Jockey Ron Turcotte, the last living connection to the great racehorse Secretariat, died recently in New Brunswick, Canada, at the age of 84. For a generation of people, Secretariat was the super horse that got them hooked on the sport of kings. A friend of mine became a lifelong fan after climbing a telephone pole to catch a glimpse of Secretariat winning the Kentucky Derby. Disney even made a successful Hollywood film about the horse some called Big Red.
Super horse is not an exaggeration. Secretariat’s heart was one and a half times larger than that of other horses and could pump 30% more blood than his competitors. If you’ve ever run, biked, or skied, you know that when you push beyond a certain point, your legs get wobbly. Your muscles are still strong, but your blood can’t get oxygen there fast enough, and your legs give out.
In horse racing, pace makes the race. That is, it distributes energy evenly enough to remain competitive from start to finish without fading: from early speed to gain position, to rating during the heart of the race, to acceleration for a strong close. There are horses who can and those who can’t. Secretariat could and did go strong the whole way. When Ron took off in the backstretch at the Belmont Stakes, he thought there were fans out there who wanted to shoot him for moving too early. They feared the horse would fade. He didn’t.
Ron Turcotte was blessed enough to be along for the ride. To his dying day, despite ending up in a wheelchair later in his career, he was one of the best spokesmen the sport ever had. There is a famous picture of Ron looking back, 31 lengths ahead of the competition, as he broke the mile and a half track record for the Belmont Stakes: stunning achievements on both counts. Other jockeys sometimes try to emulate that picture when they have a big lead in a major race. In Ron’s case, there were no other horses in the stretch with him! Secretariat’s records in each leg of the Triple Crown still stand.
Paralyzed in a race at Belmont Park in 1978, Ron knew the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in the sport. When I recently ran the gauntlet of animal rights protesters at the track, I wondered why the risk to horses was given a higher priority than the risk to the men and women who ride these magnificent thoroughbreds.
Recently, a family member, in her attempt to work the new word she had learned in school into a conversation, said I was being garrulous, meaning that I was talking too much. Nice 50-cent word. Well, when Ron Turcotte and I got talking about racing and life… well, an hour could pass like a minute. The only time I think I agitated Ron was a few years ago. Lucien Lauren, Secretariat’s trainer, thought the world of his horse, as did Penny Chenery, his owner. After the record-breaking Belmont win, Lucien joked that maybe Ron should have kept going and lapped the field. But I asked Lucien once what Secretariat was really like. He said, People think all kinds of nice things about him. And that is true. But he could be a mean horse.
Yep, top thoroughbreds know they are alpha stars and can be high-strung at times. I didn’t think I was speaking out of school when I mentioned this in passing to Ron. I’d touched a nerve. Ron was upset. “Lucien said that!” Ron said. “How could he say that. He was not a mean horse.” I guess he and Lucien had never discussed this topic, and suddenly Ron was once again the young man riding his beloved horse. Trainers sometimes call jockeys pin heads. But this time, the jockey was sticking the pin into the trainer. Who’s right? Well, that’s what makes a horse race.
Ron came from a French-Canadian lumberjacking family of 12 children. When work dried up, he and one of his brothers moved to Toronto to find jobs. His luck went from bad to worse. When he could no longer pay the rent at the rooming house, the landlord gave him a job lead. The brothers ended up working as part of a crew scouring fields in the middle of the night with flashlights, tin cans strapped to their legs, in search of fishermen’s worms.
Not long after, back at the rooming house, Ron saw his landlord getting worked up about something on TV. A local Canadian horse was in the Kentucky Derby. At one point, the landlord quipped that Ron was small enough to be a jockey.
“What’s a jockey?” Ron asked.
“He’s the little guy in white pants,” the landlord said.
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Well, wearing white pants would be better than hunting for worms, so Ron and his brother made their way to the track looking for work. After managing to get past backstretch security, Ron immediately got a job as a hot walker, and his brother got a job as a cook, slinging hash. Eventually, there would be four Turcottes racing in Toronto. A large family with small kids paid off for the sport of kings. Ron went from walking horses to cool them down after races to winning stakes races in the United States with the likes of Riva Ridge and Secretariat.
In the charity of your prayers, please pray for the repose of Ron’s soul and for his family: his wife of 60 years, Gaëtane, and his four daughters, Lynn, Ann, Tina, and Tammy, as well as his grandchildren. Their public statement summed up his life well: “The world may remember Ron as the famous jockey of Secretariat, but to us he was a wonderful husband, a loving father, grandfather, and a great horseman.”
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