Thirty-one lengths. That is the margin by which Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes on 9 June 1973, and it is the reason this print exists. Everything else is context.
What thirty-one lengths looks like
A length is about the body of a horse, eight or nine feet of animal. Thirty-one of them is most of the length of a football pitch. In a championship race, at the highest level of the sport, against the best three-year-olds in America, the winning margin was longer than the straight of some tracks.
The photograph everyone remembers is not a photograph of a finish. It is a photograph of a horse and an empty racetrack. The camera could not fit the second horse in the frame without giving up the winner.
The clock
He ran the mile and a half in 2:24. That is the American record for the distance on dirt, and it has stood since the afternoon it was set. Records in racing tend to fall eventually, shaved by a tenth here and a surface change there. This one has not moved in more than half a century.
The two facts together are what make the race strange. A huge winning margin can mean a weak field. A record time cannot. He did both at once, which means he was not beating the horses beside him. He was beating the distance.
The Triple Crown that had stopped happening
Before 1973, no horse had won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont in the same season since Citation in 1948. Twenty-five years of near misses had persuaded a lot of people that the modern thoroughbred, bred for speed over shorter trips, could no longer be asked to do it.
Secretariat answered that question and then kept answering it for another quarter of a mile.
The heart
He died in 1989. The autopsy found a heart of roughly twenty-two pounds, against an average of about eight and a half for a thoroughbred. It was not enlarged by illness. It was simply that size, and it had been that size for his whole life, doing its work behind a rib cage nobody had reason to open.
There is something almost unfair about that. Every rival he ever faced was competing against a physical fact none of them could see and none of them could match.
Why it goes on a wall
Most sporting greatness is a matter of degrees. Slightly faster, slightly stronger, slightly better on the day. This was not that. This was a margin so large it broke the photograph, and a time so fast the sport has spent fifty years failing to reach it.
Thirty-one lengths, and a clock that has not moved since.