It was almost 25 years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.

I had holed up in the late spring of 1973, studying for the bar exam. It was dreary work, 18 hours a day, trying to learn crap I should have learned in the previous three years but never had. Now I was paying for it. I'd crammed through high school and college and if there is a course you have to take in order to die, I'll cram for that too. But on three Saturday afternoons back then, I'd taken a half-hour off to watch The Horse.

He had stomped the field in the Kentucky Derby, winning in a time that even to this day has never been approached. Two weeks later he'd crushed the Preakness. The Pimlico track timer had screwed up or he would have had another record there. The Belmont Stakes came on June 9. I turned on the TV and made my girlfriend sit down and watch it with me. She hated horses. I told her she wouldn't hate this horse.

It was, as the sportscasters say, the last jewel of the Triple Crown, at 1.5 miles the longest of the three races, and a stone heartbreaker. But Secretariat, going off at a laughable 1-9 odds, was making it look easy. The jockey, Ron Turcotte, was just hanging on. When they flashed the one-mile split, yet another record, the crowd started to grow curiously quiet. Secretariat began to stretch out the lead. Five lengths. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. It was unbelievable. The camera pulled back in a wide angle shot as he hammered toward the wire. There was no other horse in sight. Twenty-five lengths. Turcotte looked back. Thirty lengths. Then it was over. Two twenty-four flat and thirty-one lengths, records that still stand.

"We are never going to see anything like again for as long as we live," I said.

Now I'm not so sure.

Stephane Peterhansel took it easy on the final day, knowing that all he had to do to take home his sixth Paris-Dakar title was to cross the finish line in one piece. He did. It wasn't a thirty-one length lead, but it didn't have to be. Everyone else had given up a week ago, victims of broken bikes, equipment, or spirit. KTM's factory had pitched the best riders and wrenches and equipment they had at him; Peterhansel turned them away effortlessly. It never was close.

My confidential informant, Deep Throat, thinks that until KTM changes its approach to the Paris-Dakar rally, nothing is going to change. Yamaha concentrates nearly everything it has on Peterhansel. He has three mechanics, guys who've been with him for years, who follow him like shadows. They may take showers together. They apparently communicate telepathically. Peterhansel shuts down the motor, looks at something without even speaking, and the wrenches fix it. KTM, on the other hand, dilutes its energy, giving one mechanic to each rider. Deep Throat thinks that if they'd focus on just two men, perhaps Meoni and Roma, instead of the armada that they fielded in this event, they might have better luck. That makes sense to me.

But then Meoni and Roma would have to beat Peterhansel through the dunes, and in the last eight years no one, not even Batman, has been able to do that. This year he fell down once, got lost once, and overheated once. That is not what I'd consider a mountain of tribulation, particularly when you recall that two-thirds of the starting field never made it to Dakar. The rally even now is being viewed as one of the toughest ever, but for Peterhansel it was merely a case of watching the wheels go round and round, up one dune and down another. Repeat as necessary for eighteen days. Accept the crown at the end. No one has ever done what he has now done.

Secretariat died in 1989. A necropsy was performed. They found a heart that was nearly twice the size of the average equine heart. People wanted to believe it explained the animal's success. It didn't explain anything to me. I already knew that Secretariat was a gift from the gods. They hand them out occasionally to remind us of what true greatness really is. We can't understand it any other way. All we know is that we may never see anything like it again.

	1	PETERHANSEL	YAM	FR	  0:00:00
	2	MEONI		KTM	IT	  0:30:29
	3	HAYDON		KTM	AU	  1:19:42
	4	COX		KTM	AF	  2:25:57
	5	JIMMINK		KTM	HO	  3:16:29
	6	ARCARONS	KTM	ES	  4:57:44
	7	VON ZITZEWIT	KTM	AL	  5:32:35
	8	DEACON		KTM	GB	  5:48:37
	9	MAYER		KTM	AL	  7:56:41
       10	ZLOCH		KTM	RT	  9:01:30
       11	VERHOEF		KTM	HO	  9:42:22
       12	DE GAVARDO	KTM	CH	 11:08:08
       13	LE BLANC	HON	FR	 11:27:10
       14	SCHILCHER	KTM	AL	 11:33:26
       15	KRAUSE		KTM	US	 11:33:26

© 1998 Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois

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