I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. . . That was...just beauty, you know? He started in last place, which he tended to do. I was covering the second-place horse, which wound up being Sham. It looked like Sham's race going into the last turn, I think. The thing you have to understand is that Sham was fast, a beautiful horse. ''He'' would have had the Triple Crown in another year. And it just didn't seem like there could ''be'' anything faster than that. Everybody was watching him. It was over, more or less. And all of a sudden there was this, like, just a disruption in the corner of your eye, in your peripheral vision. And then before you could make out what it was, here Secretariat came. And then Secretariat had passed him. No one had ever seen anything run like that – a lot of the old guys said the same thing. It was like he was some other animal out there.〔Sullivan, John Jeremiah. ''Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son''. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, pp. 19-20.〕