Quick Take
- Narration: Grover Gardner brings the right weight to William Nack’s magazine-caliber prose; his measured delivery honors the material without sentimentalizing it.
- Themes: Athletic greatness under commercial pressure, the bonds of horse and human, the economics of Thoroughbred racing
- Mood: Richly detailed and quietly reverent, with flashes of genuine exhilaration
- Verdict: The definitive account of a horse whose performances remain statistically inexplicable, told by a journalist who was there for all of it.
I was halfway through a rainy afternoon commute, the kind where nothing outside the window is worth watching, when Grover Gardner started describing the morning of the 1973 Belmont Stakes. By the time he finished the race sequence, the train had stopped and I hadn’t noticed. That is the measure of William Nack’s writing: it has the intimacy of someone who was actually standing at the rail, which he was.
Nack was the Thoroughbred racing correspondent for Sports Illustrated during Secretariat’s career, and that proximity gives this book something that retrospective accounts never quite manage. He knew Penny Chenery, the owner who bet everything on a horse that might not even legally be hers. He knew Lucien Laurin, the trainer who handled the enormous pressure of managing a horse that had become a national event. He knew Eddie Sweat, the groom whose daily relationship with Big Red was as close as any human got to the animal’s inner life. This is not a fan’s account. It is a working journalist’s account, and the difference matters across fourteen hours of listening. Nack filed race reports under deadline; he noticed things the retrospective historian misses.
What Made Big Red Different
Nack is careful to explain Secretariat in terms that go beyond the romantic. The horse’s physique was genuinely unusual: a necropsy after his death in 1989 revealed a heart estimated at nearly twice the normal size, which may explain the cardiovascular capacity that allowed him to run the Belmont Stakes in 2:24, a record that still stands half a century later. Nack doesn’t sensationalize this. He presents it as one data point in a larger portrait of an animal that was structurally exceptional and also, for reasons no one could fully account for, seemed to enjoy running more than most horses do. His times in both the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont remain the fastest in those races’ histories. Those are facts that no amount of storytelling can inflate further; they simply are.
One reviewer here recalled watching the Belmont on a color television at her uncle’s house as an eleven-year-old and never forgetting it. Nack’s prose recreates that experience for listeners who weren’t born yet, which is the specific gift of great sports writing. Another reviewer, who described herself as never particularly drawn to the romance of horses, found herself unable to stop reading once the racing began. That kind of conversion is only possible with this quality of journalism.
The Business Behind the Legend
One of the book’s most valuable threads is its frank account of the financial and legal pressures surrounding Secretariat’s career. Meadow Stable, the Chenery family operation, was facing inheritance tax liabilities that threatened to force the sale of the entire farm. The syndication deal that sold breeding rights to Secretariat for a then-record $6.08 million before he had won the Triple Crown was simultaneously a gamble on an unproven horse and a financial necessity. Nack traces these negotiations with the same care he gives to the race descriptions, and the effect is to place the athletic story inside a fully rendered world of money, risk, and human ambition that makes the achievement more complex and more interesting.
The Chenery family figures, particularly Penny Chenery, emerge as genuinely compelling. She was a housewife who inherited a struggling racing operation and navigated a world that had not historically made room for women in its ownership and management structures. Nack gives her story the space it deserves without turning her into a symbol. The reader who described the book as giving an insider’s look at the greatest horse in history was reaching for something true: Nack’s access to the Cheney family and their associates produces a portrait that is dense with first-hand material.
Grover Gardner and Fourteen Hours of Racing Prose
Gardner is among the most reliable narrators working in nonfiction audiobooks, and this is the kind of material that rewards a narrator who can sustain consistent quality across a long listen. Nack’s prose occasionally reaches for lyricism, particularly in the race sequences, and Gardner handles the gear shift between descriptive passages and business narrative without losing the listener’s sense of where they are in the story. One reviewer noted that the first few chapters, dense with names and family history, are slower going. Gardner’s pacing makes this more manageable than it might be on the page. By the time the racing begins in earnest, the groundwork has been laid and the momentum carries the rest.
Fourteen Hours Well Spent
Anyone with an interest in sports writing at its most accomplished should hear this book regardless of their relationship to horse racing. Nack’s craft is worth experiencing on its own terms. For those who love Thoroughbred racing, this is essential listening, the account written by someone who was present and cared about the subject before it became legend. Listeners who come primarily for the emotional experience of rooting for a great animal will need patience for the financial and logistical detail in the early sections, but the payoff is a race narrative that earns every word of it. Those wanting a shorter, more impressionistic tribute should look elsewhere. Fourteen hours is the right length for a subject of this scale, and Gardner makes every one of them count.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the book cover Secretariat’s early training and breeding background in detail, or does it focus mainly on the Triple Crown races?
Nack covers everything: the breeding decisions that produced Secretariat, the Chenery family’s financial situation, the training regimen under Lucien Laurin, and the full two-year-old and three-year-old seasons before zeroing in on the Triple Crown itself. The Triple Crown races receive extraordinary descriptive attention, but listeners get a full biography, not a highlights reel.
Is Grover Gardner’s narration well suited to long-form sports writing, or does it feel flat across fourteen hours?
Gardner sustains the material well. He is particularly effective in the race sequences, where the prose demands both pace and precision, and his register shifts appropriately between the financial narrative sections and the more emotionally charged racing passages. The length is not a problem; his consistency makes fourteen hours feel manageable.
How much of the book deals with Penny Chenery as a figure, and is her story given adequate treatment?
Chenery is a central figure throughout. Nack respects both her personal story and her professional achievement in navigating a male-dominated industry under enormous financial and personal pressure. She is not reduced to a supporting character in the horse’s story; she is presented as someone whose decisions shaped everything that followed.
Is there a free audiobook version of Secretariat available through Audible?
Yes, Secretariat is available at no cost on Audible for eligible members. Verify current pricing and availability through the Audible link on this page, as membership terms can change.
