Horse Racing Fantasy Community

With the announcement that Horse Racing Fantasy will be the exclusive licensee of the amazing SECRETARIAT and will be available for you to ride in our virtual horse game very soon, I felt it important to share with you something that not many people are aware of about this horse. Of course everybody knows he won the Triple Crown, most people know that he still holds the Kentucky Derby and Churchill Downs track record of 1:59&2, that he ran each quarter faster in the Kentucky Derby, that he unofficially set the record in the Preakness, and a sports fan who doesn't know that he set the dirt world-record of 2:24 and won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths should be publicly flogged.
However, there are some other things that he did that are not as well known that really reveal how amazing this horse really was, things that other horses simply can only dream of accomplishing, things that leave other veteran horsemen in absolute awe. Firstly, did you know that he is, so far as I can tell, the only horse that has ever set unofficial world-records after the race was over? Well, he did. Twice, in the Belmont Stakes and in the Marlboro Cup, but that's not what I want to focus on today.
In 1988, the great Alysheba, a Hall of Famer and himself one of the great champions of racing history, was in the midst of his fine 4-year-old campaign in which he won Horse of the Year, and deservedly so. One of his most impressive wins was in the 1988 Woodward Handicap at Belmont Park. In the race, Alysheba had to abandon his closing style and stay close to the fine 3-year-old colt Forty Niner. The strategy worked, as Alysheba was able to wear down Forty Niner and defeat the younger horse by a neck. In doing so, his time of 1:59&2 established a new Belmont Park dirt track record for 10 furlongs, or a mile and a quarter. That 10 furlong record has since been bested, and the current track record for the distance stands at 1:58&1, set by a four-year-old horse named In Excess in 1991.
Here is the amazing thing: When SECRETARIAT ran in the Belmont Stakes, he posted a 10 furlong fraction of 1:59 flat, which would have been the track record for that distance had the race been run at 10 furlongs. To refresh your memory, he still had not another furlong to run, but another quarter-mile! Between 1973 and 1988, there were many 10 furlong races run at Belmont Park by champion horses, not just three-year-olds but fully mature 4, 5, and 6 year olds. During that time, not one of them ever even equaled the 1:59 flat fraction posted by SECRETARIAT in the Belmont Stakes, and he still had another quarter-mile to run. What's more, when Alysheba set that official track record of 1:59&2 in the Woodward, Chris McCarron asked Alysheba for all he had down the stretch, going to the whip many times, and remember that Alysheba was a fully mature 4-year-old near the end of his brilliant fall campaign. On the other hand, SECRETARIAT was not asked for anything by Ron Turcotte up to the point they passed the quarter pole in the 1973 Belmont. In addition, he was a three-year-old at the end of his spring campaign, and was running in his third long-distance race in the span of five weeks. It speaks volumes that his 1:59 flat fraction wasn't surpassed until 1991, over 18 years after his incredible performance in the Belmont. Is this a knock against Alysheba? No, and anyone who says otherwise would be a fool. Instead, the fact that SECRETARIAT could, at three years of age, post a fraction that would have been a record time for an entire race for almost twenty years is a great example of the freakish ability he possessed. And he didn't do things like that in the Belmont only, either. Later on that same season of 1973, he posted a then world record of 1:45&2 in the inaugural 9 furlong Marlboro Cup, a race in which his stablemate Riva Ridge finished second. In pulling up over an extra 10th furlong, he was clocked in an astounding 1:57&4 for a mile and a quarter! The current world-record on dirt for a mile and a quarter is exactly that time, set by Spectacular Bid in the 1980 Charles Strub stakes, and he did it as a 4-year-old. Remember, he did these things when he was a 3-year-old. My God, what would SECRETARIAT have done as 4-year-old? It's almost incomprehensible.