The first time I got on Secretariat in mid April of 1972, I felt a power in him I had never felt in another horse and had a feeling he was headed for greatness….”
Jim Gaffney
The figures grew larger through the lane. Secretariat galloped by, Gaffney standing in the stirrups, the reins loose, talking to the colt. Around the turn, Gaffney pulled him up, turned him around, and jogged back toward the gap. He emerged through the gap in the rain. The horse was breathing lightly. His legs were splattered with mud, his body wet.
Secretariat danced back to the barn, on his toes, his neck arched and eyes glaring. Back at the barn Eddie Sweat was waiting for the colt with a bucket of hot water and a large sponge. Sweat put a blue blanket across Secretariat’s kidneys, then crouched at the colt’s side and moved from one leg to the other sponging the horse’s legs, one at a time. The colt didn’t like it, lifting his legs, menacingly, while he nibbled at Gaffney’s hand. Sweat washed the colt’s face, methodically, pressing the sponge on the forehead, letting the water drain down between the eyes and along the jowls. Then Sweat brought the sponge down between the eyes, over the wide spread of the brain pan, then over the eyes themselves, down the nose and around the lips, then into the nostrils. When he finished Sweat tossed a red wool blanket over the colt’s rump, back, and neck. Then he fastened the leather straps in front, drawing them closed, and went around to the back and untied the knot in Secretariat’s tail.
Gaffney led the colt away, serving now as a hot walker, and Eddie went to work. It was past nine, and the morning was leveling off. As Gaffney took the colt around the shed, Sweat picked up a fork and worked again inside Stall 7, dressing it up with fresh straw and thrashing the straw with the fork blades. Motes of straw dust rose from the floor. Sweat worked the fork lightly across his fingers, lifting and tossing the straw bed, turning from corner to wall to corner again in the fifteen-by-twenty-foot cubicle. Above him were two sprinklers attached to a pipe.
Now the rain was letting up. At nine-thirty Hoeffner turned into the shed, saw Gaffney leading Secretariat toward him up the aisle, and said, suspiciously, “Hey, Jimmy, is that pony botherin’ him?”
The pony, an Appaloosa named Billy Silver, was just becoming involved in his long and unrequited love affair with Secretariat. In back at the west end of the barn Billy Silver lived in a jerry-built wooden stall over which he could hang his head and sniff at horses and hot walkers angling past him.
