Secretariat

colleges Terps' O'Donnell wins Sportswoman of Year Award Senior Katie O'Donnell of the Maryland field hockey team was named the Women's Sports Foundation's Sportswoman of the Year award Tuesday night at the annual Salute to Women in Sports banquet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The Maryland coaching staff, the O'Donnell family and athletics director Kevin Anderson were all in attendance as O'Donnell was named the year's top performer for all team sport competitors.

Grant Whitacre's acting career began with a scribbled phone number on the back of a racing program. It almost ended there, too. The 25-year-old jockey, who grew up in Howard County and graduated from Atholton, was getting dressed in the jockeys' room at Laurel Park in August. As he was putting his clothes on, he noticed a piece of paper stuck to the wall. It was a casting call for jockeys interested in auditioning for roles in a Disney movie about legendary Triple Crown winner Secretariat.

One contender for autumn box-office honors might break away from the field. With "Secretariat" (opening nationwide in October), director Randall Wallace has crafted a stirring, fact-inspired fable about the 1973 Triple Crown winner who was the greatest champ in horse-racing history. But Baltimore racing fans swept up in Secretariat's come-from-behind victory at the Kentucky Derby will get a surprise as Wallace guides the story into the Preakness. The director makes his most daring and unexpected move when the action shifts to Northwest Baltimore's Pimlico Race Course . Rather than lavish the same attention on re-creating Old Hilltop that he did on Churchill Downs, he shows the middle jewel of the Triple Crown entirely on television, as Secretariat owner Penny Chenery Tweedy's husband and four children follow the broadcast in their family room in Denver.

Almanac June 9--1973: Secretariat became horse racing's first Triple Crown winner in 25 years by winning the Belmont Stakes.

ELMONT, N.Y. - When Smarty Jones won the Preakness by a record 11 1/2 lengths, he finished with his ears pricked, a sign he was having fun. In the ensuing three weeks leading to the Belmont Stakes today at Belmont Park, he became a national sensation. People have compared him to Seabiscuit because of the richness of their stories. They've compared him to Seattle Slew because Slew, too, was 8-for-8 entering the Belmont. And they've compared him to Secretariat because of the power with which Smarty Jones drew away in the Preakness and the potential of his doing the same in the Belmont.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The racing world stood poised to welcome its next Triple Crown winner. Point Given, the large, flashy chestnut, was the anointed one. But yesterday, as horses thundered down the long stretch of Churchill Downs in the 127th Kentucky Derby, a streak of gray named Monarchos carried the hopes of racing for its next star. Overshadowed before the race by the Bob Baffert-trained pair of Point Given and Congaree, Monarchos drew off to a 4 3/4 -length victory in only the second Kentucky Derby ever run in less than two minutes.

The Indy Racing League, yielding to criticism and mindful of the possibility of a media boycott, changed its position and issued a credential to a Sports Illustrated reporter for the May 30 Indianapolis 500.Tony George, president of the IRL, yesterday granted a credential to Ed Hinton, SI's senior auto racing writer, but not before calling Hinton "a danger to himself and to the sport he covers."It's my hope that I never see him or they never come around," George told the Associated Press.

D. Wayne Lukas rubbed his hands along the glistening neck of the chestnut colt Charismatic. Yesterday, the morning after Charismatic won the Preakness, Lukas was pointing out the colt's similarities to Secretariat.The revered Secretariat is Charismatic's great-grandsire on his male side. Charismatic also boasts strong Secretariat influences on his female side.Before Lukas could get too far into the comparison, he and his audience, a small group of reporters, enjoyed a good laugh. Here they were at the Pimlico stakes barn comparing Charismatic to Secretariat when three months ago Lukas couldn't even dump the horse in a claiming race (a race in which all entrants are for sale for a set price)

Secretariat's run for the black-eyed Susans may finally be headed for the record books, 26 years after his Triple Crown win.The horse, considered by some the greatest to ever race, set records in the 1973 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes. In between, he won the Preakness. But Pimlico Race Course's official timer -- a device whose accuracy had been publicly criticized for years -- came in with an impossibly slow time of 1 minute, 55 seconds.Three men in the press box with stopwatches all clocked the winning time at 1: 53 2/5, which would have been a record for the race, one that has subsequently been beaten.

The move to reopen the investigation into Secretariat's 1973 Preakness time gathered some momentum yesterday at a routine meeting of the Maryland Racing Commission at Laurel Park.Marty Jacobs, executive general counsel of the Maryland Jockey Club, said the organization will "make a formal request" of the panel to look into the matter, which has been a subject of debate for a quarter-century."Computerized timing is available now, and we believe it will reveal the true time as opposed to the official time," said Jacobs.