That didn’t happen: the Dancer placed third at the Belmont Stakes in New York. He did, however, return home to Toronto late in June to win North America’s oldest continuously-run sweepstakes, the Queen’s Plate. Peter Gzowski described the event in his 1983 book, An Unbroken Line. “For a while, as he loped around the first turn dead last, we gulped in disbelief. But when he began his Lamborghini move past the field we cheered him again, and we kept cheering as he swept up the homestretch, the race now convincingly won ... he was still tearing up the dirt in that unforgettable choppy, driving run.”

It was his last race: he suffered a bowed tendon shortly after winning the Queen’s Plate and as a three-year-old had to be retired after only one short year in which he had won seven of his nine starts for a total of $490,171. He then went on to make millions over the next 25 years as the father of a string of champions in both the United States and Europe.

Despite impressive bloodlines — he was sired by the stallion Nearctic out of Natalma — Northern Dancer so unimpressed potential buyers at E.P. Taylor’s Windfields Farm yearling sale in 1962 that no one bought him for the $25,000 asking price. As a result, Taylor kept the colt which some described as “chunky” and “little.” (When fully grown, at 15 hands and two inches, he was still small.) His stride was also described as short and choppy and his disposition “ornery and mischievous,” but, as a two-year-old, he quickly established himself by winning five times in Ontario and also winning the Remsen Stakes at Aqueduct in New York. From there he was shipped to Florida where, in the spring of 1964, he won two major races, both with the famed Willie Shoemaker in the saddle.

Shoemaker, however, had doubts about the Dancer’s chances in the Kentucky Derby in 1964 and chose, instead, Hill Rise. Jockey Bill Hartack was hired for Northern Dancer and Hartack rode him to a victory in the Blue Grass Stakes two weeks before the 90th running of the Derby where he was to challenge the unbeaten Hill Rise. The Dancer not only won over the favourite but set a new record of two minutes flat for the mile and a quarter distance where such previous immortals as Whirlaway, Count Fleet and Citation had won.