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The Last One Out of the Gate🐴💥
There was something electric in the air at Churchill Downs on May 5, 1973. A crowd of 134,000 had packed the stands, mint juleps in hand, buzzing with a mix of excitement and doubt. Doubt, because the horse everyone had come to see — a big chestnut c**t named Secretariat — had just finished third in his last race, the Wood Memorial. Suddenly, he looked beatable.
When the gates opened, Secretariat broke last out of a field of 13. He settled calmly toward the back, jockey Ron Turcotte holding him easy, letting the speed horses burn themselves out up front. Coming past the stands for the first time, he was 11th, with only two horses behind him. The crowd murmured.
Then, almost imperceptibly, something shifted. Turcotte didn't ask for it — the horse simply decided. Secretariat began to flow forward, wide on the outside, eating up ground in great smooth strides that looked effortless and were anything but. One horse, then two, then four fell behind him. The murmur in the stands became a roar.
Turning for home, he ran down Sham — the rival who had beaten him weeks earlier — and drew away with a power that silenced every doubt that had ever been whispered about him. He crossed the wire two and a half lengths clear, in a time of 1:59 and 2/5 — the first Kentucky Derby ever run in under two minutes, a record that still stands today.
That year, he went on to win the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, completing the Triple Crown. At Belmont, he won by 31 lengths. But it all started here — from the back of a 13-horse field, on a warm Saturday in May, when a great horse simply got tired of waiting. 🐎

He was more than a racehorse. He was a phenomenon. A ghost in motion. A champion born for television, draped in silver and thunder.
Native Dancer, foaled in 1950, wasn’t just fast , he was mesmerizing. Nicknamed The Grey Ghost, he captivated millions during the dawn of televised sports. With his striking coat and near-flawless record, he became one of the first horses America truly watched in real-time.

He won 21 of his 22 races. Let that sink in. Only one horse ever beat him ,Dark Star, in the 1953 Kentucky Derby , by a narrow nose. A controversial bump early in the race likely cost Native Dancer the win… and the Triple Crown.

But he didn’t let it define him.

He stormed back to take the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes with a fury that echoed across headlines. No one ever passed him again.

He wasn’t just dominant , he was a sire of legends. His bloodline runs through Northern Dancer, Mr. Prospector, Raise a Native… and yes, even Triple Crown winners like American Pharoah and Justify carry the fire he sparked.

Native Dancer wasn’t just a racehorse , he was the blueprint for brilliance. The grey shadow behind generations of champions.

He ran with grace. He lost with fire. And he left behind a legacy that shaped the future of the sport.

The Grey Ghost never truly vanished , he simply became part of every great horse that followed.

🏇 The greatest Belmont Stakes winners of all time.
Man o' War, Gallant Fox, Count Fleet, Citation, Native Dancer, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, American Pharoah, Justify.
Nine champions who wrote the history of the longest and most prestigious race of the Triple Crown. Nine horses who left their mark on that stretch at Elmont, New York, in front of roaring crowds.
But there's one name you won't find on this list.
And no — it's not an oversight.
Secretariat isn't here because it would simply be wrong to place him alongside the others. Not out of disrespect to these champions — every single one of them is a legend — but because Big Red belongs to a category that exists for him alone.
On June 9, 1973, at the Belmont Stakes, Secretariat didn't just win a race. He changed forever what the word "race" means. 31 lengths. 2 minutes and 24 seconds. A world record that has stood for over 50 years — and will likely never fall.
Some horses win. He flew.
🐴 Secretariat — 1973 — Forever.

Monday June 1st we'll know the entries, post positions and odds for the 2026 Belmont Stakes.
Saratoga hosts the final leg of the Triple Crown for the third consecutive year, with Belmont Park still under construction. June 6th will be the last time the race is run here before returning home in 2027.
The field is still to be confirmed. Monday's post position draw will tell us a great deal — who breaks from the rail, who faces traffic, who gets a clean run from the start. At Saratoga, the draw is never just a formality.
Golden Tempo arrives as Derby winner, a last-to-first move at 23-1 that few saw coming. Renegade arrives as runner-up, with unfinished business. Both are looking for answers that only June 6th can provide.
Monday, the picture starts to take shape🐎

I love people that love Secretariat,the great writer Charles Hatton said in 72' or 73' he saw Big Red at Saratoga and he walked by him before one of he races, he felt a chill went up his back, and knew he was something special......and he also saw Man O'War.
These were some of Mr. Hatton's favorite comments about Big Red.....
Secretariat not only has class and style and dash, he has the instinctive flair for theatre that brings the house to its feet cheering. Horses win all the time, just as ham actors quote Shakespeare endlessly. Secretariat imparts to his performances the exciting quality which is the difference between Olivier and other Hamlets.”

On Aug. 17, 1972, Hatton described Secretariat's winning move in the Sanford at Saratoga: “Coming to the quarter pole, he lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, like 'Orange Juice' Simpson plunging into the line and scattered a bunch of rookies from the second team.”

And as Secretariat prepared for a sterner test in the Hopeful one week later, Hatton wrote: “In action he can be terrifying. He swoops down on his fields like a monster in a horror movie…he gets real physical, storming through the stretch with tremendous strides and practically throwing horses over his shoulder.”

PENNY CHENERY

Paving the Way for Women in Horse Racing and Beyond

It was May 5, 1973, a perfect Saturday—partly cloudy, 67 degrees. A woman gazes onto a fast track. Her focus narrowed on a gorgeous chestnut trotting to the gate. Emotions are high as she watches the thirteen-horse field being loaded into the gate one by one. The 99th running of the Kentucky Derby was about to begin, and Penny Chenery was hungry for her second Kentucky Derby win with Secretariat. The gates open, the horses charge, and history is being made once again on the first Saturday in May. The crowd roars as Secretariat breaks records, running 21/2 lengths ahead of Sham.

This win was the beginning of a remarkable road to the Triple Crown that broke track records and glass ceilings for women in the horse racing industry. Chenery won in a boys’ club and smashed all odds as she watched her horse win the Triple Crown and become the most famous horse in history. Many people know Secretariat’s story, but you might not know that Chenery saved the family farm, Meadow Stable after her father died. Her siblings wanted to sell the farm, but Chenery fought to save it. Not only did she succeed in saving the farm when people didn’t think she could, but Chenery started to break down barriers for women in the equine industry. Many years have passed since her 1973 win, but what hasn’t is the doubt that comes with women and entrepreneurship. When I started my television show, “My Southern Home,” like Chenery, many people thought the odds were against me, but I didn’t let them stop me. Not only was I successful in starting “My Southern Home,” but I expanded to Nashville one year later. The show has been on the air for seven years.

One of Chenery’s famous quotes is, “I will not live my life in regret.” As women, we all regret things, but the one thing you will never regret is running full speed toward your goals. On the other hand, you will always regret not trying. As someone who went after her dreams when people said, “You can’t.” I’m here to tell you, you can. The road will be bumpy; you will learn from your failures, pivot, try again, and succeed. Chenery sums it up best with one of my favorite quotes, “This is not about going back. This is about life being ahead of you, and you run at it! Because you never know how far you can run unless you run.”

Christopher Tompkins Chenery
THE BLUE CAP

The Virginia of Caroline County—acres of porous soil and roughly tree-mantled countryside—is not the Old South of cotton farms and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting among the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. This is not the Virginia where buses stop at overlooks on any of the approved tours, lying outside the limits of the Tidewater and far to the southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, with its pungent orchards and its own haunting song.

Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster—a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country—watermelons and muskmelons—and it has fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for growing corn and soybeans, but it was not always so prosperous or so peaceful there.

Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to become—a man of substance and horses and a part of the landed gentry. He was born in Richmond on September 19, 1886, but his parents soon moved to Ashland, north of Richmond and just south of The Meadow, where he acquired a feeling for the land and place that never left him.

. . . Each of his brothers grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin, Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place adjoining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caroline, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have. . . .

Christopher Chenery, still a boy of sixteen—had already finished two years of college at Randolph-Macon, and he had taken a job as a surveyor with an engineering party laying tracks for the Virginian Railroad, one of America’s largest lines of coal carriers. He worked there for three years, and when he left, in 1907, he took with him enough money to return to college, this time to study engineering at Washington and Lee. Scholastically, he behaved like a man possessed, poring over the texts, teaching a course in engineering, and pushing himself to the top of his class. By the time he graduated in 1909, he had acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a taste for wild adventure that sent him west, beyond the Appalachians to the Pacific. There he joined another engineering party that reconnoitered the uncharted interior of Alaska by pack train, looking for potential railroad routes from Cook inlet to the Yukon. The job involved surveying 600 miles of land in difficult weather. “It took two polar bears to live through one winter,” said turfwriter Charles Hatton, a friend of Chenery. The terrain was hazardous, the mosquitoes in the summer malevolent.

In idle moments Chenery read and reread the complete works of William Shakespeare and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and in later years he quoted liberally from both, especially when he was with people educated in the arts and letters he had missed.

One day, in 1935, Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:

Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps.

The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence.

Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—

Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it.

Chenery went inside, but he didn’t stay long. Moments later he walked back to the car.

He bought The Meadow a year later.
Thus Christopher T. Chenery had repossessed his childhood, reclaiming some old hills and remembrances and a place to raise horses. But if there was some of the Gatsby romantic in him—something of a man trying to recapture his past—his brothers hardly shared his enthusiasm. They were against his buying back The Meadow.
They thought Chris was crazy to buy it back—

But Chenery had made his money by stringing utilities together, and he was on his way to being a millionaire several times over again. By 1936, he had already been the president of the Federal Water Service Corporation for ten years, and that year he also became chairman and director of Southern Natural Gas Company. Deep in the Depression, Chris Chenery was making money and incorporating his holdings and sharing his stock with the family, and with the gold he set about in earnest to rebuild The Meadow.

He spent thousands of dollars making it a showplace, rebuilding and enlarging and refurnishing it:

He built stables for one hundred horses, a mile training track, breeding sheds, hay barns, and an office—the old one had been beyond repair. The poor country boy eventually spent his winters in Palm Beach buying at auctions the things that were symbols of wealth in his childhood.

He had earned what he was spending and what he owned. He had a contempt for idle people and for laziness, a disdain for dullness and the weak witted. Education was not what set men apart. What distinguished them was the intensity of the drive and the energy and imagination they possessed and used.

Financially, he was bold but careful, and when he invested in thoroughbreds in the late 1930s he made small and what appeared to be insignificant acquisitions of blooded horses. “The price does not always represent what a horse is worth,” Chenery once said. “It is only what some fool thinks he is worth.”

Among his first purchases was a filly named Hildene, a daughter of the 1926 Kentucky Derby winner, Bubbling Over. He paid only $600 for her. “Hildene showed speed, but she tired badly eight times in eight races,” he said. So he retired her to the stud, and there she produced a family of some of the finest horses on the American turf.

Sometime during the Depression, when he was getting started in racing, Chenery acquired a set of jockey silks. They were some old silks that had been abandoned, no doubt discarded by some owner who went haywire for a decade and then dropped off into the perpetual twilight that came in October of 1929. The silks were snappy: white and blue blocks on the shirt, and blue and white stripes down the sleeves.
And a blue cap.

Ron Turcotte, Secretariat’s jockey, once described an unforgettable moment during one of the greatest races in history:

I could hear Sham’s hooves fading behind us, and then... there was nothing. The sound of the crowd seemed to vanish, and all that remained was the rhythmic pounding of Secretariat’s hooves and the powerful, steady cadence of his breathing. It was an almost eerie silence, a moment where everything else fell away, and I could feel his raw strength and determination beneath me. It was as if the world had narrowed down to just the two of us, pushing forward with unstoppable momentum.

This quote reflects the awe-inspiring power and focus of Secretariat during his legendary Triple Crown races, where he left both his competitors and spectators in stunned silence.