# Secretariat Set Three Records in 1973. All Three Still Stand
> Fifteen rankings put Secretariat next to Man o' War, Michael Jordan, Laika and a gelding named Onion. His three 1973 records are all still standing.
*By YPB Team · Published August 25, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/secretariat-ranked-many-ways*
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Secretariat at the Kentucky Horse Park. Photo by Calstanhope via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.9
Secretariat won the 1973 Triple Crown in record time in all three races, and 53 years later all three records are still his. The Belmont he won by 31 lengths in 2:24, and no horse has come within a second of that time on dirt since.1
Saratoga's summer meet is running as this publishes, with Travers Day on 29 August.2 Saratoga is also the track where the most famous horse in America was beaten by a four-year-old gelding named Onion.
He appears in fifteen rankings here, and no two of them put him in the same company.
> Secretariat's three unbroken records make him unarguable on one kind of list and only a candidate on the next: as a sire, as an athlete measured against humans, and as the odds-on favourite who lost at Saratoga.
## Secretariat vs Winx: the all-time racehorse question
Start with the widest question in the sport. Every great thoroughbred is eligible, from every continent and every era, which means the comparison is between careers that never touched each other.
Secretariat's case is 21 starts, 16 wins, three seconds and one third, for $1,316,808 and five Eclipse Awards.3 He was Horse of the Year twice, at two and at three.
Winx has the counter-argument that a short career cannot answer: 33 consecutive wins in Australia, 25 of them at Group 1 level.
Phar Lap, Frankel, Justify and Arkle share the ballot, each from a racing culture with its own definition of a great horse.
The obvious list first: every great thoroughbred of the last century, on one ballot. Play it →
## Secretariat vs Northern Dancer: two Derby records, nine years apart
The Kentucky Derby is where Secretariat's record book starts. He ran the mile and a quarter in 1:59 2/5, the first horse to break two minutes at Churchill Downs.4
Northern Dancer held the mark before him, at a flat 2:00 in 1964. Three fifths of a second separates the two fastest Derbies ever run, and nine years separate the horses who ran them.
Sham is the detail that gets forgotten. He finished second in 1:59 4/5, eight lengths back and still faster than the record he had come to break.
Fourteen Derby winners share this ranking, including Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Rich Strike and Mystik Dan, which is the whole span of the race in one field.
Fourteen Derby winners, and the two fastest runnings of the race nine years apart. Play it →
## Thirteen Triple Crowns, and Citation got there first
Only thirteen horses have swept the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont since Sir Barton did it in 1919. That is the smallest club Secretariat belongs to, and the one where every member has the same headline.
So the ranking turns on how each of them won. Secretariat is the only one who set a record in all three legs.
Citation took the 1948 series and retired as racing's first millionaire, which was the older benchmark for a great career before purse money inflated. Seattle Slew and Justify both swept the three races unbeaten.
Then there are the members nobody argues for: Omaha, Assault, Gallant Fox, Whirlaway. They did exactly what Secretariat did, and the reason they are footnotes rather than legends is the margin, not the achievement.
Thirteen horses have done it in 107 years. Narrowing the club to one is the hard part. Play it →
## Man o' War won the Belmont by 20 lengths. Secretariat by 31
This is the race the whole reputation rests on, so it is the one ranking where Secretariat is not really being compared to anyone.
The margin is the part people remember, but the clock is the harder fact. He ran a mile and a half in 2:24, and the second-fastest time ever recorded at the distance on dirt belongs to Risen Star, who ran 2:26 in 1988 and was Secretariat's own son.1
Man o' War is the only entry with a comparable margin, 20 lengths in 1920, and Count Fleet's 25 lengths in 1943 sits between them. Three horses, three enormous wins, spread across five decades.
The close finishes are the other kind of great Belmont. Affirmed held off Alydar by a head in 1978; Easy Goer ran the second-fastest Belmont of the twentieth century in 1989 and is remembered mainly for who he denied.
The race he won by 31 lengths, up against every other great mile and a half. Play it →
## The Preakness clock that took 39 years to fix
The middle leg is the one where Secretariat's record needed a committee. He was timed at 1:54 2/5 in 1973, slower than the stakes record, and the Daily Racing Form's own clockers had him faster.
In June 2012 the Maryland Racing Commission reviewed the race video and voted unanimously to correct the time to 1:53, a new stakes record 39 years after the fact.5
American Pharoah, Man o' War and Rachel Alexandra are in the same field, each judged on one afternoon rather than a career.
The middle leg, and the one whose clock took 39 years to settle. Play it →
## Secretariat's Belmont vs the Miracle on Ice
Widen the question to the whole of twentieth-century sport and the horse stops being a horse. He becomes one moment among fifteen, filed next to Jesse Owens in Berlin and a group of American college hockey players who beat the Soviets.
His Belmont has one advantage over most of the field: the winning margin is the story by itself. Nobody has to be told why it mattered.
Jackie Robinson's debut, Bob Beamon's long jump and Roger Bannister's four-minute mile changed what people thought was possible. That is a different kind of claim, and it is the one a racehorse cannot make.
Now he is not up against horses. He is up against the Miracle on Ice. Play it →
## ESPN's SportsCentury put a horse at No. 35
In 1999 a panel of 48 journalists, historians and administrators assembled ESPN's ranking of the century's greatest North American athletes. Secretariat came 35th, and he is the only non-human in the top 50.6
Two other horses made the wider hundred, Man o' War at 84th and Citation at 97th, which tells you the panel was not making a novelty gesture. They were ranking three racehorses against ballplayers and boxers and putting one of them ahead of the other two by a distance.
Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown filled the places above him. Against that field, a top-forty place for an animal who raced for sixteen months is a serious one.
The counter-argument is straightforward and hard to answer: the horse did not choose to run, and every human on the list did. It is the objection that keeps this ranking interesting rather than settling it.
ESPN put him 35th on this list in 1999, the only non-human in the top 50. Play it →
## The 1970s: Ali, Aaron, and a horse
Restrict the field to the 1970s and it gets harder, not easier. Two Ali fights are in it. So is Hank Aaron passing Babe Ruth's home run record in April 1974, after a year of death threats, and Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in front of 30,000 people.
Secretariat's answer to all of that is a week in June 1973, when he became the first athlete to appear on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated at the same time.5
One decade, and a field that includes two Ali fights and a broken home-run record. Play it →
## Secretariat's 2:24 vs Joe DiMaggio's 56 games
Records are the one category where a horse competes on level terms, because a clock does not care what species set it.
Secretariat's mile and a half has stood since 1973 against every advance in training, veterinary care and track surface that the sport has made since.1 The horses chasing it have had 53 years of better everything and have not got close.
Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak is the American benchmark for an untouchable number. Pete Rose reached 44 in 1978 and nobody has been nearer since.
Cy Young's 511 wins, Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points and Byron Nelson's eleven consecutive tournament victories are all in the same field. Every one of them describes a version of the sport that no longer exists, which is usually why a record survives.
Fifty-three years and nobody within a second. It still has to argue with DiMaggio. Play it →
## Arthur Ashe, Allen Iverson, and a colt from Caroline County
Secretariat was foaled at Meadow Stable in Doswell, Virginia, on 30 March 1970, which puts him on a state roster he has no business being on.5
Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond and won singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open. Allen Iverson came out of Hampton and won an NBA MVP at barely six feet tall. Lawrence Taylor, from Williamsburg, made NFL offences redesign how they protect a quarterback.
Sam Snead, Bruce Smith, Moses Malone and Gabby Douglas fill out a list that would be strong for a country, never mind a state.
Being the only quadruped in the field is either a disqualification or the single most interesting thing about the ranking, and Virginia's tourism board has never been in any doubt which.
He was foaled in Caroline County, which puts him on a list with Arthur Ashe. Play it →
## Seabiscuit vs Secretariat, on screen this time
Both horses got a film, and the films are the reverse of the careers. Secretariat was the champion who never lost a fair race; Seabiscuit was the undersized claimer who became a Depression story.
Disney's Secretariat arrived in 2010 with Diane Lane as Penny Chenery and John Malkovich as trainer Lucien Laurin. Seabiscuit came out in 2003 and was nominated for Best Picture.
National Velvet, The Black Stallion and a Marx Brothers farce called A Day at the Races sit alongside them. The track has been good to cinema for eighty years.
Here he is a 2010 Disney film, and the competition was nominated for Best Picture. Play it →
## Laika, Hachiko, Dolly, and the racehorse
Leave sport behind and Secretariat is competing for fame itself, against animals whose fame came from something other than winning.
Laika orbited the Earth in 1957 and did not come back. Hachiko waited at Shibuya station for nine years after his owner died. Dolly was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. Cher Ami carried the message that found a trapped American battalion in 1918.
Secretariat's claim is narrower and, on this list, oddly thin: he was very fast, and a great many people watched. Set against a dog who changed spaceflight, that is a hard case to make.
Bucephalus, Koko, Jumbo and Punxsutawney Phil complete a field with no shared unit of measurement. That absence is the reason to vote on it rather than rank it.
Out of sport entirely, and now the rivals are a space dog and a cloned sheep. Play it →
## Elizabeth Ham's submission, after the Jockey Club said no
The name almost did not happen. Meadow Stable sent the Jockey Club a run of suggestions and had them all turned down, until Elizabeth Ham, Christopher Chenery's secretary and a former diplomatic staffer, offered one from her old working life.
It is a bureaucrat's word attached to the fastest horse anybody has timed, and that mismatch is most of why it stuck.
The field it is up against is stronger than the subject. Zippy Chippy lost all 100 of his career starts. Onion beat the best horse in the world. Man o' War was named for an owner's husband away at war, and American Pharoah carries a misspelling that made it onto the trophy.
A name a stable secretary supplied after the Jockey Club rejected the rest. Play it →
## Bold Ruler is on this list. His son is the argument
Breeding is the one ranking where being the fastest horse ever timed counts for nothing, and it is the one Secretariat loses.
Breeding is measured in descendants, and Secretariat's stud career was the one part of his life that disappointed the people who paid for it. He sired 57 stakes winners, including the Horse of the Year Lady's Secret and the Belmont winner Risen Star, and he never produced a top-class stallion son.3 For a horse syndicated at a record price on the strength of his own racing, that was a commercial disappointment as well as a sporting one.7
His influence arrived sideways, through his daughters. A.P. Indy, Storm Cat, Gone West, Summer Squall, Chief's Crown and Dehere are all his maternal grandsons, and between them they shaped modern American dirt racing.
Bold Ruler is also in this field, and Bold Ruler was Secretariat's father. Eight times the leading sire in North America, he did at stud what his son could not, which makes this the one list where the family order reverses.
The unflattering one: at stud he left no top-class son, and his own sire is on the list. Play it →
## Onion, Saratoga, 4 August 1973
Two months after the Belmont, Secretariat went to Saratoga for the Whitney Handicap as the 1-to-10 favourite, in front of a record crowd of 30,119. He lost by a length to Onion, a four-year-old gelding trained by Allen Jerkens.8
Jerkens had watched a flat morning workout and decided the champion was not right. A viral infection and a low-grade fever were identified afterwards, which explains the result without making it any less real.
It was not even the only defeat of that year. Three weeks before the Derby he had finished third in the Wood Memorial behind Angle Light and Sham, with a mouth abscess later blamed for it.5
The rematch is the part that belongs in the record. On 15 September at Belmont Park he ran a mile and an eighth in 1:45 2/5, a world record on dirt, and Onion finished fourth.5
The last list is the one where he loses: Saratoga, August 1973, beaten by a gelding named Onion. Play it →
## Fifteen lists, three records, one bad afternoon
Fifteen rankings and the same horse, and the only ones he owns outright are the ones with a clock in them. Ask about bloodlines and his own father outranks him. Ask about fame and a stray dog from Moscow has the better story. Ask about one Tuesday at Saratoga and a gelding nobody had heard of has the answer.
That spread is what the site is built to surface, [one matchup at a time](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison), rather than by handing you somebody else's finished list.
Pick the question that interests you and see whether the horse holds up. Or make the one nobody has made yet.
## More rankings, more angles
- [The Wolf, Ranked 16 Different Ways](/articles/the-wolf-ranked-many-ways) — predator, myth, and conservation comeback
- [Lion vs Tiger: The Crown Depends on the Category](/articles/lion-vs-tiger-ranked) — two apex predators, sixteen different tests
- [How Rankings Are Scored: The 1000-Point System](/articles/how-rankings-are-scored) — what the numbers under a ranking mean
Sources
Wikipedia — 1973 Belmont Stakes, the 31-length margin, the 2:24 American record and Risen Star's 2:26: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-21)
BloodHorse — the 2026 Saratoga summer meet, 3 July to 7 September, with the 157th Travers on 29 August: bloodhorse.com (checked 2026-08-21)
National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame — Secretariat's career record, earnings, Eclipse Awards, and his 57 stakes winners and maternal grandsons at stud: racingmuseum.org (checked 2026-08-21)
Wikipedia — 1973 Kentucky Derby, the 1:59 2/5 winning time, Northern Dancer's previous 2:00 record and Sham's 1:59 4/5: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-21)
Wikipedia — Secretariat: the 2012 Maryland Racing Commission correction to 1:53, the June 1973 magazine covers, the foaling date at Meadow Stable, the Wood Memorial defeat and the Marlboro Cup world record: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-21)
ESPN — SportsCentury top 100 North American athletes of the 20th century, with Secretariat 35th, Man o' War 84th and Citation 97th: espn.com (checked 2026-08-21)
Daily Racing Form — Secretariat's stud career and how it was judged against his racing: drf.com (checked 2026-08-21)
BloodHorse — the 1973 Whitney Handicap, Secretariat's defeat by Onion at odds of 1-to-10 before a crowd of 30,119: bloodhorse.com (checked 2026-08-21)
Wikimedia Commons — the hero photograph, "Secretariat KY Horse Park" by Calstanhope, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0: commons.wikimedia.org (checked 2026-08-21)
