It’s only fitting: two years after her dominant victory in the Queen’s Plate, Holy Helena has come home to race on Plate day at Woodbine, albeit in the Grade 2 Dance Smartly Stakes. The 5-year-old daughter of Ghostzapper, owned by Frank Stronach’s Adena Stables, was chosen Canada’s top 3-year-old filly in 2017 after she swept […]

Frank Barroby is a lifer at the horse racing game. Countless honors as both a jockey and trainer have rolled his way. And now he’s been chosen as the 2019 recipient of the Avelino Gomez Memorial Award for his contributions to Canadian jockeydom and the sport. The 75-year-old Saskatchewan native (his hometown of Ravenscrag is […]

Eugene Melnyk had never been inducted into a Hall of Fame before. Never. Finally, on Wednesday night, the 58-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame in Toronto. And it seemed no small matter to him. “There’s no other way to put it,” he said. “This is a huge, […]

At 87, Sam McComb hasn’t lost a step. Dressed in a tidy suit, ready with the Irish gift of the gab, mischief up his sleeve, he’s an easy raconteur of a past life that sniffs of high adventure. “Sitting here is like a river flowing backwards,” he said, rather poetically, during a long chat about […]

Trainer Don Pleterski feels as if he had a great rest. As if he’s been on holiday. He knows he hasn’t. He can feel it every day when he wakes up in the morning, when he feels the pain and his joints kick up, as he examines a life in limbo. He’s lucky to be […]

Trainer Mark Casse barely has time to celebrate a year that has been beyond compare. On Wednesday, he was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame. It was an emotional moment. He dashed into Toronto on Wednesday afternoon and before the night was over, he and his family were already on their way […]

Young Elias Stein, pushing five years old, has urgent advice for his father, Justin: “Use the green stick, dad,” he says. And then the questions always come: “Did you win a race with it? Did you use the green stick?” Yes, Justin Stein used that green stick to win the Queen’s Plate at Woodbine racetrack […]

David Anderson had an out-of-the-pale moment while on a plane from Columbus, Ohio to Toronto to attend the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inductions, where his father, Robert Anderson, was to be enshrined Wednesday night. “Something happened to me today that was very spiritual,” he said, on the podium at the Mississauga Convention Centre. […]

Covered in dirt, jockey Jim McAleney strode through the Fort Erie clubhouse, the flower garland draped around his shoulders, after the most spectacular win of his career. On track, he’d thrown up his arms. He’d scattered petals. The 45-year-old McAleney  had just won Tuesday’s $500,000 Prince of Wales Stakes, the second jewel of the Canadian Triple […]

Frank Stronach doesn’t need luck. “I am so lucky in everything I do,” he said, moments after winning his third Queen’s Plate with Shaman Ghost, a very, very slight second choice to Plate Trial winner Danish Dynaformer, who had about $2,000 more bet on him in the win pool. But Stronach knows that a little […]