Lucien Laurin
Secretariat's Hall of Fame Trainer
Trainer Lucien Laurin was the most enigmatic member of the Secretariat team...
While owner Penny Chenery and jockey Ron Turcotte talked easily with the press and public, Laurin typically avoided the spotlight, keeping his mind on the business of training horses. A former jockey himself, Laurin had grown up on the bush tracks of Canada, then made it big on the biggest racing stage in New York. He didn’t give away any secrets about training racehorses, including his part in bringing out the greatness of Secretariat.
It wasn’t as if Laurin didn’t speak. He wasn’t as silent as "Silent Tom Smith," trainer of Seabiscuit, nor as famously closed-mouthed as Frank Whitely, trainer of Damascus. But he followed a long-established turf tradition of holding your cards close to the vest. A reporter with an open notebook at Laurin’s barn didn’t hear much to use in a newspaper column. But you could get an idea.
First of all, Penny Chenery [then Tweedy] trusted Lucien Laurin. That says a lot right there. When Chenery was suddenly forced to take over the failing fortunes of Meadow Stable from her ailing father, Christopher Chenery, she needed a trainer she could count on. Someone who could accurately evaluate the horses in the stable, train them correctly, and help her navigate a complex sport. She needed an inside advocate in an insider’s game. And Laurin was just that person.
And it worked the same way for the trainer. Laurin, then 59, had been all set to retire when the Chenery job came along. Lucien’s son Roger Laurin had recently taken over as trainer of the Chenery family’s Meadow Stable horses, but now was leaving to train for the Phipps family and Wheatley Stable, considered the No. 1 outfit in the sport. The son recommended his father.
It was no small matter to ask Lucien Laurin to cancel retirement plans to orchestrate a turnaround in the fortunes of a high-profile stable that had fallen on hard times. Just as the owner needed a trainer she could trust, so, too, the trainer needed an owner who would back his play. And that was Penny Chenery.
Laurin also needed horses that could win. Trainers can’t make horses run faster than they’re able, just as jockeys can’t carry their mounts across the finish line. Meadow Stable needed runners, and the Chenerys’ farm, The Meadow, in Virginia, hadn’t been producing the kind of talent it had in the past.
But then it did. In 1971, a colt named Riva Ridge arrived from the farm, and hit the track running. Riva Ridge was a son of Meadow Stable sire First Landing, who had been named the 2-year-old champion colt in 1958 and won 19 races in his accomplished career. Riva's dam was Hildene, a blue hen Meadow broodmare. In his juvenile racing season, Riva Ridge won five stakes races including the prestigous Champagne Stakes and the rich Garden State Futurity. Like his sire, Riva Ridge was named racing’s 2-year-old champion. At three, Riva took the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, while his talented barnmate Upper Case enjoyed his own success winning the Florida Derby and Wood Memorial.
Just like that, Meadow Stable and Lucien Laurin were back in the game. As author Bill Nack put it, “There was Lucien Laurin beaming, a man on the brink of retirement who woke up suddenly one morning with Riva Ridge in his barn.”
“There was Lucien Laurin beaming, a man on the brink of retirement who woke up suddenly one morning with Riva Ridge in his barn.”
~ Bill Nack
Lucien Laurin and Riva Ridge, the horse who saved Meadow Farm.
In the prosperous 1972 racing season, Laurin also found Secretariat in his barn. Turcotte remembered the first time he saw Secretariat, shortly after the 2-year-old arrived from the farm to Laurin’s winter barn in Miami. “I was walking down the shed row at Hialeah,” recalled Turcotte. “I was going to see Riva. I looked to my left and there was this big, beautiful red horse. I said, “Lucien, who’s that red horse?’ He says, ‘Ah, he’s too good-looking to be any good. He’s royally bred, but I think he’s too good-looking to be a runner.’”
Of course, that’s how horse people always hedge their hopes. Penny was thinking the same thing. But they all had to wait.
'He shined under pressure"
Lucien Laurin was born in Joliette, Quebec, near Montreal. He arrived on the turf as a jockey in 1929, racing with modest success at Delmorier and Bluebonnet Park in Montreal and other small Canadian tracks.
Lucien Laurin (front row, far left) and the 1935 Spring meet jockey colony at Bluebonnet Park in Montreal.
He spent years toiling as a jockey, and when the mounts dried up he began galloping horses as an exercise rider for Alfed G. Vanderbilt at historic Sagamore Farm in Maryland. In 1942 he then shifted his focus to training.
He trained first on the New England circuit, where he caught the eye of prominent New York owner Reginald Webster. Webster supplied Laurin with well-bred stock, and the pair clicked with several top horses, including the champion filly Quill and a colt named Amberoid, who upset Kauai King in the 1966 Belmont Stakes.
When Laurin took the Meadow Stable job in 1971, he brought with him from his Holly Hill, South Carolina farm and training center the skilled hands of groom Eddie Sweat and exercise rider Charlie Davis. That pair also formed a traveling team for Laurin, vanning his best horses to tracks in other cities for important races. Henny Hoeffner was Laurin’s stable foreman. Mordecai Williams was Secretariat’s first groom, and Jimmy Gaffney the colt’s initial exercise rider. With all that experience and expertise around the barn, the Laurin operation ran smoothly. Didn’t make many mistakes.
So when the Big Horses came along, Laurin delivered. Riva Ridge was a nervous horse — tall, thin and edgy. A finicky eater. But he skipped swiftly over the track. Secretariat, of course, was nothing like that at all. Big, strong, poised, sure of himself – and powerful. Ate everything in sight. His feet hit the ground hard, dug in and pushed off. That Laurin could handle such opposite types was a credit to his talents and his instincts. Thoroughbreds don’t come all the same, and they can’t be hammered into set routines.
The equally friendly and fiery French-Canadian trainer could also handle the pressure of intense public and media interest, which built as Secretariat dashed through his 2-year-old season, culminating in the juvenile colt being named Horse of the Year. Secretariat wasn’t just a racing champion; he was becoming a star familiar to the general public. A horse people heard about, even if they never followed racing.
Secretariat made news off the track as well. As he turned three and was being pointed for the Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown, he was syndicated for a future stallion career for a world-record $6,080,000 — worth more than his 1150 pounds of weight in gold, and suddenly the most valuable horse in history. And the owners of syndicate shares weren’t merely investors, but almost all were very accomplished figures in racing. Famous names, whose opinion commanded respect — Kings in the Sport of Kings. Many of them had ideas on how the horse should be handled coming to the Derby, and throughout his racing career.
Lucien Laurin, captured in the limelight of the 1973 Triple Crown.
But Laurin, backed by Chenery, shooed them away. The trainer stayed in charge of the horse and trained Secretariat exactly as he thought best. Maybe there was an advantage for Laurin in that he had already enjoyed a fine career. He’d been talked out of retirement, and now had his hands on a possible horse of the ages. That doesn’t mean Laurin didn’t worry. He was a nervous kind of guy anyhow, and trainers ALWAYS worry about their horses. But the limelight didn’t bother him.
“He shined under pressure,” says Turcotte. “Every time there was pressure he did everything right.”
Secretariat lost his final prep for the Derby, running third in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct in New York. “But it seemed to work in reverse for him [Laurin] after the Wood, how the pressure was on him and he came through real good,” says Turcotte. “He was pulling everything together around the horse, and every move he made was right.”
Turcotte told Laurin that he didn’t like Secretariat’s first work after the Wood. The rider thought something was bothering the horse. Laurin called in noted veterinarian Dr. Manuel Gilman, who located an abscess in Secretariat’s mouth. A remedy was suggested, and Laurin and groom Eddie Sweat applied the necessary hot-packs and horse-care know-how — and the patient soon recovered. Back to his old self. “In his final work [before the Kentucky Derby] he really flew,” says Turcotte.
And Secretariat kept right on flying at Churchill Downs, zooming from last to first to win the Kentucky Derby in track record time of 1:59 2/5 for 1¼ miles – the first Derby clocking ever under two minutes, and more than a half century later, still the Derby record.
Secretariat with Ron Turcotte aboard winning the 1973 Kentucky Derby, establishing a new track record that still stands today.
Not that the trainer got to breathe a big sigh of relief. Two weeks later in Baltimore, Secretariat and the Meadow team continued their epic run at Pimlico, winning the Preakness Stakes in another record-breaking performance. The race left little doubt that the superhorse would soon arrive in New York as the heavy favorite to win the Belmont Stakes.
The pressures of a Triple Crown attempt ratcheted up the interest in Secretariat. It had been 25 years since Citation had swept the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont in 1948 – a quarter century since a horse had been able to do it. And now people were talking about Secretariat winning it like it was almost a sure thing.
Digging into the news stories of the time, Nack found Laurin had been plenty jumpy. “God, don’t mention the Triple Crown to me,” Laurin told Newsweek’s Ed Comerford. “I hate that, especially when all these people say he’s got it in the bag.”
“I’ll tell you something that might surprise you,” Laurin continued, “I’ll be glad when I get done with him. It worries me the way they talk about him going back to Man o’ War. He’s such a handsome horse. Everyone falls in love with him. That’s the whole deal. But he hasn’t done any more than Riva Ridge.”
But once again, Laurin was merely hedging against hope.
Seizing the Crown
Stories abound of what Laurin is supposed to have said to Turcotte the night before the Belmont Stakes. But Turcotte said the important words actually came a few days before the race. “It was after Secretariat’s final workout, and we went out to dinner,” said Turcotte. “Everybody was saying the horse had trained great, and he had. I told Lucien if I get beat on this horse, I’m going to hang up my tack. He said, ‘Ronnie, this is the greatest horse ever to look through a bridle. If he gets beat I’ll throw my book in the river.’”
Laurin got to keep his “book,” a schedule of upcoming races that every trainer carries around, and Secretariat, of course, would run right into history.
Turcotte, a fellow French-Canadian, said Laurin’s race instructions for the Belmont were pretty much just let the horse do what he wanted to do: “Use ton propre jugement. Use your own judgment,” Laurin told the rider, “and let your horse use his.”
Still, Laurin fretted. Some years later, Chicago Tribune turf writer Neil Milbert talked with Laurin about Secretariat’s famous Belmont victory. Laurin detailed his emotions as the Secretariat team watched their horse seize the lead early in the 1½-mile race. “When I saw how fast he was going on the backstretch if I had a gun, I’d have shot Ronnie Turcotte!” Laurin told Milbert. “I told Mrs. Tweedy, ‘We can never win now; he won’t have anything left.’ But he kept going and he went faster all the time."
“Ronnie never really asked him — he hand-rode him, and never went to the whip,” said Laurin. “I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Ronnie when I talked to him afterward.” Secretariat completed the 1½ mile Belmont in a world record 2:24 clocking, with an ever-widening margin. The Daily Racing Form later was able to establish Secretariat’s winning margin as an astounding 31 lengths in front of second-place Twice A Prince, easily eclipsing the 25 lengths by which the great Count Fleet had won the race in his 1943 Triple Crown campaign.
Chenery said Laurin understood Secretariat as an equine athlete. “I’ve always thought Lucien was the perfect trainer for Secretariat,” Chenery told the Louisville Courier-Journal, “because Lucien was hard on his horses and he liked the horse he could really put the work to. And that’s what Secretariat was. If someone else had been afraid to stretch his limitations, we might not have found out what Secretariat was. He might have just stayed a fat, lazy horse. Lucien’s temperament, and the way he liked to train a horse, just suited Secretariat.
"I’ve always thought Lucien was the perfect trainer for Secretariat... if someone else had been afraid to stretch his limitations, we might not have found out what Secretariat was"
~ Penny Chenery
But Lucien also wasn’t intimidated by him, because the horse could have turned out to be mean,” Chenery added. “If anybody had had ego problems and wanted to show him who’s who, I think Secretariat could have been tough to handle. And the other thing was that Lucien had very good grooms. Eddie Sweat (who cared for Riva Ridge and Secretariat) was one of the finest men around a horse I ever saw.”
Such was the magnitude of Secretariat that it is possible another gifted trainer could have done as well with the horse. But it is difficult to imagine anyone could have done better. The record is there. And Laurin himself knew he’d been lucky that a one-in-a-million chestnut comet had come his way.
“Lord only knows how great he’d have been if we raced him as a 4-year-old,” the trainer said. “He was so strong I think he could have won carrying 140 pounds. I’ll never see another one like him – that I know for sure.”
In his later years, Laurin retired to Key Largo, Florida. He was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1977 and his native Canada's Horse Racing Hall of Fame the following year. He died on June 26, 2000 at the age of 88. Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch said that the only words Laurin would need inscribed on his Hall of Fame plaque would be: “He trained Secretariat."
Adapted from an earlier feature by Bill Doolittle.