I'll Have Another Is the Star of the Moment in Horse Racing,

but in the final analysis, there is only one horse, and only one race, that really captured the sport--hell, all sports.

Next year it will be 40 years since I graduated from high school. But during that first week of June in 1973, I cared less about getting my high school diploma than whether Secretariat would be the first horse in 25 years to win the Triple Crown. I am not the only one who thinks his performance in the Belmont Stakes was the definitive performance in sport. Nobody anymore even talks about the next Secretariat. It became obvious after the first decade or so after his sweep of the Crown that he was a genetic freak who could never again be duplicated.

I'll be happy if I'll Have Another wins the Belmont, but he will never be "the big red horse."

If anything, Secretariat's feats in 1973 have gotten more impressive with time because no other horse has ever come close to them. Imagine this: three races at three different tracks in three different states over a five-week period and winning all three races in record time (his Preakness time would forever have an asterisk after it thanks to the track clock screwing up his time). The Derby and Belmont records still stand. The Belmont in particular is likely to stand for all time. It's not just because no other dirt race in the United States is run at a mile-and-a-half anymore (I believe there were four in 1973 run at that distance), but it is just that there is no other Secretariat that will ever happen again.

Somebody agrees with me on the champion:

Secretariat died in 1989, 16 years after that Belmont victory.

To some of us who watched him that year, he lives on, though, as the best race-horse that ever lived. And every time we hear about a horse possibly winning a Triple Crown at the Belmont, our thoughts go back to 1973, and watching Big Red demolish the field.

What a fabulous horse.

And what an incredible performance at the Belmont.

One of my most popular posts was my review of the movie Secretariat a couple of years ago. I posted a picture I took of Secretariat on July 31, 1989, at Claiborne Farm. His groom, Bobby Anderson, was my guide for the tour of the farm, and he posed with the champ in this photo:

I even heard from Anderson's grandson albeit on a different blog when I posted this and other Kentucky pictures. It was fun to hear from him. I still have that lock of Secretariat's mane his grandfather gave me all those years ago.