Horse Racing Fantasy Community

Of course everybody knows that SECRETARIAT won the Belmont by 31 lengths. It's his crowning achievement, and rightly so. Thing is, SECRETARIAT did amazing things that had nothing to do with his win at the Belmont, things that, like his Belmont, were never seen before or since. A great example is his win in the 1973 Kentucky Derby, run at a mile and a quarter:

Except occasionally in races held at much shorter distances (a mile and under), the fastest that horses run are always at or near the beginning of a race. When we see a horse that wins during a stretch drive, it only looks like they're running faster than at the beginning, but in reality the winner has simply tired less than the other horses, and is therefore passing them. What makes the 1973 Kentucky Derby such an anomaly is that SECRETARIAT really did run faster at the end of the race. Not only that, but he ran each quarter of the race faster, which is known as negative splitting. Check out these amazing quarter fractions: 25&1, 24, 23&4, 23&2 and finally, and astounding 23 flat in his final quarter mile, which is still the fastest final quarter ever run in the Derby. What made this achievement even greater is that up until the last quarter mile of the race, he had been on the outside, 3 & 4 wide, and he had run completely on his own. At the head of the stretch, just past the quarter pole, Ron Turcotte went to the whip on SECRETARIAT twice, and he responded by very quickly catching Sham at the 3/16th's pole, then drawing away in the final furlong to win by 2.5 lengths, setting a Kentucky Derby record of 1:59&2 that still stands to this day and is unlikely to be broken anytime soon. He needed that kind of effort, too, because in finishing 2nd, Sham's time of 1:59&4 would also have been a record. In other words, the two fastest KD's were run on the same day!!!
What SECRETARIAT did that day is truly a one-of-a-kind occurrence, something that didn't happen before, and something that has never happened again as of 35 years later. This is just one non-Belmont example of his singular greatness.

gfn02

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