Trainer, colt a patient pair
By MIKE ULMER -- Toronto Sun
Eric Coatrieux's horse, Niigon, had just put him on the map with a convincing win yesterday's at the Queen's Plate and here he was being interviewed on television.
Five, six, maybe seven words would filter out before he would stop in mid-word and you sat there, waiting.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
For 60 million people in the world, there is a black hole between thought and word. Eric Coatrieux is one of those. So was Winston Churchill, so they say, and James Earl Jones the actor and Ozzie Smith, the ball player.
There is no real cure for stuttering, but there is a universal antidote.
Patience.
Many stutterers jerk their heads or lose eye contact. They blink or make a face or grimace.
It's the body's way of doing something, anything, until the blasted word or phrase finds its way home.
That's why people mistake stuttering for a mental illness.
Yesterday on television, Eric Coatrieux waited along with everyone else for his next word, as quiet as an oak on a windless day.
"When you have a speech impediment, you have to be patient," Coatrieux said later. "It's the way I am. It's the way I have to be."
Niigon, ridden home by Robert Landry, is a stamina horse of fine breeding who endured a lousy stint as a two-year-old. He couldn't break his maiden and, in Florida, finished seventh in one race and sixth in another. Coatrieux shipped him to Keeneland in Lexington, Ky., where he finished seventh in his next race, 24 lengths in arrears.
"You come to your barn in the morning and see all these expensive horses. You wonder: When are you going to get the results," Coatrieux said.
Owner Robert Kembril wondered as well.
"You know," Kembril laughed yesterday, "the trainers and jockeys give you all the excuses."
Coatrieux had wanted to enter Niigon in the Kentucky Derby. Instead, he took him north. Maybe it was the footing, maybe it was the air, but for whatever reason, Niigon found his stride about the time he cleared customs.
He won his first race, then finished a solid second to A Bit O'Gold in the Plate qualifier and went off a 6-to-1 shot from the 13th spot yesterday.
Only two other horses since the Triple Crown era started in 1959 have captured the Queen's Plate from the 13 hole. It takes perfect timing to find a good spot from which to operate, make your move at precisely the right time and hold off the field. There's a whole lot more ground to cover when you start outside.
Niigon stalked the pacesetter, took the lead late in the backstretch and then kept A Bit O' Gold at bay, leaving just enough in the tank for the stretch. The only advantage Niigon had over A Bit O'Gold was an ability to endure. It was, in the end, the only advantage that mattered.
Eric Coatrieux was born in Paris 37 years ago. His mother, Odile, taught him patience. She would wait while he fished for the words, her expression unchanged.
"My mother would just stand there and wait," he said. "She never got upset. It was okay. It was who you were."
"It was hard as a kid, hard as a teenager but there were people who didn't care. When I first came to work for Roger Attfield (1993), he would wait for as long as it took for me to get out what I wanted to say."
There are perks, Coatrieux insists. "A lot of times, I haven't said the wrong thing because it took so long to get out."
Niigon, by the way, is an Ojibway word.
It means 'for the future.'
Patience.
