Ron Turcotte, a champion jockey who made racing history when he piloted the great Secretariat to resounding victories in all three Triple Crown races in 1973, died on Friday at his home in Drummond, New Brunswick. He was 84.
Leonard Lusky, his longtime business partner, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause. Turcotte had used a wheelchair since being paralyzed in a racing accident in 1978.
Before his triumph riding Secretariat, Turcotte (pronounced tur-COTT) had already put his stamp on the Triple Crown. He rode Tom Rolfe to victory in the Preakness Stakes in 1965 and, the year before Secretariat’s triumph, won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes aboard Riva Ridge, whose bid for the Triple Crown was stymied when he encountered a muddy track in the Preakness Stakes and finished fourth.
Secretariat, a big coppery chestnut nicknamed Big Red who, like Riva Ridge, was owned by Penny Chenery of Meadow Stable and trained by Lucien Laurin, made up for that disappointment in spectacular fashion. He powered to victory in the Derby and the Preakness, setting track records that still stand. He then demolished the competition in the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948.
Secretariat’s Belmont remains one of the most celebrated performances in racing history. Under Turcotte’s supremely confident handling, he cruised by the competition on the backstretch, “moving like a tremendous machine” in the famous race call by Chic Anderson, then drew off to win by an astounding 31 lengths. He broke the track record set by Gallant Man in 1957 by just under three seconds — the equivalent of 13 lengths — and set a new world record for the mile-and-a-half distance on the dirt, one that still stands and has never been approached.
“He was a superstrong horse, superintelligent — you name it, he had it,” Turcotte told The New York Times in 2013. “He was great every which way you can think of. There’s nothing that any horse had over him. Every time he was right, he never got beat.”
Ronald Joseph Morel Turcotte was born on July 22, 1941, in Drummond, New Brunswick, where his father, Albert, worked as a lumberjack. His mother, Rose (Devost) Turcotte, stayed home raising their 12 children, of whom Ron was the third, in a farmhouse with no central heating or running water. The family spoke French at home.
At 14, Ron dropped out of school to work alongside his father. Because he was too small to wield an ax or saw — he stood 5-foot-1 and weighed 130 pounds — he was put in charge of the horses that hauled the timber out of the forest, valuable training for his future profession.
“My father taught me to be patient with horses,” Turcotte told the newspaper Le Forum in 2001. “He taught me how to give horses confidence.”
When his father sold his favorite workhorse for badly needed cash, Turcotte headed to Toronto with $50 in his pocket, hoping to find construction work. An industry strike spoiled that plan, so he hunted for worms and night crawlers to sell as bait, earning barely enough to cover the rent at his rooming.
One afternoon, prepared to admit defeat and go back home, he sat down with his landlord, who was watching the 1960 Kentucky Derby on television. Commenting on Turcotte’s size, he asked him if he had ever thought about being a jockey.
“What’s a jockey?” Turcotte asked.
“He’s the little guy in white pants,” his landlord said.
Turcotte hitchhiked to Woodbine Racetrack, outside Toronto, and got a foot in the door at the powerful Windfields Farms stable. He started at the bottom, walking horses to cool them down after races and then working as a groom. “I enjoyed it,” he told an interviewer for the 2013 documentary “Secretariat’s Jockey: Ron Turcotte.” “To me, it was a picnic around the racetrack. It was much easier than cutting lumber.”
One of Canada’s top trainers, Gordon Huntley, liked the way Turcotte handled horses and put him on the path to become an apprentice jockey. Turcotte learned quickly.
He began riding professionally in 1961, won his first race at Fort Erie Race Track in Ontario the next year and finished 1962 at the top of the jockey standings with 180 wins. In 1963, he won more than 200 races, again finishing at the top of the standings. Setting his sights higher, he began riding in Maryland — so successfully that, within a few months, he moved to the New York circuit, where the purses were larger and the competition keener.
In 1965, he married Gaetane Morin, who grew up on the farm next to his. She survives him, as do their four daughters, Lynn, Ann, Tina and Tammy; four brothers, Aurèle, Albert, Gaétan and Yves; two sisters. Camilla and Odette; and five grandchildren.
Turcotte was known as a cool, daring rider with an uncanny knack for getting the most out of his horses.
He devised a special training regimen for Riva Ridge, a balletic horse fearful of being crowded by the competition. To toughen him up, Turcotte instructed exercise riders to move in on the horse during workouts, then back off when the animal became too anxious. Gradually, the horse learned to hold his own in a crowd.
Turcotte was regarded as a skillful tactician whose gambles usually paid off. In the 1973 Preakness, sensing a slow early pace, he made an electrifying early move that put the race away.
“I went from last to first in a quarter of a mile on the first turn,” he told Bill Heller, his collaborator on the book “The Will to Win: Ron Turcotte’s Ride to Glory” (1992). “That’s unheard of. That is the proudest move in my racing career.”
In the Belmont, racing fans and Secretariat’s own training team watched with dismay as Turcotte put Secretariat in the thick of a heated pace that seemed impossible to sustain for a mile and a half. “I guess I was the coolest one of them all because I knew what I had under me,” he told one interviewer.
After the Triple Crown season, Turcotte, who rode Secretariat for all but three of his 21 races, continued riding in New York, where he routinely finished among the top jockeys in total wins each year.
Overall, he won 3,032 races and more than $28 million in purse money riding some of the greatest horses in North America, including Northern Dancer, Arts and Letters, Damascus, Fort Marcy and Shuvee, and winning dozens of prestigious races.
On July 13, 1978, his career came to an abrupt end. His horse, Flag of Leyte Gulf, clipped heels with a rival in the eighth race at Belmont Park and went down suddenly, sending Turcotte headfirst onto the track. Several vertebrae of his back were crushed “to powder,” he told The Times, and for the rest of his life remained paralyzed from the waist down.
He was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1979.
After the accident, he returned to New Brunswick, where he built a house in Grand Falls, not far from Drummond, and planted thousands of trees on a 220-acre farm. He became a prominent spokesman and fund-raiser for charities aiding injured jockeys and other victims of spinal injuries.
“I have so many good memories,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1992. “I’m very lucky. Who could say he wasn’t proud to ride the greatest horse who ever lived?”
Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.
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