Today's video is of one of the most magnificent sporting achievments I've ever seen, Secretariat's victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.*
The announcer's call is deeply embedded in my experience of the race (I saw it live on TV and heard the call then). I don't know why, but it's very affecting for me when the announcer, Chic Anderson, says "He is moving like a tremendous machine!"
I've never been able to figure out why it's so moving. I don't think it's just nostalgia; I remember being strongly moved at the time.
Maybe it's the strange mixing of categories -- we love the personality, the courage, the pride and swagger of race horses, all things to which we can relate (and not in some crude "anthropomorphism," for we are not "projecting" pride onto a race horse, we are recognizing it) and then the "machine" remark pops up. Is it that Secretariat was so dominant it's as if the other poor beasts were running against a machine?
Or maybe it's just the awe-struck tone in Anderson's voice that works; the semantic content is, if not irrelevant, perhaps secondary?
*I recognize that powerful ethical arguments can be made against horse racing, or at least in favor of drastic reform of many of its practices.
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