Out Of The Woods And Into The Limelight

To Ronald Turcotte, first jockey to win the Triple Crown since Eddie Arcaro did it in 1948, the Belmont was a nice little ride in an easy chair. Turcotte loves to get aboard stakes horses. "Ninety percent of them are easier to ride than the cheaper horses," he says. "They're as determined to win as you are." He loves to ride Secretariat. ("That horse is all business.") And he especially loves to ride a horse like Secretariat in a weight-for-age stake like the Belmont, where all the horses carry 126 pounds.

The mysterious workings of genetics have made Turcotte just naturally small, though one of the brothers in his family of a dozen children stands 5'10" and weighs over 200 pounds. Ron can ride at 112 pounds without too much trouble. But to make 112 he has to ride on one of those postage-stamp saddles with a minimum of leather to protect a rider's rump. In the Belmont he used his favorite saddle, a big, heavy, cushioned contraption that weighs a full dozen pounds.

"Sitting on a regular saddle is like sitting on two rods," he says. "But the big saddle is like a sofa. It sits solid. It's very comfortable." (Since he spoke French before he learned English, he pronounces the word com-FORT-able.)

Big saddle or small, Turcotte is a man to reckon with when he gets on a horse. He never was in a saddle until he was 18 and he is not the most stylish of riders, but he gets the job done. "I may look terrible on a horse but I feel good and I think I'm with the horse," he says. "I don't try to adjust the horse to me; I adjust me to the horse."

It took an accident of nature, in the form of a long, cold winter, to make Turcotte a jockey in the first place. This was in 1959-60, when he was apparently destined to spend the rest of his life as a lumber cutter, like his father, around Grand Falls in New Brunswick, Canada.

At the time Turcotte was a good man with a chain saw and an ax. On his 5-foot frame there bulged 128 pounds of muscle; his legs, especially, were so thick they almost looked like tree trunks. He was also a good man at handling the horses that pulled the trees out of the forest and into the camps. But these were workhorses, not thoroughbreds. The nearest racing was in Montreal, more than 300 miles away, and he had never seen a horse run.

That hard winter did two things. First, it brought Turcotte's older brother Camille back home from Toronto where, when the weather was favorable, he was a roofing contractor. Second, it closed down the New Brunswick lumber camps for months. When the heavy snow still kept the camps closed into spring, Camille went back to Toronto—and Ronnie Turcotte went with him to try his hand at the roofing business.

A horse named Bess figured in his decision. Bess was the horse he had been working with. "I loved her," he recalls, "she was almost human." But during that long winter of unemployment for the whole Turcotte family his father sold Bess. Turcotte, brought up under strict French-Canadian discipline, was not exactly angry at his father because he knew the family needed the money. "But it hurt my feelings," he says. "The thought of having to work with a different horse was something I didn't like at all."

So the combination of deep snow and the sale of Bess sent Turcotte to Toronto, exhilarated by the idea of trying a new business. Alas, Toronto turned out to be in the midst of a long carpenters' strike. No carpenters, no roofs to install. Turcotte holed up in a boardinghouse and tried to figure out his next step. To an 18-year-old with only an eighth-grade education, the future did not look too bright.

On a Saturday afternoon in May, Turcotte walked downstairs from his room to pay his rent. On the TV set Venetian Way was in the process of winning the Kentucky Derby. "Maybe that is the life for you," his landlord said. "Why don't you try to get a job at the track?"