Dan Lagace might be a name you know, but did you realize that he developed and owned part of the recently retired superstar, Allywag Hanover, and also developed stars like Grace Hill, Party Girl Hill, Sintra and others? Lagace likes having a small stable and keeping a low profile, and while raising a family with his wife, Michelle, was more fond of selling horses and being a dad to his three kids than racing at night. Now though, his kids are older, and two of the three wanted to follow in his footsteps, so although the ‘Lagace Stable’ are still sellers, they’re also racing more once again, and that’s a good thing - especially when the $12,000 yearling they purchased as a family last fall earned them over $378,000 as a freshman! By Dan Fisher.

YOU GOT IT KEMP

If someone asked you a trivia question that said, ‘What trainer developed Sintra ($1.6 million), Grace Hill ($2 million), Allywag Hanover ($2.4 million) and Party Girl Hill ($932,545)?’ (as well as a host of other equine stars), would you have known that the answer was ‘Dan Lagace’? Probably not, but it’s true. The man who has developed and sold, or sent away, rather than raced, a plethora of great racehorses has definitely flown under the radar to a large degree. However, after focussing more on his young family for years, than on racing horses at night, two of Lagace’s three children made it known to him that they wanted to follow in his footsteps, so recently the family stable decided to race a bit more. The trainer that only had 212 starts from 2013-2021 has now had 135 in the past three years, and the most financially rewarding one of those came on October 12th of this year, when You Got It Kemp - owned in majority by Dan, Brady and Brooke Legacy - easily won the $300,000 OSS Super Final for two-year-old trotting colts and geldings at Woodbine Mohawk Park.

‘Family’ is the key word when it comes to the Lagace crew, and the man listed as the trainer wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, if it wasn’t for being surrounded by his family in the barn daily, he might not even be doing this for a living at all.

 

Dan Lagace is a straight shooter, and it might be part of the reason that his stable isn’t overly big. That’s 100% ok with him however. In fact, that’s exactly how he wants it.

“People think it’s rude I guess, but I say, ‘You can’t call me in the morning because I’m working. And you can’t call me on Sunday because I need a day off and so do you. You’re not allowed to call me the day of the race either… or after the race. Give me a day… if you call me after the race and you’re mad because the horse raced bad, I’m mad too. Even if I don’t own him I’m still mad.’”

“Some owners want to race in every single stakes race too, where we judge it by the individual horses and what’s best for them,” interjects Dan’s daughter Brooke, who celebrated her 26th birthday on the night of You Got It Kemp’s 5 ¼ length Super Final crush in 1:53.4.

The fact that Dan, who along with Brooke is also surrounded by his wife Michelle and their son Brady (27) during this impromptu interview at Classy Lane Training Centre early one morning, is so comfortable with his young daughter voicing her opinions at this time, clearly shows how this family are all on the same wavelength when it comes to both respecting one another and training horses.

“It’s not the Dan Lagace Stable,” the trainer of record makes it quite clear; “it’s the Lagace Stable.”

Then, continuing on the path of explaining why he doesn’t necessarily like having a lot of owners around, Dan laughs and shares the following reminiscence.

“I love golfing,” Dan starts. “I’m not very good at it but we do it a lot… like two-three times a week when we’re in Florida in the winter. So I had this one horse recently, Cupid Shuffle, and all summer the one owner wanted to send him here-and-there, and I wanted to wait until he was ready. So finally, just to please him I sent the horse down to Linda Toscano [in New Jersey]. In his last start down there he got beat about 30 lengths, so we brought him home and I just wanted to get him racing better so we could sell him. So we race him, and he’s second [at Mohawk] twice in a row and then he’s fourth, in 1:50, in a stakes race down at The Meadows for us. So Mark Weaver wants to buy him for 90 [thousand dollars] and I want 100 [thousand dollars], and he says ‘Why don’t you race him in the Simcoe against good horses, see how he goes, and we’ll re-chat?’ So he races good in there, finishes third to Nijinsky and Legendary [Hanover] and paces in [1]:49-and-a-piece. We would have sold him for 100 the week before… now I get 130 [thousand U.S. dollars]... plus the $20,000 we made extra for finishing third in the Simcoe. We’re like $50-$60,000 ahead of where we were a week ago on this horse! So I send the owners a text and tell them, and then later we’re out golfing. Now, I’m not very good, like I said, but I’ve got three pars in my last four holes… I mean I’m f@#king on fire out there (laughing). I’ve been waiting for this game. This owner texts me and says ‘I think you should have been able to get another $5,000 for him.’ I said ‘You @#$%$# - &%$@#’, &^%-$%#@&% #$%@. I lost it. I probably shouldn’t have gotten so mad but I had gotten us such a great deal… we were selling him for 100 a week earlier! Then he told me to ‘Relax’ and then I got REALLY mad (laughing). I told him I’d never race another horse for him. We owned one other horse together, so the next day I reached out so we could come to an agreement on dissolving the partnership. He suggested that we didn’t have to do that and I said, ‘You f@#ked up one of the best golf games I’ve ever had… there is no coming back from that’ (laughing heartily). It had ruined my game and the rest of my day. I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not a bad guy and I’m not saying you’re a bad owner, but we’ll never race another horse together’” (laughing).

That’s the 2024 version of Dan Lagace - the one who is in a position where he can pick-and choose who he trains for. But how did it all begin, one wonders, as the devoted family man holds court on this chilly fall morning, surrounded by his adoring family.

How did you get involved to begin with? one asks.

Brady and Brooke let the cat out of the bag quickly on this one however, laughing that their dad is only a horseman because ‘he was a rebel when he was young’.

“He skipped school… a lot!” laughs Michelle. “Nobody else in his family is in the business - just him.”

Dan retorts by adding, “Well, my one brother is a gambler… a bad gambler.

“My dad worked in a factory, and when it closed we moved to Elmira,” Dan shares. “I was skipping school when I was like, 10-years-old, and I went for a walk and found the racetrack. Bob Ellis was there and that was it. I started doing stalls for Bobby in the morning and stuff when I was just 10 or 11.

“The first horse I jogged was when I was that age too. A horse called Fellers Lady. They said ‘Don’t chirp at her’... So I’m jogging her at Elmira; you know, you’re 11 and you think you’re cool, so I just literally spit and this thing was gone! Everyone had to come out of the barns and line up across the track to try and get her to stop. So they got her stopped and they said ‘You’ve just gotta get right back out there’. So the second one I jogged was Best Of Me. We were going out the door, she twitched her god-damned tail, got the line underneath it, started to back up and fell down (family all laughing).

“Those were the first two I ever jogged… they were all like ‘You gotta get back on’ and I said ‘Nah, I’ll take a day off’ (laughing).

“I really didn’t like school. I’m one of six siblings but the four oldest are a lot older,” he shares. “My one brother, who is just a year older, and I were really close. He failed grade one actually, so we were always in the same class. But when we got to grade eight they moved him into high school instead - back up with the kids his age. After being apart for about three weeks though, we were both being so bad… they said they couldn’t move me up [to grade 9] but I could write a grade eight equivalency test. So I passed it and they moved me up into high school with him, but not only are the grade nines the youngest kids in the school, I was the youngest grade nine. That made it tough,” Dan recalls.

“But he missed so many days they didn’t even count it as him ever being there anyway,” laughs Michelle.

“It was around that same time I met her [Michelle],” Dan says about the love of his life. “She was babysitting for my uncle. When we were 12 [years-old]. I looked at her and said ‘I’m gonna marry you one day’. She asked me why and I said ‘Because you’re pretty’... and I’ve been infatuated with her ever since,” he beams.

“I worked for Bob Ellis for quite a while,” Dan recalls. “People actually thought that he was my father. I learned more from him than anyone else to be honest.

“We had some crazy times in those days. There was an accident at Elmira one day and my brother was actually the one that grabbed the loose horse just before she crashed into a fence. It turned out that it was Classic Wish, who went on to be the dam of Bettors Delight!

“I was buddies around the track with Keith and Ken Middleton then, and I went to school, in grade eight, with Chad Rozema too. Bob [Ellis] used to faint sometimes if he’d been out in the hot sun. I remember one time when Bob, Keith [Middleton] and I were shipping some horses home from Orangeville Raceway and Bob passed out behind the wheel… we went right down into a farmers field with the horses on.

“Keith and I actually took turns driving the truck and trailer back home that day, with Bob passed out beside us… we were only 12 or 13-years-old at the time (laughing).

“It’s kind of crazy when we look back at things like that now.

“Then I worked for Gerry Dinelle Jr. for a couple of years, when my first daughter [Destiny] was born, so I was 19… and then I went to work for Rick Zeron for a little bit. When I worked for Rick I was working with a few that were just training back because I had two of my own on the side.   

“Old Bill Carroll gave us two horses… both were on the vet list and one only had one eye. Those were the first two horses I ever had (laughing). They both raced good the first two times I raced them though, and then Rick was getting mad. He was saying that I had to be there [still] when he got there… but he didn’t usually get there, to Mohawk, until later. So I said, ‘I quit’... he said ‘You don’t have to do that’ but I still quit (family all laughing).

“I was young then, only about 20-years-old, and Brad Gray came up to me because he knew Bill Carroll. Brad said, ‘Claim me something, and if it’s good, I’ll be the best owner you ever have, and if it’s not, you can go f@#k yourself (laughing). His exact words.

“The first horse that I ever claimed for him though was Daylon Command, and he was good for me… I had horses for Brad for close to 20 years after that. We had a lot of good horses together over the years, but the only reason that I got into yearlings was because I got suspended for a positive test. I was young and stupid and it was my own fault, but Brad bought two yearlings [for me to train down when I was suspended and couldn’t race] and they both turned out alright… After that I thought, ‘Geez, I’m alright at this game’.

“The biggest reason though, that we went from racing a lot to doing young horses is because my whole life was run by time. Everything was time. When you get up on Monday you’re worrying about Friday. If your horses are just getting things like bute and banamine, it’s all about time. Everything is time.

“My time was worth too much to be worried so much about time.

“When you’re young like that [and you’re racing] you’re always worried about what everybody else is doing too. Eventually I realized that if I could just find a way to bring in $10,000 a month - just training - that everything would be fine. I’m an uneducated person but I don’t mind working, and if I could bring in ten grand a month I’d be fine.

“So we started doing that with young ones and it just got better and better, and we started investing more and being smarter with money and things like that.

“We cut down too. We went from 20 horses down to about eight. Our kids were just starting to get a little older… I mean, we had three kids before we were 21-years-old… I’ve been around a long time though, and you see so many of these guys drinking and just trying so hard to win a race that they lose track of their family. The best race that you can win is your family. That’s what I did, I just cut down and spent more time on being a dad… or at least trying to be one anyway.

“Our oldest daughter isn’t into it. She did fall for one horse… I claimed a horse called Colonel Moffitt. She jogged him, rode him, did everything with him, but hasn’t touched a horse since. We claimed him for 10 [thousand dollars] though and won a bunch in a row with him, and someone wanted a horse for The Meadowlands and offered us twenty-thousand U.S… and I said ‘Sold’ (laughing).

When asked if Destiny was angry about that, sister Brooke stated that “She wasn’t thrilled, but we got used to it. There’s so many horses that I’ve gotten attached to and he’s like, ‘Sorry, sold him.’”

“As far as selling horses goes,” Dan explains, “It really started back in 2010 when Brad Gray and I had a bit of a falling out. We shared ownership in four two-year-olds together at the time, including Tea Party Princess [$666,934] and Watermelonwine [$428,289]. I wanted to split them up, take two each, but in the end he wrote me a cheque for $165,000 for my half of the four of them.

“I went to the sales and bought four yearlings - but I didn’t spend a whole lot of money on them. I bought a Striking Sahbra for 15 or 20 [thousand dollars] and a Kadabra filly in Lexington, from Brittany Farms, who had a big hock. I sat there for an hour and watched people ask to bring her out… they all saw the hock and had her put her right back in. I got her for $7,000.

“In March [2011], Jack [Darling] told me he wanted to buy the Kadabra, but she [Michelle] wouldn’t let me sell them all, so I sold half of her to him for $50,000.

“In February Ben [Wallace] had come up and told me he liked the Striking Sahbra. I asked him for $45,000 and he said ‘You want to make $25,000 in just a couple of months?’ I said, ‘Well you were the one that liked him!’ (laughing). I said that he could buy him for $100,000 in June then. After I qualified him in June I ended up selling him for $120,000.

“I had also bought a Stonebridge Regal that fall, that Jack offered me $80,000 for, but Michelle wouldn’t let me sell him,” Dan laughs.

“He was selling our entire stable!” Michelle says emphatically, amongst the laughter of her family.

“I did end up selling the Stonebridge Regal eventually,” Dan deadpans as Michelle blushes. “For $15,000! Let’s just say that he drew the 10-hole in his first lifetime start, in an OSS Gold race against Warrawee Needy… and we all know how that turned out,” Dan laughs.

“The moral of the story though, is that first I got the $165,000 in the fall, then I got $120,000 and $50,000, and it was the only time in my career up until that point that I had actually seen some money in my pocket. That’s when I started thinking that this selling thing is the way to do it. 90% of the money that I’ve made in this business has come from selling horses.

Fast forward to November of 2023 at the Black Book Sale in Harrisburg, and learn how the family navigated what was probably their best yearling sale ever.

“I had my eye on a Captaintreacherous filly to be honest,” Dan reveals, “but I had a FaceTime doctor’s appointment scheduled for around the time she was selling, so I said ‘Why don’t we just try to buy a few Ontario-sired trotters on day three?’

“I love trotters but can’t usually afford them, but we bought You Got It Kemp for $12,000 and Artful Dodger for $15,000. We didn’t really plan on selling Artful Dodger when we did, but he was second in [1]:56 in the first Gold and they emailed Brady - I have it so Standardbred Canada can’t release my number - and offered us a number we couldn’t refuse.

“They [Dominic Chiaravalle] tried to buy Kemp from us a few times too,” chimed in both Brooke and Brady.

“My dad is in the business of selling though,” Brooke said proudly, “and he didn’t want to sell them a horse that might not hold up.”

“They actually offered us $250,000 for him,” smiled Dan, “but because he had hurt himself last winter, and he had to be put on stall rest, I wanted to see how he’d sustain it. I really didn’t want to sell him to them for that kind of money and then have something happen to him in that regard. I mean, I wanted to take the $250,000 (laughing), but in the end I guess we got it anyway,” Dan laughs, when referring to the Muscle Mass gelding that the family owns 75% of, along with one of the co-breeders, Suojalampi Stable Inc of Delray Beach, Florida.

Now, following a season where You Got It Kemp put together a stat line of 6-5-1-0, his earnings stand at $378,167. Significantly more than the rejected offer would have provided the Lagace family. Plus, they still own him.

“Dan’s honesty with them worked out in our favour,” boasted a proud Michelle.

While You Got It Kemp may be the ultimate family horse, Dan Lagace gives most of the credit for his success to his son. “Brady does everything with this horse,” Dan brags. “He’s a bit crazy in the field so every morning he puts him on the walker for 30 minutes, then he grasses him for 30 minutes, then he jogs him, bathes him, takes a long time putting him away and then grasses him for another 30 minutes. He spends so much time on that horse he only has time to look after one other! (laughing)”

On race night it takes a full family effort however, as the horse who is quiet in the barn is the very opposite in the Mohawk paddock. “We look like complete idiots on race night,” laughs Brooke. “We have to put him in one of those newer stalls, close the doors and hang coolers over the bars so he can’t see out. That’s the only way he’ll stay calm enough so you can even harness him. At Grand River they let us use a Lasix stall where he was off by himself but at Mohawk they won’t allow us to.”

As far as ‘looking like idiots’ though, that part can be argued, as their rookie trotter ended his season with five straight victories - all in stakes company - after opening his career with a close runner-up finish in a two-year-old maiden event. Most horsepeople would love to ‘look like idiots’ if those were the results that came along with it.

And what about the prospects of selling the star of the stable, who is giving them the ride of their lives? Dan Lagace, they all admit, is afterall, in the business of selling horses.

“He’s sold so many that I really loved,” Brooke admits. “Allywag [Hanover] was one of my favourites. I used to curl up and sleep with him in the stall. Momentarily was another… we all loved her so much that we almost took her back to Florida as a four-year-old… and we never do that,” sighed Brooke.

“I tried to overprice her on purpose though,” retorts her father. “I said to them ‘If you give me 95 [thousand dollars] I’ll sign the papers right now’ and the guy agreed. Then I thought ‘Uh-oh’. So I told her [Brooke], ‘Go into your room, cry, get it all out, and then get back to work’ (family laughing).”

“If we sold him [Kemp] it would be for a lot of money at least,” reasons Brady, “but I think my dad really likes him because he’s good, so maybe we’ll be able to keep him.”

“Determination, well Luc [Blais], did ask me in Lexington if we’d sell him,” shares Dan. “I said, ‘I don’t know, he is kinda fun.’”

Whether they sell You Got It Kemp or not, the Lagace family is enjoying their lives, working together with the animals they all love, and making a good living at the same time. And their current angle of simply developing a small number of horses for both themselves and a few others, but really only racing the ones they own, seems to be the key to it all.

“I’ve developed a bunch of good horses that I didn’t race,” says Dan.

“Not only did I develop Allywag [Hanover], but we kept 5% of him after they sold him and he went to [Brett] Pelling. He made $2.4 million, so even owning 5% was like a nice dividend cheque coming in each month every summer. And we got to win some big races like the Canadian Pacing Derby too. In fact, if you watch the replay from when he upset Bulldog [Hanover] at The Red Mile, down past the wire, when the crowd noise dies down a bit, you’ll hear a crazy woman screaming like mad… that would be my wife Michelle,” laughs Dan.

“I also developed horses like Party Girl Hill and Grace Hill for Tom Hill, and Sintra, before he went to Dave Menary. Dave did a great job with him for years but it still gives us a lot of pride to be the ones that gave him his start,” Dan says.

“I still train down horses every winter for owners like David McDuffee and Bill Donovan… both are great to train for. We trained Reckless Abandon down for Bill Donovan this past winter, and Pelling won the New Jersey final with her in August.

“For years, when our kids were younger, we didn’t really want to be racing all the time, but we also liked selling the horses because we needed the money to raise our family. We bought them their first cars and put them through college, and we didn’t want to be in-debt to do that. Now it’s a little different… we don’t really have to sell like we once did.

We told them all that they had to do college though, to have something to fall back on. I only have a grade eight education,” laughs Dan. “I can’t even go work at McDonalds. But I am part of the pipeline union and Michelle is a PSW, so we both have something to fall back on - we wanted our kids to have the same.

“Destiny is a nurse, Brady went through college to be a police officer and Brooke has a year of Health Sciences,” says Dan proudly.

“I was supposed to go to school to be a nurse too,” adds Brooke, “but at the last minute I changed my mind.”

“Ya, she called us and told us that she wanted to do the horses instead,” her dad says, then looks at her and smiles, “I knew you weren’t going to go and do that anyway!

“For a few years, Michelle and I enjoyed not racing in the summer. One year we sold the horses and booked two one-way flights to Europe. We went to Paris for a week, then London, then Majorca, and on to Barcelona after that,” recalls Dan.

“And then we told you we needed jobs and said ‘Ok, stop playing around,’” laughed Brooke.

“She’s right,” agreed Dan. “But my kids are my best friends, and if it wasn’t for them wanting us all to do this together, I’m not even sure that I’d be training horses anymore.

“But I never think of woulda, shoulda, coulda… nothing like that. I’m just glad of what is today,” smiles Dan, while watching his champion two-year-old trotter munch grass amongst his family members and their dogs, Denver and Reba. “I don’t think about mistakes I’ve made in the past. You have to f@#k up to get better and some of your missed opportunities end up as your best opportunities. And I NEVER think about tomorrow,” he says in all seriousness.

“I love horse racing, and doing it with my family, because it allows me the freedom of my time. These guys do a lot of the work - I do a bit more in the winter than in the summer maybe… but now I can go and do what I want to do. I can go spend time with my two grandsons if I want. My life now gives me more time.

“Like I said before, that’s why I stopped racing so much at one point, because it took away too much of my time. Now, the way we’re doing it, it actually gives me more time.

“Put it this way,” he reasons. “If everybody here was going to die right now, they’d only ask for one thing - they’d ask for more time.”

As for right now though, the Lagace family are simply having the time of their lives.

 This feature originally appeared in the November issue of TROT Magazine. Subscribe to TROT today by clicking the banner below.