Remembering Ron Turcotte
Secretariat set a turf record for the mile-and-a-half Man o’War at Belmont. Here Elizabeth, Penny, Jack, and John lead Secretariat to the winner’s circle. From “Secretariat’s Meadow: The Land, The Family, The Legend.”
August 26, 2025
I’ve spent time the last few days celebrating, mourning, and remembering Ron. He was one of my childhood heroes. I first got to interact with him during that surreal summer and fall of 1972, when Riva Ridge had barely missed the Triple Crown and Secretariat was—even as a two-year-old—roaring past him into immortality.
It was the year my family life utterly transformed; we went from nursing our ten-year-old Chevy II wagon over Colorado’s Loveland Pass to cruising our new Mercedes 300 SEL into the valet lot at Belmont Park. The quiet, intimate center of it all was Barn 5, where soft-spoken trainer Lucien Lauren presided, and where Ron Turcotte, arms folded and feet planted wide, stood at his side, smiling with easy confidence at my mother and me.
Ron and I were the same height. We had a standing joke that if I could only stop growing I could be a jockey too. It was funny, not just because of my obvious growth spurt (I’m now 6’4”), but also because I was a privileged stripling of a lad, whereas by my age Ron had already been an apprentice lumberjack. You couldn’t really appreciate it from the race broadcasts of that era, when jockeys wore blousy silks that obscured their physiques. But Ron was an extremely strong man, and when he bulged out of a crew-neck on the backstretch, you saw the brawn to prove it.
To his dying day, Ron spoke modestly about how “easy” it was to ride Secretariat. But from my boyhood vantage, Secretariat was an immensely powerful animal, and it took the strength and confidence of a top athlete to manage him.
The deeper dynamics of those Barn 5 chats I sensed only dimly at the time, and only understood fully in retrospect. The racetrack in those days brought together every social class, from the Vanderbilts in the Trustees Room to the railbirds on the Apron. And the special appeal of what is now called the “Secretariat Team” llikewise came out of a unique convergence, a combination of talents drawn from wide gaps of culture and class.
My mother, born from Southern stock but reared in New York wealth, was in reality an Eastern heiress. But she’d learned from service in World War II and two decades as a Colorado housewife how to talk to everyone and never talk down to anyone. Ron was born and reared in the lumber camps of New Brunswick. When his small stature freed him from that calling and someone suggested he try riding racehorses, the early going was so tough that he sold bait to survive.
But by the time he met my mother, Ron had already ridden Tom Rolfe and Northern Dancer, thereby mastering the courtly dance between athletes who rode horses they didn’t own and aristocrats who owned horses they didn’t ride. Well-prepared for their respective roles, Ron and Penny – and Lucien too – put on a world-class show, fueled and inspired by Secretariat himself, a horse for all ages. For each of them, it was the role of their lives. And the nation ate it up.
After Secretariat’s Triple Crown, Ron gave me a solid gold wristwatch. It was an impossible extravagance for a boy to own, but Mom let me wear it, and I did so proudly. Kids in my school—trying to reckon how that new smartypants in English class was the same boy they’d seen interviewed on TV—would ask if I’d ever ridden Secretariat. I would answer no, and they’d act a little crestfallen.
Inwardly, though, I’d think: “Yeah, but I know Ron Turcotte,” and that was more than cool enough for me. It has been ever since.
©John Tweedy
