Trio After a Triple Crown

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.

Like Riva Ridge, winner of last year's Belmont Stakes as well as the Run for the Roses, Secretariat was raised in the lap of equine luxury at The Meadow, a rolling, tree-shaded retreat in Doswell, Va., with a century-old mansion surrounded by stables, swimming pool, tennis courts and a cemetery for thoroughbreds. Penny Tweedy, 51, inherited the 2,600-acre farm from her father Christopher Chenery, the public utilities magnate who founded the stable. The wife of John Tweedy, executive vice president of The Oil Shale Corp., and the mother of four, Mrs. Tweedy has been a lifelong horsewoman, a rider of show horses since her childhood in Pelham Manor, N.Y. After Smith College and a stint as a Red Cross "donut dolly" in France and Germany during World War II, she entered the Columbia Graduate School of Business. The training, says the regally attractive president of Meadow Stud, Inc., "gives me confidence in running my family's business. Looking at a balance sheet doesn't scare me."

The 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 while another of his entries, Jay Ray, was winning the California Derby. Lucien succeeded his son Roger as trainer of Meadow Stable in 1971 when the younger Laurin resigned to join the Ogden Phipps stable.

The 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 to Riva Ridge. They are two-year-olds. As God is my judge, either one--or both--might be better than Secretariat."

Though Laurin has been known to chew out fellow French-Canadian Ron Turcotte in salty Gallic argot, he insists that "I never give my rider instructions. If I didn't think he was the best in the business, I wouldn't be riding him." Turcotte 31, has all the credentials. One of 14 children, he added muscle to his diminutive frame (5 ft. 1 in.) by cutting wood with his lumberjack father in Grand Falls, New Brunswick.

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 and a slab of cold dried fat back is only a memory. For spiritual replenishment, he periodically packs his wife and their three children into the family motor camper and escapes to the Canadian wilderness.

Despite his triumphs, he admits to few pretensions about his importance in the saddle. "The horse does the running," he says. "The biggest mistake a rider can make is to feel that he's more important than his horse and not give him credit for intelligence."

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