/16-mile race? That did not compute. Sitting atop pace setter Ecole Etage in the early stages of the 1973 Preakness Stakes, Cusimano had to know Secretariat would move on him eventually. BALTIMORE – George Cusimano heard the big, red horse coming more than he saw him.

Secretariat by William Nack