Every morning, the postman slips a small stack of letters into Ron Turcotte's mailbox and reignites the memories of an incandescent, brilliant past. A typical day will bring three or four letters and there are more this year than last, more last year than the year before.
"They all want to ask me about Big Red," the 63-year-old Turcotte says from his home in Drummond, N.B.
Perhaps the most famous picture in all racing has the little Canadian looking over his shoulder aboard Big Red, Secretariat, at the 1973 Belmont Stakes. He is sighting a field 31 lengths behind and no one has caught up yet.
"Thirty one lengths, and he wasn't all out," Turcotte said, the admiration still fresh in the millionth retelling. "I could have gone faster. They denied him the track record at the Preakness so this time, I let him run.
"He was a mighty horse. I don't think we'll see another one like him."
Even more remote is the likelihood of another Ron Turcotte. Like Bobby Orr, expunged by his knees from from the game at 29, Turcotte had lapped the field and was entering his prime when he was lost to his sport.
In July 1978, Turcotte was aboard a horse named Flag of Leyte Gulf at Belmont. It was his 20,309th mount since his first ride aboard Whispering Wind at the old Woodbine. Another horse veered into his horse's path. Turcotte's horse went down, whipping the 110-pound jockey into the dirt.
Two vertebrae were damaged, two more were crushed.
Turcotte was 36 and the winner of more than 3,033 races, the first jockey in 70 years to win back-to-back Kentucky Derbys. In 1972 and 1973, the little lumberjack had won five of the six Triple Crown events but now came a terrible leavening. He who had known an angel's flight would be earthbound forever.
In 26 years in the chair, Turcotte has seen his condition stay static while the words used to describe it change.
"Some people say you're handicapped, not crippled," Turcotte said. "Well, handicapped is crippled. If you can't raise your leg, you're crippled. I call them as I see it."
Turcotte quit school in Grade 9 to lumberjack for his dad. He groomed and harnessed the great work horses that pulled the giant trees from the forest. A neighbour would bring wild horses from the west for use in logging and Turcotte would ride them, hanging on to their manes until they tired.
He had never used a saddle when he left home for Toronto 45 years ago, intent on a career as a roofer. Instead he found an industry shut down by a carpenters' strike. Turcotte picked worms at night to make enough money to eat. He heard they might be hiring at the track. Twice he hitchhiked to the site but failed to talk his way past the front gate. The third time, he was picked up by a trainer running a pack of employees to the grounds.
"Everybody got their passes?" the guard at the gate said to the trainer.
"Yeah," said the trainer. Ron Turcotte had breached the kingdom.
Turcotte didn't mind being at work at 4 a.m., he was used to harnessing the horses at that hour back home. Two years after sneaking past the guard, he had graduated to the top jockey in Canada. The States was beckoning.
ACCIDENT
He bought land back home just before the accident and along with Gaetane, a local girl he married 40 winters ago, Turcotte raised four daughters.
His injuries were too profound to allow him to work in the business.
"I can't trust my body, I get bladder infections, back pains. I can't promise someone I will be somewhere because I never know if my body will let me."
He watches racing via a satellite and soon he will head to Florida and New York and Kentucky and the great tracks that once were his fiefdom.
Last summer, they put a life-sized bronze of Secretariat up at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington. The park is the final resting place of the only other horse worthy of compare to Secretariat, Man O' War. Turcotte was there for the dedication. The statue depicted Secretariat being led to the winner's circle at Churchill Downs by groom Eddie Sweat. In the irons is Ron Turcotte.
"Being immortalized on that big horse ... I'll be long gone and that bronze will still be there," said Turcotte, the little man who rode on the wings of greatness.
"That's a real honour. That's immortality."
