50 years later: Turcotte still speaks of his love for Secretariat

It is the golden anniversary of the most famous accomplishment in the history of horse racing.

It was the spring of 1973. The spring of Secretariat.

It reached a crescendo when the big, chestnut colt was “moving like a tremendous machine” in unthinkable, record time to complete the first Triple Crown of the television era. It was a romance that galvanized American sport, that resonated in an American culture that was smack in between Vietnam and Watergate.

Jockey Ron Turcotte had a head start of more than a year.

“Believe me, it was love at first sight,” he said. “Love at first ride.”

That was in January 1972, when trainer Lucien Laurin introduced the 30-year-old jockey to the 2-year-old colt at Hialeah Park in Florida. In the next 22 months they would make the kind of history that felt then like it was once in a lifetime. A half-century later it still feels that way.

“He was everything,” Turcotte said. “Somebody said that there will never be another Triple Crown winner. But there will be another Triple Crown winner, because they were saying the same thing when we went 25 years. There will always be Triple Crown winners.”

After Secretariat ended the quarter-century wait since Citation’s 1948 sweep of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, and long after he shattered track records with performances that have stood the test of all this time, Turcotte would have none of the statement that Secretariat was maybe the greatest racehorse of all time.

“There’s not too many maybes there,” he said before he declared, “Definitely.”

From snow to sunshine

Eddie Sweat, 58, Secretariat’s hard-working groom, died in 1998. Laurin, 88, in 2000. Breeder-owner Penny Chenery, 95, passed away in 2017. Big Red himself preceded them all, euthanized in 1989 at age 19 after he got laminitis.

Turcotte, 81, is the lone survivor among Secretariat’s most prominent connections.

When Turcotte answered the telephone last month at his house in his native New Brunswick, Canada, the calendar said it was the first week of spring. The stubborn climate of the Maritimes suggested otherwise.

“In the snow country,” he told Horse Racing Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod. “I was born here. I went to school here. Then I worked in lumber for five years before I moved to Ontario and got lucky there.”

That was where Turcotte, the third oldest of 12 brothers and sisters, caught on first as an exercise rider and then as a jockey. And a good one. As a bug boy 60 summers ago, he rode the debut win on Northern Dancer, who went on to become one of the greatest stallions of all time.

Within a few years, Turcotte connected with Laurin, a fellow Canadian from Québec who worked as a jockey in the 1930s before beginning a 45-year training career in the northeast U.S. during World War II.

“We had done a lot of fishing together,” Turcotte said. “We’re both fishermen, and we got together in ’67 and ’68. Those were the two best years that Lucien and I had in Florida. When he came north, he picked up some other horses from some other stables. They had their own riders, so I told Lucien that I wasn’t going to just school horses for other riders or go work horses for somebody else in the morning.”

Laurin took Turcotte with him and embedded him in the New York jockey colony. Laurin was pushing 60 and was pretty much retired when his son Roger recommended him for some part-time training at the struggling Virginia stable where he had been working. That was when Laurin and Turcotte were introduced to the Chenerys and their Meadow Stable.

The rising stars of 1972

A year before Secretariat, Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes. He lost the Preakness when rain turned the Pimlico track into slop he did not like. That unrequited Triple Crown of 1972 established the team of Meadow, Laurin and Turcotte just as their new star was about to rise.

That first ride Turcotte had on Secretariat came four months before Riva Ridge won the Derby.

“I asked Lucien, ‘Who is that pretty boy you’ve got here?’ ” Turcotte said. “He told me, ‘He’s a Bold Ruler. Too good-looking to be true.’ Then we went to see Riva Ridge. ... He asked me if I was ready to go to work. I said yes. I got my boots on. He said, ‘All right. Put your tack next to that pretty boy and tell me what you think about him.’”

As Bill Nack wrote in his seminal 1975 book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, Turcotte slowly galloped the ever-growing 2-year-old in company with three other colts “almost lackadaisically.”

Turcotte’s memory 51 years later was more upbeat.

“He was so beautiful to ride, gallop,” he said. “He didn’t shy from anything. ... At that time he was still carrying a little baby fat, but he was still very good to gallop and all that the first time I got on him.”

An injury and another commitment kept Turcotte from riding Secretariat’s first two races. Once they got together, it was magic.

“Coming out of the gate I never rushed him,” Turcotte said. “I let him take his time, and he’d come from way back.”

They finished first in all seven of their starts in 1972, although one resulted in a disqualification. No matter. Secretariat would become the first 2-year-old in two decades to be named horse of the year.

Riva Ridge might have come up a wet track short of being the chosen one, but Meadow Stable had the horse who was about to put that frustrating memory out of sight. And Turcotte was about to be along for the ride.

False rumors and a race-day nap

In Australia the word is unbackable. It means a horse whose odds are so short that it makes little sense to lay a big bet to get a tiny profit in return. By the time he began his 3-year-old season, Secretariat was unbackable, returning no more than 60 cents on a $2 win bet for eight consecutive races.

The last of those came two weeks before the Kentucky Derby in the 1973 Wood Memorial, where Secretariat and Angle Light were a coupled 3-10 favorite. Inexplicably, Secretariat finished third to his stablemate, inspiring what might have been the most grousing ever heard at Aqueduct from successful bettors.

It is no secret now that Secretariat had developed a painful abscess behind his upper lip. Nobody knew it on race day, though. Decades before social media, the grapevine of rumors about the horse’s fitness was in full flower.

“Especially after I worked him the following Saturday,” Turcotte said. “I didn’t like the way he went. I had flown down to Kentucky to work him. I had to go back (to New York), and I ran into Dr. (Manuel) Gilman. Dr. Gilman asked me if I had worked the horse. I said yes. He said, ‘How’d he go?’ I said, ‘Something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is. He hits the ground good. He’s sound, but there’s something wrong.’ ”

That was when Gilman, a groundbreaking racetrack veterinarian who died in 2011 at age 91, revealed the problem to Turcotte.

“He said, ‘Did the abscess come to a head?’ I said, ‘What abscess?’ ” Turcotte said. “That’s when I found out about the abscess. Had I known before, if Lucien would have told me before, I’d have rode him with a looser rein. He wouldn’t have been pulling his head, and I think he sure would have won.”

Amid the churn of rumors, the abscess sounded to skeptical bettors like one more excuse. Secretariat was not unbackable in the Kentucky Derby. He still was favored, but he and Angle Light went off at 3-2, which looks now like the overlay of the century. Or at least the half-century.

On race day, May 5, 1973, Turcotte did something a little different when he arrived at the Churchill Downs jockeys room. Rather than prepare for rides on the undercard, Nack wrote, Turcotte took a nap.

All these years later, Turcotte said it was not so much that he was oblivious to all the pressure. It was about a local racing regulation.

“They had a rule in Kentucky that if you went down in a race, you were taken off for the balance of the day,” he said. “Therefore, if I get on a horse and he stumbles, he gets shut off and goes down or something, I automatically couldn’t have rode in the Derby.”

Turcotte said he got first-hand knowledge of the rule riding the previous spring at Keeneland.

“A horse died after we won,” he said. “He dropped dead of a heart attack or something. My foot was stuck in the iron. It took me a little while to get loose. When I got on the scale, the clerk of the scale told me I was off. I couldn’t ride the rest of the day.”

That was the afternoon Riva Ridge raced in the Blue Grass Stakes. Turcotte said he practically had to beg to keep the mount.

“Only after telling the stewards what exactly happened, and that I was fine, and first aid had told them I was fine,” Turcotte said, “I got to ride Riva Ridge.”

That ride was a winner, but the experience made Turcotte less willing to take any chances that he would not get to be paired with the horse of the year in the 1973 Derby.

Bad timing for a rival

The 2010 movie “Secretariat” played up the rivalry with Sham, the California-based horse who won the Santa Anita Derby in a time that still stands as a stakes record. He also finished second in the Wood Memorial, ahead of Big Red.

The film made Sham’s trainer Pancho Martín out to be a mouthy villain, but contemporaries do not remember him that way. On the contrary, Turcotte had nothing but glowing things to say this spring about the horse who finished second to Secretariat in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness.

“Oh, he was a great horse,” Turcotte said, his voice turning wistful at the thought of him. “Sham was a great horse, and any other year he’d have won the Triple Crown. He was breaking records right alongside me. I would break the track record, and Sham also broke the track record.”

Sham was the 5-2 second choice in the Derby, and he finished 2 1/2 lengths behind Secretariat, clearly the best of the rest of the field. Secretariat’s time was 1:59.4, still a Derby record. If a length is roughly equivalent to one-fifth of a second, then Sham’s time was 1:59.85, still the second-best ever.

After a fortnight dealing with the abscess and the rumors and the disappointment of the Wood Memorial, the way Secretariat disposed of his West Coast rival convinced Turcotte that the toughest challenge was behind him. He said as much to Laurin and Chenery.

“I said it’s downhill from here on, because he came back good, and he looked fit and ready to run,” Turcotte said. “I knew that he had a lot of speed, and I could use him whenever I wanted.”

That led Turcotte to do something different May 19 in the 1973 Preakness. For only the second time in his 14 races to that point in his career, Secretariat was taken forward early.

“Remember the Preakness, where I made that bold move around the first turn?” Turcotte asked before recounting a since-disproven myth about Pimlico. “They were afraid about the turns. I said, ‘Don’t worry about the turns. They’re the same as Kentucky.’ When I went to drop in, the other horses were trying to slow down the pace, so I just let him run by every horse around the first turn. When I hit the back side, I actually delayed and controlled the race the rest of the way.”

Secretariat, who was the 3-10 favorite, and Sham, the 3-1 second choice, finished one-two again. And again the margin was 2 1/2 lengths. Thanks to a clocking mistake that day, it would take 39 years and a dose of updated technology for the Maryland Racing Commission to rule the winning time was 1:53.0, still a record. Sham’s time of 1:53.45 still would be faster than that of all but five Preakness winners.

He knew how fast

The images of Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes victory were tattooed in the memories of any racing fan who watched it unfold June 9, 1973. The perfectly long stride that never changed. The ever-lengthening lead that tested the limits of the CBS TV cameras. The head-shaking fractions that suggested insanity before they confirmed greatness.

The three weeks before that indelible tour de force were frenetically endless, what with TV and radio coverage everywhere and cover photos on Sports Illustrated and Time and Newsweek, media affirmations that seem so anachronistic now.

The pressure was intense. These 50 years later Turcotte sounded like the quintessence of calm, because Secretariat looked so good in morning training. If Turcotte had his way, Big Red might have taken on one more race before the Belmont.

“I was hoping (Laurin) would run him in the Jersey Derby,” Turcotte said, “but when I mentioned that, Lucien said, ‘Don’t mention that again.’ ”

The Jersey Derby was sandwiched nine days after the Preakness and 12 days before the Belmont. Knightly Dawn, who had tangled with Sham in California, won the race in the slop at Garden State Park. It was a different era when it was not such a big deal to run horses back that quickly, but Laurin was not biting.

“I told him that (Secretariat) was going to work faster than the Jersey Derby would be run,” Turcotte said. “As it turned out he was working faster than the horses running in the afternoon, so I was very, very confident that he was going to win the Belmont.”

Onlookers thought Secretariat appeared calm before the 1 1/2-mile test of the champion. Maybe too calm. Turcotte said that might have been a case of the horse feeding off the vibe of the rider.

“Oh, he was good,” he said. “I was just relaxed. When you’re relaxed on a horse, the horse will be relaxing with you. If you’re nervous, the horse will get nervous. I wasn’t nervous at all. First of all I knew he was fit, and the distance didn’t matter to us.”

In 50 years Turcotte has been asked thousands of times about that race. Reporters have tried countless ways to try to frame the memory differently. This time the question was whether this was the greatest run by a horse whose jockey was sitting chilly.

“I would believe that. I believe so,” Turcotte said. “I was going to stay second or third, but when we hit the first turn, I’d see the other jocks take a hold of their horses. So I just dropped to the rail and let him run.”

Sham tried to keep up, but he withered to finish last against the impossible fractions of 23.6, 46.2, 1:09.8, 1:34.2, 1:59.0 and, finally, the winning time of 2:24.0. And the mind-boggling margin of 31 lengths. Those last two numbers are to racing what .406 and 762 are to baseball.

“I knew exactly what I was doing,” Turcotte said. It was an answer that might as well be his mantra. “My horse was running beautifully, very relaxed. He was long-striding. He was so easy. He was breathing beautifully under me. I had no worries at all in the Belmont.”

Legendary photographer Bob Coglianese captured a famous image from his infield camera of Turcotte looking to his left at the clock on the toteboard to forever gauge Secretariat’s greatness. Turcotte has told that story time and again.

Less well-known is what happened about a minute after a quarter-century of the sport’s Triple Crown frustration had been wiped away in front of 69,138 fans at Belmont Park and 15 million people watching on TV. Amid the gleeful maelstrom, it was a conversation between two men down by the clubhouse turn.

“The outrider pulled up alongside me,” Turcotte said. “He says, ‘Do you know how fast you were running?’ I said, ‘Yeah, 2:24 flat.’ He says, ‘What?’ I said, ‘2:24 flat.’ He says, ‘Unbelievable.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you got that right. How did you know?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a clock in my head.’ I was kidding. Then I told him that I sort of watched the clock stop on the infield board.”

Count that as the first of thousands of stories Turcotte was asked to tell after Secretariat made history worth celebrating all over again 50 years later.

Still building a legacy

Turcotte’s time nowadays is focused on his four daughters and five grandchildren and his beloved Gaetane, to whom he has been married for going on 58 years.

“She doesn’t feel that great,” Turcotte said, “but we’re managing. The kids are coming around now. The kids come in and help.”

The ups and downs have been many since 1973. Turcotte’s career ended in the summer of 1978, when he was paralyzed in a fall at Belmont Park. He was hurt again in 2015 in a snowy accident driving near his home in New Brunswick.

But he is not just a survivor. Turcotte has spent a lot of years staying in public view. He has made appearances to sign autographs, meet fans and reminisce about Secretariat. Those meet-and-greets have gone a long way toward raising money and awareness for the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund.

In his hometown, there are very visible reminders of Turcotte’s Hall of Fame career.

“In Grand Falls here, first they named a bridge after me,” he said, referring to a span built in 1976 that crosses the Saint John River. “Then they put up a statue, a monument to finishing the Belmont and winning by 31 lengths.”

There are at least six Secretariat statues across North America, the newest of which is on a Triple Crown tour this year before it is placed this summer on its permanent pedestal in Virginia. There is also a locally famous mural of Turcotte and Big Red on the side of a brick building in downtown Lexington, Ky.

For anyone who is, say, 60 or older, they are reminders of a five-week snapshot that has faded only slightly from its vivid, original tones. For everyone else who is younger, the statues and mural and bridge and ongoing tributes may bring to life a story that stands out from so many dusty fragments of history.

Turcotte’s grandchildren are aware of his legacy. Not so much through the monuments, he said, but with modern technology.

“They’re all on the phone now and YouTube,” Turcotte said. “They know a lot. They’re proud of their grandpa, yeah.”

__________