Classic Sports Thursday

I don't know that the 2010 movie Secretariat made much of a splash at the box office. Certainly it was nothing like Seabiscuit from a few years back.  Which is a pity, because as we can see from CBS' live coverage of the 1973 Belmont Stakes, there really wasn't anything quite like Big Red.  Maybe the movie spent too much time on the humans rather than the horse? 




Secretariat was the first horse to win the Triple Crown in 25 years, and we thought perhaps we'd never seen anything like him.  Then we had two more Triple Crown winners (Seattle Slew and Affirmed) during the decade of the 70s, and some might have thought maybe it wasn't such a big deal after all.

But there have been no Triple Crown winners since, and now we're at the longest such drought since the Crown started.  And we remember the world and race records that Secretariat set, and the way he set them, and the 31 lengths from first to second place in that 1973 Belmont Stakes.  And then we go back to the video for another look, to see if it really could have happened that way .◙