When Secretariat first arrived at Hialeah Park in Florida for race training in 1972, the 2-year-old Thoroughbred was generally viewed as promising but a bit pudgy.
On observing Secretariat for the first time, the jockey who would ride the colt to fame remarked to his trainer, “Kinda fat, ain’t he?”
Photographer Raymond Woolfe, Jr. who later took iconic images of the chestnut colt, said, “He didn’t walk, that horse. He waddled.”
And exercise rider Charlie Davis remembered his former charge as a “big fat sucker” who “wasn’t in a hurry to do nothin.”
I think of Secretariat often, not only because I was a horse-crazed girl during his glory days, but also because across the miles, across the decades, across whatever barrier divides the living and the dead, we are…
