Word: jockey
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Silent Movie. Cars come and go down the roadway-trainers on their errands, exercise boys and jockey agents going from barn to barn, owners arriving to see their horses work out. But the cars move slowly, with scarcely a sound, partly because this is the code of racetrackers, partly because those unfamiliar with the code find their progress slowed by high bumps built into the roads and a succession of signs that read YIELD: HORSE CROSSING...
When he won the first leg of the Triple Crown at Churchill Downs in May, Secretariat set more than a Kentucky Derby speed record. He also wrote the names of Owner-Breeder Helen ("Penny") Tweedy, Trainer Lucien Laurin and Jockey Ron Turcotte into the books. It was the first time that the same triumvirate had saddled two consecutive Derby winners...
...only thing that scared Lucien Laurin as a struggling jockey out of Montreal was his spreading waistline. After twelve indifferent years of trying to overcome his appetite and mediocre mounts, he turned to horse training in New England. Laurin soon won a reputation for nursing sore-legged horses back to good form. After training such winners as Quill, the champion two-year-old filly of 1958, and Amberoid, winner of the 1966 Belmont Stakes, he joined A.B. ("Bull") Hancock's Claiborne Farm. On one memorable afternoon in 1969, he saddled Claiborne's Dike to win the Wood Memorial...
...chubby little French-Canadian has very set ideas about letting horses have their heads. "I may not have been a top jockey," he says, "but I've never believed in fighting horses, trying to change the way they want to run. I lost a lot of races when I was a jock taking orders from people who didn't know anything about their horses." At 61, Laurin says that "I've no thought of retirement." He is in fact looking enthusiastically to the future. "I've got a half brother to Secretariat and a half brother...
Turcotte rode his first race as an apprentice jockey in 1961. The following year, he posted 180 victories to become Canada's top jockey. The muscular little rider moved to the U.S. in 1964, and has guided his mounts to more than $1,000,000 in total purses every year since. Last year his 10% share of his horses' winnings came to $278,000. Now a rock-hard 112 Ibs., he credits his wife Gaetane's calorie-conscious cooking with helping him to keep slim. His old lumberjack's breakfast menu of eggs, flapjacks, beans, meat...