Quote:
Originally Posted by jbhofmann
I had a whole paragraph typed up to push Secretariat but deleted it because I thought I'd get laughed at.
There's not a single event that gives me bigger goosebumps than seeing him open up and just run at the Belmont.
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Fyi, you would be 100% correct by placing Secretariat on that list. What SEC accomplished in the Triple Crown, racings greatest stage, was unprecedented and will never be repeated again. To place his 3 TC wins in perspective, if you put all 3 races together, he would have beat American Pharoah by 57 lengths or 456 yards (1.5 football fields!!!). In fact, when ESPN completed a poll of the greatest 100 athletic accomplishments, Secretariat's Belmont Stakes run was ranked 2nd, only behind Chamberlain's 100 point game. No horse has ever come within 9 lengths of his 1.5 mile dirt track Belmont Stakes record....talk about dominance and separating yourself from your peers. In his Kentucky Derby win he ran each quarter mile fraction faster than the preceding one, accelerating the entire 1.25 mile race, also unprecedented in race horse history. As a final nail in the coffin, he still holds the fastest times for ALL 3 Triple Crown races, covering over 150 years, over 4,000 race horses and approximately 450 races! Bottom line is Secretariat stretched the physical limits of what the standard thoroughbred race horse should be able to accomplish and THAT is what truly defines superiority in sports. It's not just that he won great races, it was the manner in which he won them. As a side note, his iconic stature is likewise monumemtal, and if you are old enough to have been around in 1973, he was the most significant sports personality in the world, even appearing on the front cover of 3 major periodicals in the same week (Time, Newsweek & Sports Illustrated).
That said, my top 4 sports icons are: Ruth, Ali, Jordan and Secretariat. All 4 have the perfect combination of incredible feats for their respective sports, coupled with an "unearthly" stature versus their peers. Whether an animal should be considered an Athlete will always be open for discussion, but for my money, Big Red's unprecedented performances have earned him the right to join this iconic list. If ESPN can classify him as an athlete, that's good enough for me.
Regards,
JoeT