A legendary horseman

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, December 30th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a horse-racing legend who became an advocate for the disabled.

The sports world said goodbye this year to figures who defined entire eras—icons in the ring, on the field, and behind the microphone.

Professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan, whose later years included a strong Christian testimony. Beloved baseball broadcaster Bob Uecker. NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Hall-of-Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg. Basketball great Lenny Wilkens. And heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, who went on to become a Christian minister.

REICHARD: Today, we focus on one name whose place in sports history is also secure: Ron Turcotte, the jockey who rode Secretariat to a Triple Crown victory in 1973.

WORLD’s Jenny Rough has his story.

RACE CALLER: They’re at the post, all standing well as we wait for the start.

JENNY ROUGH: May 5th, 1973. The Kentucky Derby. Jockey Ron Turcotte anticipated breaking out of the stall with Secretariat, the favored horse.

RACE CALLER: Secretariat throws his head a bit. And they’re off!

But Turcotte and Secretariat were last out of the starting gate. Secretariat’s style was to advance from behind. By the final stretch of the mile-and-a-quarter race, everything had changed. Turcotte leaned forward.

RACE CALLER: Ron Turcotte uses the right-handed whip twice.

He chirped into Secretariat’s ear, a signal to run faster.

RACE CALLER: Secretariat on the outside to take the lead. At the wire it’s going to be Secretariat. He wins it! Secretariat just broke the old Kentucky Derby record.

That record still stands. Two weeks later, Turcotte rode Secretariat to victory in the Preakness. And three weeks after that, the Belmont Stakes, where he won by a jaw-dropping 31 lengths. Those records still stand, too. The Triple Crown victory shot the jockey to international fame.

Ron Turcotte, affectionately known as Ronnie, was born on July 22nd, 1941, in Canada. The third of twelve children. He dropped out of 8th grade to work as a lumberjack with his dad.

JOCELYN RUSSELL: And so he handled the big horses that they would chain up the logs to and drag them out. So he was very good with horses.

That’s artist Jocelyn Russell, who sculpted a monument of Turcotte riding Secretariat.

RUSSELL: But he didn’t know much about racing.

At 18, Turcotte left home to find better work in Toronto. Here’s audio of an interview with him from the documentary Secretariat’s Jockey:

RON TURCOTTE: The landlord asked me, “Why don’t you try the racetrack?” He says, “You look small enough to be a jockey.” I said, “What’s a jockey?” He says, “The little boys in the white pants.”

Turcotte was five feet one inch. He started as a hot walker at Windfields Farm, cooling down horses after their workout.

SOUND: [Bugle call]

He began racing in 1961 and quickly became Canada’s champion jockey. In 1963, he moved to the United States to compete. Two years later, he married his childhood sweetheart and together they had four daughters.

After Turcotte moved to the States, trainer Lucien Laurin connected him to the Chenery Family. They owned Meadow Stable, a prestigious racing operation in Central Virginia.

LEEANNE LADIN: This was his particular stall. The colt showing the most promise got this stall.

Leeanne Ladin gives tours there.

Secretariat's stablemate was a horse named Riva Ridge. And Turcotte was instrumental in Riva’s success, too. Riva was afraid of other horses on the track.

LADIN: And Ronnie asked Lucien Laurin, could he take some extra time with Riva? And jockeys don’t usually do this, to get him to overcome his fear of other horses. So they would gallop three abreast with Riva in the middle, and do some bumping and all of like that. And Ronnie cured Riva of that fear.

But Riva didn’t run well on the muddy track at the Preakness in 1972, and that cost them the Triple Crown. Secretariat could run on anything. Here’s Turcotte in the documentary Big Red’s Last Race:

TURCOTTE: When he runs, he runs so fast, it’s like piloting a jet, you just push the accelerator and he goes on. I don’t think bad conditions will affect the horse at all. He’s always impressed me that he would run on broken bottles.

Sculptor Russell said when Turcotte raced Secretariat he’d pull the bit back in the horse’s mouth.

RUSSELL: So what we would think of “Whoa!” — it was, “Go!”

LEONARD LUSKY: That is a real intuitive thing between horse and rider.

That’s Leonard Lusky. He became Turcotte’s business partner and friend.

LUSKY: And I don’t know that any other jockey would have figured that out with Secretariat in time. They got each other.

Turcotte won over 3,000 races. He once said he was never scared of dying—only of becoming paralyzed. In a 1978 race, Turcotte’s horse clipped heels with another, catapulting Turcotte over the horse’s head.

LUSKY: The worst part of a spill is getting hit by the trailing horses, because you can really get damaged. He seemed to avoid that, so people at first thought, oh, this doesn’t look too bad.

Turcotte explained what happened:

TURCOTTE: My legs were crossed, something like, you know I saw my legs twisted, and I went to straighten them out. And when I touched my legs it was like I was touching someone else’s legs.

He was 38. He never walked or raced again. Lusky said Turcotte relied on his faith.

LUSKY: His faith undoubtedly was the pillar to so much of his success, I think both before and after the accident.

Russell agrees.

RUSSELL: He was a very strong believer and it echoed through everything he did and said throughout his life.

He lived with incredible pain. But he said—

TURCOTTE: I just thank God every time I open my eyes every morning.

Turcotte began working with other injured jockeys.

LUSKY: He became a big advocate for the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund. It’s an organization that funds disabled riders because riders are not employees. They don’t get insurance and so forth, so there are many riders who when they’re injured, I mean, their lives are over, basically, for the working part. So this was a group he was very passionate about.

He became the face of the organization, which gave him a new purpose, counseling hurt jockeys and encouraging the healthy riders.

Lusky describes Turcotte as optimistic.

LUSKY: When my little boys were young, probably 2 and 3, and he would come to the house. They would say, Can we go for a roller coaster ride? Because they didn’t know really what a wheelchair was. And he’d put them on his lap and they’d climb all over him. He was just so kind that way. He really was one of my favorite people in life.

Ron Turcotte died on August 22nd at age 84.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough.

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