Otto's Prophecy

A couple of years ago, the jockey Otto Thorwarth was a member of Vevay Assembly Church, a small congregation in a small Indiana town about an hour's drive from Cincinnati. It was not uncommon, Thorwarth says, for the clergy at the church to be visited by God with prophecies for various members of the faithful. An associate pastor, Bob Morgan, told Thorwarth that he had heard from upstairs that Thorwarth was going "to ride a champion, sometime in the next two years." Thorwarth had seen other prophecies at the church come true, and he believed. "But what I thought it meant was that I might wind up with a Kentucky Derby horse," he said.

Thorwarth, 40, has been riding at mainly small circuits in the Midwest since 1991. He's accumulated close to 1,500 wins, but has never ridden in the Kentucky Derby, before or after the prophecy. Who knew? Thorwarth's champion turned out to be a movie version of a horse who's been dead since 1989. Playing the part of Ron Turcotte, in the first acting he's ever done, he rode the horses who played Secretariat in the new movie of the same name. Now Otto Thorwarth is an ex-jockey, waiting by the phone for his next screen role.