Live long enough, and you may see a legend form before your eyes. Deserving immortality, yet also simplified from the reality you knew.

Fifty years since Secretariat won the Triple Crown, he has both grown and reduced. One image often represents his high place in racing history: his Belmont Stakes, the stunning all-alone “tremendous machine.” And yes, it felt as phenomenal that day as it still looks today.

The unforgettable image of Secretariat's Belmont Stakes runaway. (Bob Coglianese photo)

But when I remember Secretariat, there’s an ingredient that our latter-day legend may forget.  I remember living with uncertainty.

When Secretariat turned 3 years old, I was a fifth-grader who bought Turf and Sport Digest each month with my allowance and searched each weekly issue of Sports Illustrated — dad had a subscription — for more timely racing news. We didn’t live near any racetrack. I’d never seen a Daily Racing Form. There was no internet, no home computer, and not much horse racing on TV.  ABC’s Wide World of Sports and the CBS Sports Spectacular didn’t show Secretariat’s Kentucky Derby prep races. His progress came to me through the magazines, plus newspaper items that appeared more frequently as the Kentucky Derby drew near.

One day in April 1973, I found a four-leaf clover in the grade school playground yard. It was soon before the Wood Memorial Stakes. I remember standing in that schoolyard, anxious for Secretariat’s final Derby prep, and thinking a line from a Peanuts comic strip: “Good luck, kid, you’re going to need it.” 

I taped the four-leaf clover to his full-page photo from a recent Sports Illustrated article, “Oh Lord, He’s Perfect.”

Hyperbolic headlines and special clovers can’t guarantee success. Third place. I was sad, yet hopeful. The year before, Riva Ridge ran fourth in one of his Derby preps … but we saw him impressively win the Derby. I loved Riva. And if he could bounce back after losing, Secretariat might, too.

The Derby broadcast was my family’s first time watching him in real time, inhabiting a saddling paddock and a post parade. I can tell you this about Secretariat: he had a presence that grown-ups might call charisma. Our TV was black and white, but he was easy to spot. The Meadow Stable checkered silks and blinkers stood out as they had with Riva Ridge. And Secretariat, known from many photos, already seemed like a friend.

Penny Chenery with Secretariat. (NYRA/Bob Coglianese photo)

We had hope, but how he came through was a joyful surprise. I hedged my bets — at home, inking Secretariat the Great 1:59 2/5 on a Derby photo from Sports Illustrated; at school, drawing him inside the cover of my three-ring binder with Secretariat “the Great” this time.  Quotation marks because it felt bold saying “Great” so soon. The racing writings I adored made clear that true greatness typically is proven over time and through challenges beyond a 3-year-old’s springtime campaign.

Uncertainty wasn’t gone. It was just warming up.

He surprised us again in the Preakness, barely settling in last place, then flying by the whole field on the clubhouse turn and cruising in, not asked for anything. Of all the things Secretariat did, that’s the one I feel most certain we won’t see again!

His triple sweep of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Time magazine covers, the week before the Belmont, also seems unlikely to be repeated. Could he become the first Triple Crown winner since 1948? Was such a thing even possible, anymore? Anyone who cheered American Pharoah in 2015, wondering could he overcome the drought since 1978, knows the same keen hope and sweet anxiety I felt when Secretariat stepped into the Belmont starting gate and whatever was going to happen was about to come true.

Twice, in the past five weeks, he had wowed us. Yet I could not take Secretariat “the Great” for granted. Sham was a strong opponent. I’d seen Majestic Prince and Canonero II enter the Belmont with Triple Crown momentum — and lose. History listed many others, in the ages since Citation, who had failed.

June 9, 1973, we would have been delighted if Secretariat won the Belmont by a nose hair. How he did it, setting sprinter fractions and rolling away, had us whooping all the way from the far turn through the gallop out. We could have feasted on that triumph for months. Yet Secretariat was back on TV June 30, winning the Arlington Invitational — my first view of a “paid workout.”  In hindsight, however, a poor idea … shipping from New York to Chicago and running again just three weeks after the fastest Triple Crown yet known.

I may have felt cocky as well as nervous, crouching near the TV on Aug. 4 when Secretariat trotted out for the Whitney Handicap. Then, shock and puzzlement. Instead of brilliance, a one-length loss. I defended him to neighborhood kids: “He had to go to the bathroom!” Yes, he had passed manure shortly before entering the starting gate. He hadn’t done that in the Triple Crown races or at Arlington. Was something off?

Waiting six weeks between races was a lot, in those days. Much to my disgust, our local TV stations didn’t carry the Sept. 15 Marlboro Cup Invitational Handicap. (No cable or satellite, y’all — only signals within antenna range.)  So, I did not witness the redemption, won from beloved older champion Riva Ridge and a field that these days would grace a Breeders’ Cup Classic. We did receive the Sept. 29 Woodward Stakes. Sigh. The last Secretariat performance I watched in real time was a second, though he finished far clear of all but one runner. On a sloppy day, certainty slid farther away.

Jockey Ron Turcotte, Penny Chenery, and Secretariat after win in Marlboro Cup. (NYRA/Bob Coglianese)

Yet there can be consolation in racing often, as they did in the 1970s. Although bound by syndication agreement to retire by Nov. 15, Secretariat had two more chances and made them count. A course-record performance nine days after the Woodward, trying turf in Belmont’s Oct. 8 Man o’ War Stakes. And 20 days after that, a 6 ½-length tour de force in the Canadian International, back to breathing different air than the field he left behind.

Delighted and bereft, I was left with a question. In those days, the Washington, D. C. International, on turf at Laurel Park, was the U.S.A.’s climactic autumn classic. Uh oh. Wood Memorial, Whitney, Woodward … if Secretariat went there instead of Canada, would he lose?  But people often called it the D.C. International, for short, so maybe he’d be OK?

That question remains open. Thirteen days after Secretariat dominated at Woodbine, European corker Dahlia impressively won the D.C. International. I wondered, would Secretariat have beaten her and his “W” jinx? Fifty years later, it might mean something that Big Spruce ran second in both Internationals — beaten 6 1/2 by Secretariat, 3 1/2 by Dahlia. At the time, I respected Dahlia’s brilliance while shivering with superstition.

And now?

Secretariat, like any true marvel, makes us long to know the unknowable. Fifty years later, I do know this: when a racehorse becomes legend, uncertainty tends to fade. We don’t celebrate not knowing. We repeat the highest peaks. And history’s memory, like human memory, has only so much room. No wonder the Belmont Stakes is Secretariat’s emblem. Yet also, it is so far from all he was.

I wish every generation could meet Secretariat the work-in-progress, his unfiltered self animating his beautiful form. They would see him learning in plain sight: schooling us with stumbles that felt worse because he was phenomenal … stunning us with dazzling comebacks … creating questions along with his enduring image, bounding like inevitability.