Raised around them from before she could even walk, Tamara Vandewiel loves horses as much as she loves life. In the winter of 2025, however, one of the horses in her care took advantage of the young mother’s kind nature, and in an instant that very life was threatened. It was Tamara’s strength and spirit that helped her survive that harrowing ordeal, and now it’s a spirited little OSS Gold-winning colt that she owns, who has helped put that entire episode behind her. By Dan Fisher. Traduction Manon Gravel.

When freshman pacing colt Gogo Gadget was entered in a $100,000 OSS Gold event in his second lifetime start, on July 3, 2026, his proud owner, Tamara Vandewiel, didn’t care that she just had her appendix out a couple of days earlier - she was going to be there, and she was going to be the one paddocking him. Her doctor may have just told her that she wasn’t to do any lifting for four weeks, but compared to the terrifying, and potentially life-threatening experience she’d been put through approximately a year-and-a-half earlier, an appendectomy seemed like nothing to the tough country girl who has spent her entire life just loving horses.

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There’s nowhere else that 36-year-old Tamara Vandewiel would rather be than in a barn, surrounded by horses… except maybe outside of that barn, sitting - or even standing - on the back of one of them.

“I was just born into it,” she smiles, as she reflects on her youth. “My Mom [Darlene Hayes] started off with mostly Thoroughbreds, and the breeding of them… then we got into doing lay-ups, off the track, with both Standardbreds and Thoroughbreds. That’s how I got into it… I worked with my Mom from the time I can remember. I always had my own little pitchfork and wheelbarrow (laughing) and was right beside her.”

“She [Tamara] was always fearless around them - almost too much so,” Darlene laughed when asked about her daughter’s relationship with horses.

“I always had them, and I couldn’t wait… like, when she was eighteen months old - just eighteen months old - I bought her first pony for her. It was a 20-something year-old, black and white Pinto Shetland Pony… that was just a kind, gentle soul. Tamara would do the little lead-line around… at that young age everything had to be done very carefully… But then I broke the pony to drive, so then Tamara and I would drive her up-and-down the back roads in this tiny cart, the dog would trip along beside us, and Tamara loved it. The pony’s name was Taffy and Tamara would just giggle the whole way down the road - she loved it.

“Then when she was seven [years-old] I bought her a purebred Welsh Mountain Pony - a beautiful grey pony. His name was Nicodemus - we called him ‘Nicky’ - and she learned a lot on him… rode him all over the farm and stuff.

“I was showing Quarter-Horses and Paints back then and she always wanted to ride my Western Pleasure mare though… she ended up doing the Walk-Jog [competitions]... I think Jacks Triple Mistress was the name of the first one she competed with, and she won lots. She might have been eight or nine [years-old] by then.

“Then I got Stinger - he was my show horse but she wanted to ride him. When she started doing that she was just winning everything, and that’s where everything changed. I kind of stepped back and [my husband] Derek and I became horse show parents.

“Derek was grateful for that though, because before we had to haul three or four horses to these shows… you had to have a Halter-horse, a Showmanship, English, Western horse, whatever… Tamara did the all-around [every discipline] on Stinger and won multiple, multiple awards on him.

“He was just a Western horse until she started riding him… she wanted to ride him in the Hunt-Seat [English/Hunter-Under-Saddle] and stuff too though… We were at the Canadian Championships, the first time we ever put an English saddle on this horse… and she won under all four judges - it was crazy! She wore my riding clothes, which were way too big for her… she would have been about 13-years-old at the time. She even beat her own coach that day,” Darlene laughed.

“She’s always just been a natural with horses,” the proud mother beamed.

“It was Brad Watt that first showed me how to harness a Standardbred,” Tamara recalled. “My mom owned a mare that he trained by the name of Tuahiwi Trick N. I remember the first time I went to paddock her at the track… I said, ‘I like this’ (laughing).

“I got a job working for Casie [Coleman] not long after that, and I think I worked for her, on-and-off, for about five years. Cheddar (Betterthancheddar) was the big fella in the barn when I was there.

“I also worked for trainers like Ian Downey, Nick Gallucci and Corey Giles, but as a little girl I grew up wanting to be like Casie. She was the one I idolized. I thought the world of her. And she did work my ass off (laughing), but I learned so much there. Casie’s the one that gave me the ambition to go on with it. I always thought she was just a great businesswoman… I’ve always looked up to her and I still message her once in a while for advice and to try to pick her brain, to be honest.

“I tried getting a ‘real job’ once… I dated this fella [who wasn’t in the horse racing industry] and we bought a house in Mount Forest. I leased out my mare, Trixie, and I sold the babies that I had. I was out of it for about a-year-and-a-half but I couldn’t handle it (laughing). I worked as a bartender and in a butcher shop, but I couldn’t handle it - I just needed to be in the barn.

“I eventually moved my horses up near Mount Forest, to Arthur, and that’s where [my partner] Kyle [Bossence] and I met…. Kyle and I were just good friends for about four or five years at first… We actually met in the paddock at Hanover the day of Trixie’s [Trickshooter] first lifetime start [August 17, 2013]. He was racing a horse that I had looked after for Casie, Four Lane Fast. I was like, ‘Who’s this handsome dude?’ (laughing) so I looked in the program and saw that I used to take care of his horse - that was my ticket to go talk to him (laughing). So I just walked right on down and introduced myself,” she laughed.

As for Trixie, like Kyle, she’s still a big part of Tamara’s life today.

Kyle and Tamara now have a 4 ½ -year-old son, Lloyd, a daughter, Charlotte, who will be three in August, approximately 32 racehorses, some goats, a couple of ponies and three “old farts” - AKA, retirees Trickshooter (16), Willyorwonthe (13) and Stir And Serve (20).

“I’m looking at her (Trixie) right now,” Tamara smiled. “She’s out in the field with Willy and Stanley (Stir And Serve) as we speak. Kyle gave me Stir And Serve for Christmas one year. Patrick Shepherd had claimed him off of us in London and I bawled my eyes out (laughing). He didn’t have any luck with him so Kyle bought him back, and on Christmas Day he showed me the papers with my name on them… so he’s not going anywhere either. The three of them are just happy hackers now.

“I ride all three of them. We have a pond in the centrefield so I take them down there on the hot days… Trixie likes going in up to her belly.

“Even when Willy was still racing I’d ride him in from the paddock all the time - he’s so cool. Lloyd has one of those battery-powered little tractors, and the one day I just got on Willy and followed him around. Willy was just so patient - he just kept stopping and waiting. He’s such a good boy.

“Standardbreds are the best - I don’t know what I was thinking, bringing home that other monster…”

The ‘monster’ Tamara was referring to was a Lusitano-warmblood - a project horse that she tried rescuing back in the winter of 2025. Unfortunately, in the end, it was Tamara that needed rescuing from the unruly animal, one cold, blustery day in February that same year. When nobody was there to rescue her however, it was the tough country girl who took matters into her own hands.

“My brother called me one day and said, ‘There’s this horse locked in this dirt pen… and you’ve got to help him.’ I said, ‘I’ve got enough horses,’ but he sent me a picture of him, and I had always wanted a buckskin.

“I guess the guy who had him was a retired bullfighter, but now he’s a goat farmer, so I offered to trade him a goat for the horse and he agreed.

“We went down to get him and the guy had told me not to even touch him until he got there, so that should have been a tell-tale sign. He led him onto our trailer and we brought him home. He was great for the first few days but then I put him out into our run-in area where he could smell the mares’ poop, and he started lunging at guys as they’d just walk by. He actually broke the fence twice, lunging at Kyle when he was just walking by.

“I could work on him great by myself, but if one of my friends or one of our employees came around he’d start to blow up and get all tense. I had been lunging him though, and he had been doing great, but when I moved him into the run-in area, where the mares’ poop was, something changed within two days.

“We could obviously tell that something very traumatic had happened to this horse, but eventually I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore - he’s a different fu@#ing horse now.’ I realized that I was actually a little afraid of him, and I’d never felt that way about another horse in my entire life,” she admitted.

That news definitely set off alarm bells for her mother, Darlene.

“Everything she said about that horse, my gut was saying that this horse was going to hurt her, or one of the kids, or someone. I told her, ‘You need to get rid of him - now. I know that you want to save the world and everything… but this is NOT the horse for you,’” said Darlene - known to many in the industry as Mama D.

“I asked [one of our employees] Kirk one evening, if he could come over and help me move the horse,” recalled Tamara. “I wanted somebody watching because something had changed. I was just waiting for Kirk to come over, and I had just moved a bucket that was down in front of the gate to the run-in area, when the horse came right over the gate, grabbed me by the wrist and tried to lift me right up and in with him.

“I got lucky enough that I was able to grab the gate… I was able to weave my legs through it… they were all bruised and cut-up afterwards too, but that was just from me holding on with them. He was trying to pull me in with him. He had me by my wrist and the noises his teeth were making, crunching my bones, were absolutely horrific.

“Somehow I got loose on my own,” Tamara revealed humbly.

Her mother gave us more details on her daughter’s heroic struggle.

“She (Tamara) remembered that Laverne Turnbull always told her that if you pull their tongue out they won’t bite their own tongue… so that’s what she did. She reached in with her free hand, as her wrist was being savaged, and pulled out his tongue. He opened his mouth just enough that she was able to slide her arm free.

“She was bleeding really badly. She somehow then made it to the main barn and made her own little tourniquet with a towel… one of the ambulance attendants basically said that her doing that might have actually saved her life,” shared Mama D in a sobering tone. “Terrifying!”

“I was in the hospital for just over a week,” said Tamara. “First they fixed my broken bones, with plates and screws, and then they eventually did another operation to fix my tendons and do a skin graft… I think they said that the second operation took about seven hours to do.

“Thank God for Megan Downey setting up the GoFundMe and the raffles that she did for us, because I had months and months of physiotherapy and rehab to go through. We needed to pay for child care throughout all of that, as well as hire another employee to take my place in the barn too.

“Charlotte was still really ‘Mommy-Mommy-Mommy’ at that point, so it was a really difficult time for all of us,” Tamara said in an understated yet brave way. “We’re so lucky to be part of an industry that really takes care of their own during times like those. We’ll never be able to thank Megan, and everyone else, enough.

“I still can’t quite bend it [my wrist] 90 degrees like I can the other one, and I don’t feel as strong as I did before. I can actually tell you when it’s going to rain… I always thought that was a joke, but I actually do feel more stiffness in it when rain is on its way. The one bone still has a crack in it. They said that they can go back in, take the plates out, scrape it and re-do it, but I really don’t want to do that. As long as I can carry a water bucket and a hay bale I’m fine,” she laughed.

Speaking of carrying a water-bucket, that takes us back to the paddock Tamara did, against her mother’s wishes and her doctor’s orders, on July 3rd, where it seems like carrying the water and bath buckets was the only thing that she didn’t do.

Did we mention though, that at least it turned out to be a winning paddock?

Yes, Tamara’s new equine pride-and-joy, that came into her life at just the right time - approximately seven months after her horrific ordeal - is the two-year-old Betting Line pacing colt, Gogo Gadget, who won that OSS Gold event for his proud owner on July 3rd at Mohawk Park, in 1:52.2.

And how was it that ‘Gogo’ came into Tamara and Kyle’s lives? Of the eight babies in the Bossence Stable this past fall, seven were trotters - something Kyle has been known to specialize in - and one was a pacer. How did that happen?

Well, Mama D played a big role in that too it seems.

“My Mom’s the one that actually found him [Gogo},” Tamara explained. “One of her clients used to own the mare. She’s an older mare and they wanted to get rid of her because they hadn’t had any luck… so my Mom got her sold to [breeder] Jessica [Kulcher] - who used to work for her - and Jessica had posted a short video of him on Facebook that my Mom liked.”

“A client of mine from Newfoundland had owned the mare [JK Getupngo],” reiterated Darlene. “I suggested to them many times that they should breed her to Betting Line, as the cross would be very close to Abuckabett [Hanover], but they chose not to. So when Jessica bought her from them I told her the same thing, and I guess she listened to me,” laughed Darlene.

“I did my homework on breeding that mare to Betting Line and had figured out that the resulting foal would be about an 87.5% brother or sister to Abuckabett. Fast-forward a year and Jessica, who is now the Farm Manager for Glenview Livestock, and was so busy at the farm, forgets to nominate him [Gogo] to the OSS, forgets to put him into the [yearling] sale, everything.

“I saw a five second video of him that she posted on Facebook, just trotting through the field, and he just floated. So I went right over to see him and he reminded me of a smaller version of Betting Line. Before I even pulled out of her driveway, I called Kyle and told him to hook up his trailer (laughing).

“They had to pay a late penalty to make him OSS-eligible, but they got him for a very good price. Thank goodness Jess did pay the dam into the Mare Residency Program at least… so she’s being rewarded nicely now too,” smiled Dar.

Her new colt couldn’t have come along at a better time for Tamara, whose arduous physio sessions were starting to wind down last fall as the babies were filtering in.

“I’ve always helped break the babies, and that was pretty much the first thing I did when I was able to start back in the barn last fall. I was so nervous to do it this time though. It was right after my arm had healed and I was more nervous than I had ever been. Kyle said, ‘You’re driving them this year,’ and I was like, ‘Whaaat?’ (laughing). I always do the first line… I always have the line on the left - that’s how we do it. But I’m thankful that he did that because I was paranoid about whether I could hold them - it was my right wrist that got hurt. Kyle and [our employee] Nolan were on the lines, and I was in the cart. I’m glad that they got me right back into it and didn’t let me be afraid or anything… It really helped me get my confidence back,” she smiled.

Fast-forward to the summer, and after two impressive baby-race victories, in-rein to Jonathan Drury, in mid-June, and an easy 1:52.3 pari-mutuel debut in late June, the stage was set for Gogo to tackle OSS Gold colts at Mohawk on July 3rd. But first came another unexpected test for his owner.

“I was working all day Sunday [June 28th] and I was having really bad cramps. We raced two that night so I drove to the track and I shipped the early one home first - I guess I was just getting some relief from the heated seat, because as soon as I got out of the truck the pain was really bad again. So I took myself in [to the hospital] and they said I had a high white [blood cell] count and I shouldn’t go anywhere. Then they did an ultrasound, saw I had appendicitis, and took it out.

“I wasn’t going to miss that race though,” said Tamara, with a giggle that probably sounded like the ones from her earliest days, while riding down the backroads with her mom in that little cart behind Taffy.

“I have a 15-year-old boy now too - Jacob - that we’ve basically taken-in and adopted, and he’s been helping out in the barn this summer for the first time. He’s a really good kid and he carried Gogo’s buckets for me the night we won the [OSS] Gold,” shared Tamara.

“She got home from getting her appendix out on the Monday or Tuesday, and she paddocked him on the Friday - she’s not real smart, my daughter,” said Darlene, with a laugh of her own.

“I had told Kyle not to even let her go that night, and he said, ‘Have you ever even met your daughter before?’

“I suppose it’s all my fault,” admitted Dar, with a smile, when reminded that she was the one that raised her fiery daughter in the beginning.

“Even if she got stepped on by a horse [when she was little] and was in tears or something, my response was always, ‘Just walk it off.’ So I know that it’s my fault (laughing). I helped create this girl. And now with my grandchildren I’m terrified - oh boy. Charlotte, my granddaughter, she’s just a mini-Tamara. She’s so brave it’s terrifying. Lloyd is just a little farmer - like, he’s up with the tractor and stuff - but Charlotte wants to ride the horses, and do this with them, and do that with them, and walk underneath them, and kiss every horse down the aisle. It’s terrifying (laughing). I really wish they didn’t even go to the barn, but that ship sailed a long time ago (laughing).

“I see the irony though - 100% - that I created all of this in the beginning, but it doesn’t make it less fretful for me,” stressed the ultra-proud mother and grandmother.

When asked to tell us more about Gogo, the horse her mother picked out for her, Tamara just gushes.

“He’s just been so professional from day one. He just sits in a hole perfectly until you pull on the right line, and then, like his name, he just goes.

“He’s pretty proud. Once he’s harnessed, as soon as you check him up, every morning, he does this little spring-hop-jump-bob-and-weave thing… he just feels so good, it just makes me so happy to see.

“I’ve never owned a stakes-winner before. The other night when he won… I just usually cry when I talk about him. It’s just unbelievable. He just amazes me - he just makes me cry.”

It’s ok Tamara - strong, tough girls like you are allowed to cry too. Especially when it comes to the horses you love.

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