![]() She claimed watching the CBS broadcast convinced her that Secretariat was dealt a serious injustice, since by the looks of the videotape he finished his race a full three lengths faster than Canonero. With two official race records out of three under their belts, Secretariat’s owner, Penny Chenery, decided to formally request a review of the Preakness time by the Maryland Racing Commission on June 18. Secretariat went on to win the Belmont in spectacular fashion, breaking that record as well. The network seemed sure that Secretariat had broken the record, and by devoting a half hour of airtime to the question, turned it into a national controversy. The network aired a 30-minute broadcast about the controversy, showing Secretariat and Canonero’s races side by side and comparing them frame by frame. Laurin said that the ruling “leaves me cold,” and that “it matters a great deal.” But he left the matter alone as they prepared Secretariat for the Belmont, and the chance to win the first Triple Crown in 25 years.ĬBS, however, wasn’t content to let it alone. It still wasn’t enough to take the record from Canonero, however, so perhaps this was all much ado over nothing. The stewards voted that Monday to change the official time to reflect McLean’s time. By Monday, Pimlico announced that McLean did, in fact, clock Secretariat faster than the Visumatic, at 1:54 2/5, but he failed to report that time to the stewards on race day. McLean Jr., as a backup in case the machine failed. It turned out that Pimlico didn’t rely solely on the Visumatic machine. The day after the race Laurin announced that he would request a review of the time before he shipped out for New York to prepare for the Belmont Stakes. The Daily Racing Form was so sure of their clockers, they chose to run their own time in their chart of the race rather than the official time, and noted in their publication that they believed Secretariat held the new record. Word eventually reached Lucien Laurin, Secretariat’s trainer, that there was a discrepancy in the finishing time. It had to have been the machine that was wrong! What’s more, 1:53 2/5 was more than enough to beat Canonero’s record. They couldn’t have both independently made the same error. The Daily Racing Form’s chief clocker, Frenchy Schwartz, also had it at 1:53 2/5. To his surprise, he wasn’t the only one who had a time that differed from the track. He checked with other turf writers who were clocking the race from other vantage points to see what they came up with. Could he have been that off? He was a veteran clocker, and he knew the difference between clicking the stopwatch a hair too early or late and making an error of over a full second. Robinson clocked Secretariat at 1:53 2/5. And Robinson’s time wasn’t off from the track time by a fifth of a second, but a full one and three-fifths seconds. ![]() ![]() Frank Robinson, the clocker for the Daily Racing Form, had recorded a different time. Visumatic was considered more accurate than stopwatch-wielding clockers capable of human error, who sometimes can be off by a fifth of a second or more.īut when the official time for the race was revealed, a buzz spread across the press box high above the racetrack. Still, nobody had any reason to doubt the track’s time of the race, which was measured by an “electric eye” called the Visumatic, which cast a beam of light across the racetrack and was only triggered when a horse broke the beam. Many had predicted Secretariat would beat that record, just as he had done at Churchill Downs when he became the first horse in history to finish the Kentucky Derby in under two minutes. Immediately after Secretariat’s brilliant last-to-first finish, the Pimlico timer reported that the final time for the 1 3/16-mile race was 1:55, a good time, but a second slower than Canonero II’s Preakness record set in 1971.
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