A Coming Of Age

Jim Gaffney, an exercise boy for more than two decades and an employee in mutuels for 12 years, went to work for The Meadow stable while Secretariat was getting over the cramped muscles suffered the day he backed out from under Feliciano. It was Gaffney who rode Secretariat his first day back on the track. He had been warned of the colt's trick of ducking to the left after pulling up from a gallop, the curtsy he had executed so beautifully with Paul two weeks before.

Secretariat walked to the training track that morning and stood for several seconds, looking to the left and right. Gaffney did not hurry him. He let him stand there and watch the morning bustle.

Walking off toward the clocker's shed, Secretariat ducked left, but Gaffney, riding with long stirrups, stuck with him. The colt had been confined for a few weeks and he was feeling his unburned oats; he galloped off strongly, pulling hard on the bit. Every day Gaffney gave him more rein. After several days the colt relaxed and, as he had done at Hialeah, he started plopping along easily.

Secretariat soon stopped ducking to the left. Gaffney had put a special bit with a prong on its left side in the colt's mouth, and had worked for days on the problem, exerting pressure on the right line every time the colt started to dip.

Gaffney grew to believe, weeks before the horse ever took a competitive step on a racetrack, that he was special. His whole morning at the racetrack began to revolve around Secretariat. He rode the red horse steadily, building the animal up in his own mind, telling stablehands of the youngster's extraordinary future, boasting about him to grooms and hot-walkers and even to his wife Mary over breakfast. "He was like a third child to Jimmy," said Mary Gaffney.

Gaffney told his mother about the colt, too, detailing for her all his manifold gifts. She responded by knitting a pommel pad (inserted as protection under the front of the saddle) with Secretariat's name knitted in blue across a white background. And Gaffney purchased two white saddle cloths and took them to a woman who did needlework. He paid her $24 to stitch SECRETARIAT into the section that is visible below the rear of the saddle. Finally, he took one of Lucien's exercise saddles home, the saddle he always used when he rode the colt, and hammered SECRETARIAT into it, giving the letters a scriptural flourish.

The red horse returned to serious work on May 18, when he went three-eighths of a mile in :37 seconds, yet no one but a few clockers, Meadow stablehands and avid horseplayers paid any attention to it. Laurin had his mind on Riva Ridge and the Preakness Stakes, the second race in the Triple Crown series. (Riva Ridge had won the Derby, but the colt, with Turcotte up, finished fourth in the Preakness on a muddy track. On June 10 Riva Ridge would cruise to the front at the beginning of the mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes and win by seven lengths. But the Triple Crown would have to wait for Secretariat.)

The red horse grew in strength through May and June and was beginning to learn how to run. On June 6, three days before Riva Ridge's Belmont Stakes, Secretariat wore blinkers for the first time and went half a mile in :47[3/5] seconds, the fastest half-mile work in his life.

On June 15, with the blinkers, Secretariat worked from the starting gate and dashed five-eighths of a mile in 1:00[1/5] seconds. On June 24, on a sloppy track, the official clockers for the Daily Racing Form noted that Secretariat's 1:12[4/5] seconds for six furlongs was the fastest workout at the distance that morning. (The clockers themselves had come a long way since the horse's first appearance in Florida, when they spelled his name "Secretarial.")

That day Lucien called Penny Tweedy and asked her if she would come to Aqueduct, saying that he wanted her to see Secretariat run his first race.