12/14/2025
Ron Turcotte started riding thoroughbreds at age nineteen, after he hitchhiked from Toronto to nearby Woodbine Race Course. Someone picked him up at the stable gate and deposited him that morning at the barn of Edward Plunkett Taylor’s Windfield Farm. He walked in and got a job working as a hot walker for a month, cooling out horses after exercise, then grooming for a time. He finally went to Taylor’s farm and learned to break yearlings under tack. He was on his way to becoming one of America’s leading riders, but he had had an unlikely beginning.
Turcotte was born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, on July 22, 1941, one of fourteen children supported by a lumberjack in the small community of Davis Mill, in the New Brunswick parish of Drummond. While growing up, he saw his father infrequently. Alfred Turcotte spent many weeks of his summers lumbering in the woods. Ron left school in the eighth grade, to help support the family when their home burned down. He harvested potatoes and went to work as a lumberjack himself. He cut trees and hauled logs behind a team of horses and worked in a lumber mill. When he was eighteen, with a purse of fifty dollars saved, he went to Toronto to look for a job in construction. He was lonely and still looking, in fact, when his Toronto landlord told him he should try riding the runners at Woodbine. So he hitched that ride out of town.
He was extremely powerful, and he learned to use his strength to push and bounce a racehorse through the lane.
So he became known as one of the strongest riders in the game, steady and durable, and he earned early on a reputation for honesty, as a rider who would scrub and shove as hard with a $5000 claimer as with a stakes horse like Riva Ridge. He rode his first winner in 1962, two years later his first stakes winner. In 1965, he won the Preakness Stakes on Tom Rolfe. He rode Northern Dancer, too, and champions Arts and Letters, Fort Marcy, Damascus, Dark Mirage, and Shuvee in the years leading up and down to Riva Ridge. Yet Turcotte remained, despite the wealth and fame his riding brought him, utterly without pretensions. He never forgot that he grew up poor. When he made a name in riding in America, he returned to Canada, married a girl he’d known from childhood—G*etane Morin—and bought a three-bedroom suburban split level in Valley Stream, Long Island. They had three kids and a Datsun station wagon; he came home at night, and G*e fixed him dinner.
Turcotte had been earning almost $200,000 a year even before he rode Riva Ridge. The horses he rode won $1,904,175 in 1970 and $1,989,306 in 1971. His finest year was 1972, when he was riding both Secretariat and Riva Ridge. His mounts earned $2,780,626, a figure that made him the third leading jockey in America in money won.
