THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : Coin Was Heads, so She Got Foal With 3 White Feet: Secretariat

Penny Chenery was living in Denver 25 years ago when the call came from the family farm in Doswell, Va.

“He’s a grand colt,” said the voice at the other end. “A real strong chestnut.”

This was the horse that would be named Secretariat--on the sixth try, after the Jockey Club rejected the first five suggested names. Somethingroyal, an 18-year-old mare who had been romantically introduced to Bold Ruler, two years her junior, did the honors in the Meadow Farm foaling barn at 12:10 a.m. on March 30, 1970.

The foal had three white feet, stockings on all corners but the left front. There’s a horse trader’s wheeze about that: “One white foot, run him for his life; two white feet, keep him for your wife; three white feet, keep him for your man; four white feet, sell him if you can.”

Farmhands at her father’s 2,600-acre spread reminded Chenery of that doggerel.

“It’s an old wives’ tale,” she said Thursday from her home in Lexington, Ky. “I don’t subscribe to old wives’ tales, but you know how those Virginia farm guys can be. So I held my tongue.”

Six weeks after the colt’s birth, Chenery saw Secretariat for the first time.

“He was a big foal,” she said. “But nobody had any idea what he might be. At that time, he was just one of a crop of 12 foals that we had hopes for.”

Lucien Laurin, the sawed-off Canadian trainer who would lead Secretariat to a sweep of the Triple Crown in 1973 and horse-of-the-year titles in ’72 and ‘73, was impressed by the colt’s looks, but still wary.

“He might be too pretty to be a good horse,” Laurin said.

But Secretariat had a take-charge style long before he reached the track.

“He was frisky and aggressive, but not mean,” Chenery said. “He didn’t hang around his mother much, but of course she was kind of an old lady by then. He was the boss of the herd. Somethingroyal was the queen of her herd too.”

Chenery’s father, Christopher T. Chenery, was a public utilities executive who bought back The Meadow in the 1930s after the family had lost the farm during the Civil War. Although Somethingroyal never won a race, running only once, she was a top broodmare, producing other stakes winners that included Sir Gaylord, who was undefeated as a 3-year-old when he was injured the day before the 1962 Kentucky Derby.

The Chenerys had a foal-sharing agreement with Ogden Phipps, who owned the stallion Bold Ruler, horse of the year in 1957. Bold Ruler was bred to Somethingroyal and Cicada, another Chenery mare, in 1968 and 1969. A coin flip at Belmont Park in the summer of 1969 determined the ownership of the foals. The winner got first choice the first year and the loser first choice the next year, but because Cicada couldn’t get pregnant in 1969, there were only three foals and the loser of the flip wound up with two of them.

“Cicada was a good race mare, but not much of a producer,” Penny Chenery said. “I hated to have to do that flip. But my father was ill, so I had to be there. Both of us wanted to lose. Mr. Phipps called heads, as I recall it, and he won the toss.”

So in the second year of the agreement, the chestnut son of Bold Ruler and Somethingroyal belonged to the Meadow Stable. Secretariat won 16 of 21 races, and in 1988 the now-defunct Thoroughbred Racing Action weekly asked a panel of 100 experts to name the 20 best horses of this century. Secretariat and Man o’ War each received 34 first-place votes, Citation got seven and no other horse received more than three.

There hadn’t been a Triple Crown champion since Citation in 1948, when Secretariat came along in 1973. The Watergate scandal was shrouding the presidency, and the country as well as the sport needed a shot in the arm. Into this miasma rode Ron Turcotte aboard Secretariat. They won the Kentucky Derby in a record time.

Said Turcotte, smoking a big cigar in the jockeys’ room at Churchill Downs after the race: “Still think Bold Rulers can’t go a mile and a quarter?”

In the Preakness two weeks later, with no urging from Turcotte, there was a breathtaking move from last place to first on Pimlico’s first turn. Secretariat passed horses as though they were tied to the fence.

In the three weeks between the Preakness and the Triple Crown windup, the Belmont Stakes, the Secretariat bandwagon was barely big enough for everyone. In one week, he made the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated.

“I think he always had a self-image of himself,” Penny Chenery said Thursday.

At the Belmont, he ran a race for the ages, winning by 31 lengths and breaking the stakes record by more than two seconds. In a chilling call, track announcer Chic Anderson said at the quarter pole, “He is moving like a tremendous machine,” and Laurin yelled from his box seat, “Don’t fall off, Ronnie!”

At stud, Secretariat never reproduced himself, but he did account for Lady’s Secret, the horse of the year in 1986, and Risen Star, winner of the Preakness and Belmont in 1988 and perhaps another Triple Crown champion but for bad racing luck in the Kentucky Derby.

At 11:45 a.m. on Oct. 4, 1989, suffering from a painful hoof disease, Secretariat was euthanized at Claiborne Farm in Paris, Ky. Bold Ruler, his sire, died in 1971, and their graves are not far apart in the horse cemetery at Claiborne.

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Horse Racing Notes

Trying to become the first filly to win the Jim Beam Stakes, Serena’s Song is the 8-5 favorite in the $600,000 race at Turfway Park at Florence, Ky., Saturday. Tejano Run is the 7-2 second choice, and the others in the eight-horse field are Car Dealer, Devil’s Brew, Mighty Magee, Sikkim, Celestial Star and Mecke. Corey Nakatani, who has ridden Serena’s Song in all five of her stakes victories, has the mount again. Kent Desormeaux will ride Sikkim. . . . In another race for 3-year-olds, favored Mystery Storm gets a new jockey, Craig Perret, for Saturday’s $125,000 Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.

At Santa Anita on Saturday, River Flyer, who has won five of seven starts on grass, heads the seven-horse field in the El Rincon Handicap. River Flyer will carry high weight of 121 pounds, one more than Romarin in the one-mile turf race. . . . Trainer Richard Mandella said that if rain makes the track unsuitable for the Santa Anita Derby a week from Saturday, he will consider shipping Afternoon Deelites out of town for his final Kentucky Derby prep.