Pharaoh paid $3.50 to win (off a $2 ticket) so it wasn’t bad.
Were all his grandchildren good, or only the ones through his daughters? (ETA: It looks like his sons didn’t get to cover particularly good mares, because breeders at the time didn’t realize his genes were going to be as good as they turned out to be.)
It would be cool if Pharoah were bred to Zenyatta when the time comes.
I was there yesterday. I’m happy to say they made significant improvements over last year in terms of crowd management. While it was still impossibly crowded, and I could hardly see the actual race at all, it was very organized. Arrival and departure ran very smoothly. The concert by Goo Goo Dolls after the last race seems to have helped stagger the departures of many people in attendance, and it was really a beautiful day. Despite the crowds, it was very exciting to be part of history. The mood was festive and the excitement contagious. I was nervous about going, but it was really a wonderful day!
I’m certainly no expert on horse breeding – I haven’t even ridden a horse since I was about 14! – but from what I read yesterday, the reason that only Secretariat’s descendants by his daughters have been successful is that there’s a genetic mutation carried only through the female line (popularly called the “X” Factor"), which creates an increased chance of the horse having a large (but normal) heart. For example, the average thoroughbred’s heart weighs 7-9 pounds. Secretariat’s heart was determined after his death to weigh 22 pounds; it was otherwise entirely normal. So Secretariat really was “like a tremendous machine” compared to other race horses, in the famous words of the announcer during his Triple Crown win at Belmont in 1973. I highly recommend looking up the clip of that race on YouTube and watching it. It’s like watching a horse with superpowers!
Then Secretariat’s daughters would have this beneficial sex-linked mutation, and half of their sons would have it. That’s interesting, and that sort of mutation is easy to trace through the pedigree.
Fascinating. However, as we know, genes are only a part of the equation.
Are these animals also tested for performance enhancing drugs? I’m thinking that with all the money at stake, and the nature of human beings, that cheating is probably a problem in horse racing as well.
Nature vs. nurture. I would like to believe that the undefinable “heart”, that will-to-win, isn’t something that is clone-able.
The horses are tested, I believe the winners are routinely tested for a variety of things, drugs that increase oxygen in the blood, steroids,etc. Some drugs are legal in some states that aren’t in others (lasix for example) so they can be checked for those kind of drugs as well.
Maybe a horse should be named Lance Armstrong?
@movemetoo, seems true. If you’ve read that wonderful book Seabiscuit, the author spends a lot of time describing the personality of the horse, and how much he saw racing as a power play and actually loved intimidating the other horses on the track.
Secretariat had the emotional set, too. As others have pointed out, he won the Belmont by 31 lengths, in a time which is still far and away the record, yet the jockey didn’t touch him with the bat and no other horse was close enough to challenge him. He just loved to run.
On the other topic: tracking quality mares is harder than stallions because as a practical matter, stallions just produce a heck of a lot more offspring than a mare can.
There’s a great chart at fivethirtyeight.com that shows the relative Belmont runs of each of the Triple Crown winners. And in a world where we see athletic performance increasing due to superior training and equipment, the Belmon times are actually slowing on average.
I was just thinking, it would be fun it they misspelled all the names of the progeny soon to be forthcoming 
@DonnaL mentioned watching clips of Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont. I came cross this match-up of American Pharoah’s/Secretariat’s Belmont runs: http://deadspin.com/this-is-what-it-would-look-like-if-american-pharoah-rac-1709988755 It was such a thrill to see Secretariat again. I remember that day 42 years ago - all of us jumping up and down in my parents’ living room, laughing and shouting because he was just that amazing.
^ I saw this last night. Secretariat would blow AP away. Now, that was a GREAT horse.
Wow, that is exciting to watch!
I watched it again Saturday night. It really is otherworldly.
Sham, the horse who battled him for the first half, was the second best horse that year and might well have won the Triple Crown himself if he hadn’t had the bad luck to be born the same year as Secretariat. But that race broke him. He finished dead last and never raced again.
^^ I was referring to video of the 73 Belmont, not the comparison video which @frazzled1 linked. I can’t make it work on my phone, so will have to wait until tonight but I can’t wait to see it.
American Pharoah is a Secretariat descendent.