HORSE RACING : At First Glance, Pulse Quickens

Secretariat’s victory in the 1973 Kentucky Derby is considered one of the greatest thoroughbred performances of all time because of the way he finished. He ran his final quarter-mile in 23 seconds, an almost impossible feat. Running the last quarter in 24 traditionally has been considered the mark of an exceptional stretch-runner.

In the Breeders’ Cup last month, for example, Rubiano, the country’s best stretch-running sprinter, zoomed the final fraction of the Sprint in 23 and three-fifths seconds, a time abetted by the unusually fast Gulfstream Park track.

Pleasant Tap, the strongest finisher among the country’s distance runners, accelerated the last quarter of the Classic in 24 flat. Nobody else in any of the Breeders’ Cup races on the dirt bettered the 24-second mark.

These numbers will underscore how extraordinary it is that an American 2-year-old this fall ran a final quarter mile in 23 seconds -- and did it in the first start of his career. One might expect that such a youngster would be hailed as a star of the future, a contender for next year’s Triple Crown series.

In fact, the 2-year-old has attracted no attention at all, not even at his home base, Laurel (Md.) Race Course. He runs for a little-known trainer with a two-horse stable, and when he unleashed that phenomenal charge through the stretch, he did it while he was losing a maiden claiming race. But the horse, Quicken, will get the chance to earn some attention when he runs in the Virginia Stallion Stakes at Laurel Sunday.

“Before he ran the first time, I thought he had potential,” trainer Clark Cassidy said. “But I wanted to enter him where I thought he could get the job done.” That’s why he entered him for a $25,000 claiming price on Nov. 10, and Quicken should indeed have gotten the job done.

Jockey Andrea Seefeldt, who had been exercising Quicken in the mornings, knew the 2-year-old had tended to be a little slow from the gate, so she hustled him early and got him into decent striking position. But when Quicken found himself in a bit tight along the rail, Seefeldt stopped persevering and let him drop back. And back. And back.

Maryland bettors know that when Seefeldt decides to take a horse off the pace, she’ll sometimes take him back into the next county. Quicken was in eighth place with a quarter-mile to go, so far back that he couldn’t possibly win.

But he almost did anyway. After Seefeldt had moved to the outside, Quicken flew around the turn and through the stretch, gobbling up ground with every stride. His rally fell three-quarters of a length short of the front-running winner, who had covered the six furlongs in a very respectable 1:1045.

Big rallies like these can sometimes be an optical illusion, created by the the fact that the leader is slowing abruptly. Fractional times are needed to show when a horse was truly finishing fast, but the traditional way of calculating fractional times is fraught with inaccuracies.

However, this fall at Laurel, a company called Turf Sciences Inc. has been testing a method of clocking each horse’s fractionals to the hundredth of a second by using sophisticated computer and video equipment, and its measurement showed Quicken ran his final quarter mile in 23.05 seconds.

From the half-mile mark to the top of the stretch, the 2-year-old was accelerating at an incredible 40.25 miles per hour-something the best older stakes horses rarely will do.

In the view of this performance, Cassidy decided to try Quicken in Sunday’s Virginia Stallion Stakes -- possibly an unfortunate decision. The seven-furlong distance is ideal and the field is weak, but the worst mistake a trainer can make with a good young prospect is to ask too much of him too soon. Entering a maiden in a stakes race is almost always too much too soon.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to blame Cassidy for being overeager. He has had a lifelong interest in horses -- his mother is a member of the Christmas family, which has been involved in Maryland racing for decades -- and he received his trainer’s license seven years ago, when he was 24.

He had one brief flurry of success-he had the top winning percentage at the Pimlico meeting in 1986-but since then his chosen career has been a struggle. Cassidy now is married to the daughter of trainer James Murphy, and he has a nine-month old son, and it’s tough to pay the bills with a stable consisting of two nonwinners.

Cassidy pays the bills by working as the assistant trainer for his father-in-law’s powerful stable. Under the circumstances, the idea of having a contender in a $40,000 stakes is an exciting one, and the idea that he might have a truly exceptional young prospect must be almost unimaginable.

And, indeed, even to the most objective observers, it seems almost unimaginable that a modestly bred gelding, trained by Clark Cassidy, ridden by Andrea Seefeldt, running in a maiden claiming ace, could have done anything so exceptional. We may know on Sunday whether Quicken’s 23-second finish in his debut was a fluke or a genuine phenomenon.