Horse Racing Fantasy Community

SECRETARIAT, a feature film produced by Disney that is set to premiere in theaters on October 10, 2010, is being edited right now and since it is the first feature length film about arguably the greatest racehorse that ever lived, it's an understatement to say that anticipation runs high for fans of the champion. Anticipation and, to be honest, a little anxiety. I think that I can safely speak for many fans of this horse out there, I mean the average fans, ordinary fans with no personal connection to the industry or no relationship with any of the big names in the sport of horse racing, when I say that we are hoping very much that this film does SECRETARIAT justice. What do I mean by that? I thought for quite awhile about how to describe exactly that, and the best way to do that is to say that I hope the film captures his almost indefinable magic.
What does that magic entail? The magic that started with his amazing talent, talent so singular, so devastating, so nearly incomprehensible that it allowed the chestnut son of Bold Ruler to do things on the track that, to this day, no horse has ever done and most experts doubt will ever be duplicated. For casual fans of horseracing that don't understand the technical aspects of racing, like what the significance of a fifth of a second holds (it's the equivalent of one length) or what a twelve-clip is (averaging 12 seconds per ever 8th of a mile) and don't care to know, they can tap into the magic that was his astounding 31 length victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, but what they might not know is how his time of 2:24 flat is so utterly inconceivable that, in the research that I've done, I've never found any documentation that any other horse has ever ran a mile and a half on dirt in a time better than 2:25&4/5ths. They might not know that he ran each successive quarter-mile in the 1973 Kentucky Derby faster, finishing with an all-time speed record for both the Kentucky Derby as a whole and for the fastest final quarter mile as well. That horse just loved to run, and perhaps the most amazing single feat he ever accomplished was one that didn't officially even count: After SECRETARIAT and jockey Ron Turcotte crossed the finish line to complete that historic 1973 Belmont Stakes performance, the horse kept running for an extra 8th of a mile to gradually slow down. A clocker kept his stopwatch running for that extra furlong, and clocked his unofficial mile and 5/8th's time at 2:37&3. To this day, the official world record for that distance is held by the Hall of Fame champion Swaps, one of the all-time greatest, at 2:38&1, an accomplishment achieved in the mid 1950s when he was fully mature 4-year-old. SECRETARIAT unofficially broke that world record, and he was slowing down after the race was over!!! The only word I can even think of to describe each of those feats, feats that have never been duplicated again, is magical. I am hopeful that the movie captures that magic.