Secretariat was syndicated before the Derby.
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The Wow Horse Races Into History
It is an irony of horse racing that its champions—unlike any other great athletes—are worth more after they retire than at the peak of their form. When they retire they go to stud, which means that they are mated to 30 or 35 high-class mares every spring, in the hope that they will reproduce their own good qualities in their offspring.
So intense is the competition among breeders to produce superior young horses that a good stud horse, such as Secretariat shows every promise of becoming, is worth almost any sum one cares to pull out of a hat. Secretariat's value in stud was set a few months ago at just over $6,000,000—a price arrived at by finding that 32 people were willing to pay $190,000 each, even before he won as a three-year-old, for the privilege of being able to breed one mare to him a year for the rest of his life. He might bring half again as much today.
Penny Tweedy was not keen on syndicating her wow horse. "I personally would prefer to race him as long as he stays sound," she says. But the family needed a lot of cash to pay estate taxes after her father, Christopher T. Chenery, utilities magnate and founder of Meadow Stable, died last January. The Secretariat bloodline was the most salable asset.
There was also the question of whether any single person is rich and daring enough to own a horse worth as much as Secretariat. "My brother's an economist," says Mrs. Tweedy, "and it made him nervous to think of owning an asset worth $6,000,000 that depended on a single heart beat." So the deal was made. Meadow Stable can race Secretariat until Nov. 15, keeping any money he earns. After that he goes to a breeding farm in Kentucky to rest up from the racing wars and prepare for the mares he will court next spring.
Crazy Business. As the Secretariat syndication shows, the economics of horse racing is totally cockeyed. Nobody would ever think of retiring a pitcher as soon as he throws a no-hitter, a quarterback as soon as he wins in the Super Bowl. But horse racing —heavily taxed by every state where it exists, requiring tremendous investments in racing plants and breeding farms and the manpower required to train and run its animals—has been turned into a sort of rich man's lottery.
A bad horse, even an average one, is worth nothing. In fact, most owners run their stables at a loss. Of the 26,000 horses born this year, at least 20,000 will cost more to train (about $10,000 a year at the big-time tracks) than they will ever earn. Most of the others, competing in routine races, will merely break even or make a modest profit. But a very few of the top ones, good enough for classics like the Triple Crown (a total of about $525,000 in purse money this year) will earn fortunes and then become the sires or dams of horses also potentially worth fabulous sums.
Thus the horse owners continue to chase their rainbows, knowing that the gold will elude most of them most of the time. They are gamblers, and every gambler thinks that some day he will be able to do it all. Every one of them will be imagining himself in Penny Tweedy's place this Saturday afternoon as her superhorse makes his run at racing history.
TIME Magazine, June 11, 1973 (34 years ago)
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