Article contentRon died late last month. He’d turned 84 a month earlier. When the news that his remarkable life had ended, in the community he loved, I remembered that December day in 1989 when we fed film through a projector and watched the races in their home.Article contentArticle content Legendary jockey Ron Turcotte speaks to a full house at the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. Photo by Cole Burston /The Daily GleanerArticle contentArticle contentI’d been commissioned to write an autobiography of Ron for a publisher friend from my university days. Titled The Will To Win, the book would eventually get written, but by someone else.Article contentThe publisher – angered I spent 20 days that December co-writing a book about a serial killer in my hometown – never got over his sense of betrayal.Article contentI – who went every Sunday to Ron’s to spend the day with him despite my work on the other book – wasn’t in a forgiving mood either. We went our separate ways.Article contentBut sitting in Ron’s home that wintry day, I sat silently as the race unfolded.Article content“He’s moving like a tremendous machine!” the announcer shouted as Secretariat pulled away while rounding the far turn, the result no longer in doubt for anyone watching.Article contentArticle contentI had to know.Article content“What were you thinking when he did that?” I asked quietly, not really wanting to break the moment, but needing to know.Article contentThat’s just it, Ron said. He didn’t know. A jockey feels his horse underneath him as it runs, he explained. His hands and legs are an extension of the horse. And they were lying to him.Article contentSecretariat was destroying the field, and the race record, but he wasn’t labouring as he did it. He was flying along, controlled.Article contentAnd his jockey was worried.Article contentArticle contentArticle contentGreatest horse in historyArticle contentArticle contentRon shook his head as he watched his younger self roar around that final turn – five years before a 1978 race, at Belmont, where he fell off his horse and was left a paraplegic who lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair.Article contentRon couldn’t hear the other horses in the Triple Crown race. They HAD to be there, he knew, but he couldn’t hear them.Article contentNormally, he explained, you hear other horses behind you. He didn’t. He didn’t hear anything.Article contentArticle contentHe peeked under one armpit, then under the other. He couldn’t see anything. He knew a crafty jockey would sometimes slip his mount into the space directly behind the leader, using the thunderous sound of the frontrunner’s hooves to hide.Article contentFinally, frustrated, fearing a horse would suddenly sweep around and try to steal the race, Ron did what a jockey never does. He stood partway up in the saddle and turned to his left, looking back for whoever was there.Article contentNo one was there.Article contentRealizing he would win, he didn’t try to ease Secretariat back. Big Red was moving so beautifully, so smoothly, the jockey let him charge through the finish, giving the crowd one final chance to see what the greatest horse in history looked like at the height of its powers.Article contentRon smiled that day in his home as he watched it happen. So did I.Article contentArticle contentArticle contentArticle contentRick MacLean is retired as an instructor in the journalism program at Holland College.Article content
RICK MacLEAN: Ron Turcotte took me aboard Secretariat, for one instant
