Triple Crown Recap - American Pharoah Great but No Secretariat

.

Secretariat remains record holder of every Triple Crown race as American Pharaoh finishes 12 seconds behind Secretariat combined times.  It has been 42 years since Secretariat broke the last drought between Triple Crown champions, a twenty-five year wait.

Since that day when all America was watching and listening, when Secretariat turned in one of the most remarkable achievements in all of sports history while blazing to a 31 length victory in the Belmont no one has come close to his record rides.

Secretariat wins Belmont - Triple Crown

In horse racing winers are determined in milli-seconds and photo finishes yet Secretariat won the longest of the races by a record shattering 31 lengths to also win the Triple Crown.

Over 52 percent of the television viewers watched that 1973 classic.  This past weekend 30 percent of the television viewers watched American Pharoah win the Triple Crown after 37 years with no winner.

American Pharoah

Here is what people thought as Secretariat blazed to his victory.

American Pharoah

Notable & Quotable: Secretariat and American Pharoah

In the three combined races of the Triple Crown, Secretariat’s margin over American Pharoah was something like 12 seconds—an eternity in horse racing.

June 7, 2015 6:06 p.m. ET

Secretariat

From a June 7 editorial, “Pharoah Without Tears,” in the New York Sun:

The roar and clapping, though, wasn’t what people remember from the Belmont in 1973, when Secretariat hurtled into the stretch. They remember what passes, in grandstand terms, for a silence. Oh, the crowd was clapping and cheering, for sure. But somewhere around the three quarter mark, something strange had started to come over the track, a sense that something impossible, mysterious, and inexplicable—and maybe even dangerous—was happening before their eyes. . . .

Secretariat Time cover

Jack Whitaker of CBS described it. “I actually saw people crying,” he said. George Plimpton described a group “of co-eds” lining the rail and weeping as Secretariat careered past. Heywood Hale Broun quoted Jack Nicklaus as saying relating that as—alone in his own living room—he watched on television as Secretariat barreled down the stretch, the great golfer also began weeping. Broun told him, “Jack, don’t you understand. All of your life, in your game, you’ve been striving for perfection. At the end of the Belmont, you saw it.”

“You’re not supposed to win the Belmont by 31 lengths,” is the way Steve Crist of the Daily Racing Form once put it. In the three combined races of the Triple Crown, Secretariat’s margin over American Pharoah was something like 12 seconds—an eternity in horse racing. It’s not our intention here to rain on American Pharoah’s parade. He is such a beautiful horse, with one of the most graceful gallops. But it is important, including for the children, to understand why, for all the glory of American Pharoah’s moment, our eyes were dry.


.