For 50 years, this image has defined Secretariat’s famed Triple Crown. Who took it?

Four days before the running of last month’s Kentucky Derby, a story was posted on NBCSports.com under my byline, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Secretariat’s 1973 Triple Crown, and more specifically, his climactic, 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes in a time of two minutes, 24 seconds, still two seconds faster than any other thoroughbred has run the race. The story was, as the writer says in Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, “… the kind of story I enjoy…” A joyful story. Secretariat and his Belmont are cultural touchstones of stunning durability and power in modern American sports, almost bereft of negativity. As I wrote in the piece, only the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal – the “The Miracle On Ice” – is in the same league for evoking a certain type of emotional response. If you can find the right entry point, and you know your way around a keyboard, Big Red is storytelling gold. Check, and check.

To tell the story of Secretariat’s 50th, I chose a narrative device. We writers love terms like device, because it purports to impose order on the process, as if we are software engineers or carpenters, meticulously building something, rather than typists, desperately trying to corral facts, ideas, quotes, transitions, word length, always right on the edge of losing control of the whole thing. My device was to feature five people who, in various ways, both in life and beyond, had perpetuated the story of Secretariat’s 1973 season and Belmont. Owner Penny (Tweedy) Chenery, jockey Ron Turcotte (the only one still living), race caller Chic Anderson, journalist Bill Nack, photographer Bob Coglianese. With help, I got to the right people, collected strong quotes, added some literary flourishes and in