Bob Loblaw Delivers For New Owners

The connections of Bob Loblaw weren't all in the winner's circle for his Ontario Sires Stakes Super Final win last Saturday (Oct. 16) at Woodbine Mohawk Park, but they were watching and loudly cheering all the same.

Dave Walls and James Grant both work for the student administrative council of Lambton College in Sarnia, where Walls — also the voice of Hiawatha Horse Park — is the director of operations and Grant acts as the general manager. The pair had been interested in horse ownership for quite some time, and according to an article in the Sarnia Observer they accepted an invitation from Ken Middleton to check out some horses on his farm. The horse Walls focused on was a son of Sunshine Beach.

“He just looked like a race horse, where sometimes when they’re young they don’t really look that muscled up or they just look like a horse. But he looked like an athlete right off the bat.” Walls said. “I just said to James, ‘I think this one right here is the one we want.’ And that was Bob Loblaw.”

Bob Loblaw and driver Sylvain Filion connected for a 37-1 upset in the $225,000 Ontario Sires Stakes Super Final for two-year-old pacing colts and geldings on Saturday, Oct. 16 at Woodbine Mohawk Park. After breaks marred his last few stakes races, Bob was on his best behaviour to land his richest win to date.

Bob Loblaw nearly doubled his bankroll, which stands at $233,657, while earning his third win to go along with three thirds from 12 starts for Grant, Walls, trainer Ken Middleton — who bred the Sunshine Beach-Lady Marina gelding with the late Bill Galvin — and Starting Centre Stables of Cambridge, Ont.

While Bob Loblaw is the first horse Grant has owned, he's no stranger to racing as his extended family owned millionaire and O'Brien Award winner D M Dilinger. Grant himself now is part owner of eight horses.

“Once you do it once, you find out it’s not that daunting of a task, which is cool,” Grant said. “Never doing it before, I was a little scared, but you meet good people and … it’s a pretty cool sport.”

That cool quotient is amplified for Middleton, who also bred and developed the pacing gelding and was able to watch and call the win from his usual perch in the announcer's booth at Woodbine Mohawk Park.

“It’s like being the coach of a hockey team. If you’re the coach of a hockey team and one of your star players scores the winning goal, that’s great. It’s a great feeling. But if it’s your son that scores the winning goal on the championship team, it just makes it feel that much more special.”

Walls concurred, noting that this is the first horse he's had a piece of in more than 20 years.

“Never in my mind did I think that we’d ever have an Ontario Sires Stakes champion,” he said, adding, “I know people that have been in the industry for 50 years and they’ve never had a Stakes win, never mind the ultimate Stakes win of the Super Finals.”

To read the full article in the Observer, click here.