On Sunday at Monmouth Park, American Pharoah, the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, will race for the first time since winning the Belmont Stakes on June 8. If Pharoah wins, he’l be the seventh Triple Crown winner to win his first race after capturing thoroughbred racing’s biggest prize.

Among the horses that won that first post-Triple Crown race is Secretariat, winner of the prize in 1973, who shipped out to Arlington Park near Chicago to capture the Arlington Invitational Stakes by nine lengths at the end of June that year.

But when he came back to New York, to Saratoga Race Course, the track over which he’d twice won races convincingly as a two-year-old in 1972, Secretariat’s run of seeming invincibility came to an end on August 4 1973 in the Whitney Handicap – at the hooves of a horse called, perhaps somewhat ignominiously, Onion.

Continue reading at The Guardian…

(I know that the story of Onion is not a “forgotten one” to race fans. This article in one of a series at The Guardian on “forgotten” sports figures, of which Onion may well be one to the general public.)