Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The June 11, 1973 issue of Time Magazine — Volume 101, Number 24 — appeared on newsstands in the immediate aftermath of one of the most extraordinary athletic performances in American sporting history. Just days earlier, on June 9, 1973, Secretariat had won the Belmont Stakes by thirty-one lengths, completing thoroughbred racing's Triple Crown in a performance so dominant that it left broadcasters, journalists, and the capacity crowd at Belmont Park struggling for adequate language. His Belmont time of 2:24 flat remains the track record to this day. Time's decision to put Secretariat on the cover was not a celebration of a sport — it was a recognition that something genuinely unprecedented had occurred, the kind of moment that transcends the athletic context that produced it.
Secretariat had already been building toward this cover for months. His two-year-old season in 1972 earned him Horse of the Year honors, and his 1973 Triple Crown campaign unfolded with a momentum that felt, to those watching it in real time, less like a competition and more like a phenomenon. The Kentucky Derby and Preakness victories had primed the public, but the Belmont — run at a pace that accelerated with each quarter mile rather than fading — transformed Secretariat from a champion into a cultural touchstone. For collectors focused on the intersection of sports history and American print journalism, the Time Magazine archive at OriginalMagazines.com offers essential context for understanding how the mainstream press framed sporting greatness in this era.
The summer of 1973 was a complicated moment in American life. The Watergate hearings had begun in May and were consuming Washington; the Vietnam ceasefire was barely six months old; and the national mood carried a particular exhaustion. Secretariat's Triple Crown arrived into that atmosphere like a reprieve — a story with a clear hero, a clean narrative arc, and an outcome that asked nothing difficult of its audience. Time's editors understood that instinctively. This issue belongs to a small category of sports covers in the magazine's history where the subject is less about athletics than about what a country needed to feel in a specific week. Collectors building a documentary record of 1973 American culture will find the full 1973 magazine archive essential reading alongside this issue.
About the Publication
Time Magazine, founded in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, was by the early 1970s the most widely read news weekly in the United States, with a circulation exceeding four million copies per week. Its audience was broad and educated — professionals, students, and engaged general readers who wanted a single authoritative source to make sense of a week's worth of national and international events. The magazine's format organized the world into departments: National Affairs, World, Business, Science, Sport, and Arts, among others. Its cover was understood by readers and editors alike as a declaration of what mattered most in any given week, and a Time cover subject carried cultural weight that few other publications could replicate.
Key Highlights Inside
- Secretariat Triple Crown cover story: The issue's central feature profiles Secretariat following his historic Belmont Stakes victory on June 9, 1973, examining the horse, his connections, and the cultural response to his achievement.
- Triple Crown context: Secretariat was the first Triple Crown winner in twenty-five years — Citation had last accomplished the feat in 1948 — giving Time's coverage an additional layer of historical weight beyond the individual performance.
- Trainer and ownership profile: Coverage of Secretariat during this period consistently featured trainer Lucien Laurin and Meadow Stable owner Penny Chenery, whose story of managing a horse syndicate under financial pressure had become part of the broader narrative.
- Concurrent Watergate coverage: Any issue of Time from June 1973 would have carried significant coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings, which were dominating American political news throughout that summer.
- Note: Specific article titles and full interior editorial content beyond the cover story are unconfirmed for this issue and have not been itemized in available listing documentation.
Condition & Rarity
Surviving copies of this issue are graded in Good condition — an honest and reasonable assessment for a fifty-plus-year-old weekly newsmagazine. In the collector market for vintage periodicals of this type, Good condition indicates a complete, structurally sound copy with readable pages and intact binding, but with visible signs of age and prior circulation: minor wear throughout, and in this case a mailing address label on the front cover. Label presence is a meaningful distinction for collectors — newsstand copies without subscriber labels are consistently more desirable, as the label partially obscures the cover image. That said, labeled copies represent the authentic subscriber experience of the era and are often the primary surviving format for issues of this vintage, making them entirely legitimate as research and reference copies. The presence of handwritten notes inside adds a layer of provenance interest — marginal annotations in periodicals of this age occasionally reflect the perspective of a reader engaging directly with a historic moment — though their presence will affect desirability depending on the individual collector's priorities. A plastic protective sleeve indicates intentional storage and generally correlates with better page stability than unprotected copies.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Secretariat's Triple Crown summer produced some of the most compelling sports journalism of the decade, and clean copies of this particular Time cover are genuinely hard to come by in collector-grade condition. If this issue is no longer available, the Time Magazine collection at OriginalMagazines.com is the best place to explore other landmark issues from the publication's long run. For collectors drawn specifically to the cultural and political world Secretariat ran through, the full 1973 magazine archive spans well beyond Time and offers a rich cross-section of American print media from one of the more turbulent and fascinating years of the twentieth century.