Secretariat Won The Belmont By 31 Lengths 53 Years Ago And The Record Still Stands

Secretariat Won The Triple Crown 53 Years Ago Today And The Record He Set Has Never Been Broken And Almost Certainly Never Will Be

Fifty-three years ago yesterday, June 9, 1973, a chestnut thoroughbred named Secretariat arrived at the starting gate of the Belmont Stakes as the heavy 1-10 favorite to win the Triple Crown, the first horse in 25 years to have any chance at doing so.

He had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, each by 2½ lengths over his primary rival Sham. The racing world understood that the Belmont, at 1½ miles, was the hardest of the three races, longer than either of its predecessors, punishing in the specific way that distance punishes horses who have been running fast for weeks.

Longshots had ended Triple Crown bids at the Belmont before. They would again.

Not this one. What Secretariat did at Belmont Park on June 9, 1973 remains, by measurable statistical standards, the most dominant performance in the history of horse racing. He ran 1½ miles in 2 minutes and 24 seconds, a time that no horse has come within a full second of matching in the 53 years since, on any track, in any country, with any level of modern veterinary care and training technology applied to the problem.

He won by 31 lengths, 253 feet and 2 inches, a margin so large that television broadcaster Chic Anderson, calling the race from the CBS booth as Secretariat turned for home, could only reach for a mechanical metaphor:

"Secretariat is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine!"

He was going 37.5 miles per hour for the entire race. The second-place horse was not close enough to be relevant. Jockey Ron Turcotte, near the finish, looked back over his shoulder at where the rest of the field was. There was nothing there.

The Race Itself

Five horses entered the gate for the 105th Belmont Stakes. The crowd of 69,138 at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York had come knowing they might be watching history, the way crowds had come to watch previous Triple Crown bids at this same track and gone home disappointed.

Sports Illustrated had put Secretariat on its cover before the race. Time magazine had. Newsweek had. The anticipation had been building since the Derby, the Preakness making it more intense.

The Belmont was the finish line of a national conversation that had been running for weeks.

Secretariat broke from the gate and went straight to the front. He and Sham, his rival across all three races of the Triple Crown campaign, also a legitimately great horse who simply had the terrible luck of being born in the same year, set a fast early pace and opened about ten lengths on the rest of the field together.

Then the six-furlong mark came, and Sham began to tire. He was a remarkable horse running out of what remarkable horses run out of. He would finish last.

Secretariat did not tire. This is the part that defies explanation in terms that contemporary sports medicine and performance science can fully satisfy. The horse accelerated. In a race where the standard physiological expectation is that pace setters slow in the final stretch, Secretariat ran each quarter-mile faster than the one before it.

His final quarter-mile was his fastest. He crossed the finish line 31 lengths ahead of Twice a Prince, the second-place finisher.

He had broken the Belmont track record by more than two seconds. He had broken the North American record for 1½ miles on dirt by more than two seconds. Both records still stand.

The Numbers That Have Never Moved

The 2:24 flat that Secretariat clocked on June 9, 1973 is the number that horse racing returns to whenever the conversation turns to the limits of what a thoroughbred can do. No horse has ever run 1½ miles on a dirt track faster than that.

The second-fastest time for the distance on dirt is 2:26, set by Risen Star in 1988, who was Secretariat's own son. American Pharoah, who ended the 37-year drought to win the next Triple Crown in 2015 and is considered one of the greatest horses of the modern era, ran the Belmont in 2:26.65, 2.65 seconds slower than Secretariat. The gap has not closed.

The 31-length margin of victory is similarly untouched. Count Fleet won the Belmont in 1943 by 25 lengths, which was considered extraordinary. Secretariat erased that record by 6 lengths, which is the distance by which Count Fleet beat his second-place horse.

The Belmont Stakes now has a pole inside the rail, wearing Secretariat's blue-and-white checkered silks, marking the exact spot where the second-place horse was when Secretariat crossed the finish line. It is there so that visitors can understand, physically and spatially, what 31 lengths means.

Ron Turcotte, the Hall of Fame jockey who rode Secretariat to all three Triple Crown victories, was asked about the performance on the 50th anniversary in 2023. He said the same thing he has been saying for fifty years. "He was the type of horse that you'll never see again. He was doing something that you've never seen before and will probably never see again."

Secretariat was a statistical outlier so extreme that data analysts who have studied the question find his Belmont performance stands alone, separated from every other Triple Crown winner's Belmont performance by a margin larger than the margin separating the second-best from the twentieth-best.

The consensus among the sports statisticians and horse racing historians who have studied the question is that what happened on June 9, 1973 will never happen again. Not because the sport has declined or the horses have gotten slower, but because the combination of physical gifts, training circumstances and competitive conditions that produced a horse capable of those numbers is not reproducible by any intentional process the species makes available.

Who Was Secretariat?

Secretariat was born on March 30, 1970 at Meadow Stud in Virginia, a chestnut son of Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal. He was bred and owned by Penny Chenery, trained by Lucien Laurin and nicknamed Big Red early in his career for the color of his coat and the scale of his presence.

He stood 16.2 hands, which is large for a thoroughbred, and his cardiovascular system, examined after his death, was found to have a heart nearly three times the normal size for a horse of his stature, which may partially explain the anomalous capacity for sustained speed that his Belmont demonstrated.

He won 16 of 21 career races, earned five Eclipse Awards including Horse of the Year in both 1972 and 1973, and was retired to stud in the fall of 1973 after being syndicated for $6.08 million, a record at the time.

He lived at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky until October 4, 1989, when he was euthanized due to laminitis at the age of 19. He is buried at Claiborne Farm, one of only a handful of thoroughbreds honored with a full-body burial rather than the traditional head, heart and hooves.

His Kentucky Derby time, 1:59⅖, also remains the fastest Derby ever run. Both records at the two ends of the Triple Crown campaign, 53 years later, are his.

The 53rd Anniversary

June 9, 2026 is not a round number, not the 50th or the 25th, just the 53rd, but the anniversary trends every year regardless, because the people who watched the race and the people who have seen the footage and the people who have simply heard the numbers come back to this date the way you come back to any moment that seems to have no adequate frame of reference.

2:24. 31 lengths. A horse going 37.5 miles per hour around a track in New York in 1973, with a jockey who turned to look back near the finish because the lead was so large he wanted to see where everyone else was.

There was nothing there.