Nancy Brown attended the Royal Blue Yearling sale at Woodbine in 2000. She had two yearlings marked that interested her. The first was a filly by Historic named Historyinthemaking, whom Brown bid on until she surpassed her price threshold of $11-$12,000. The other was a bay horse by Run The Table named Royel Millennium.
“He didn’t have a video; there wasn’t even anybody in the stall,” Nancy said. “I had to get somebody to take him out, but then I went back about three or four times to look at him and it was one of those moments that I knew what I knew. Bottom line, I felt that he would be a nice racehorse.”
Nancy’s husband, Hall of Fame driver Doug Brown, was driving at Kawartha Downs that day and did not know that Nancy was at the yearling sale, let alone intent on buying a horse. Regardless, she strode into the sales ring, ready to bid on Royel Millennium, and key on securing him for $16,000.
Royel Millennium went to Nancy Brown for $16,000.
“I got a call from someone and they said ‘You better get down to the farm; there’s a horse waiting for you,” recalled Doug. “‘What?!’”
“I had a girl friend come with me [to the sale] as my support group,” Nancy said. “She kept saying ‘You will not...you will not buy [a horse]’ and I kept saying ‘I am, I am!’ Doug was absolutely shocked, maybe even horrified, that I would do something like that.
“When I did get him, I remember there were horsemen standing behind me, and when I went to sign for [Royel Millennium], I heard them make noise and go ‘Do you see what Brownie’s wife just did?!’”
Now 17 years old, Royel Millennium, who Nancy nicknamed 'Sammy', resides at Laurie Poulin’s stud farm in Florida following a ten-year career consisting of 243 starts, 23 wins, and $216,276 accrued in earnings and more than his share of misfortune.
“When I look back through the years, through all the joys and all the tears, he was meant to be such a good horse,” Nancy said. “There was no question.”
Royel Millennium debuted as a two-year-old in a maiden race at Kawartha. He won pacing a 1:59.2 mile.
“Stew [Firlotte] was there, and he was very impressed,” Doug said recalling Royel Millennium’s first win. “He said ‘my God, I can’t believe how much this horse looked like Landslide.’”
“Stu couldn’t get over how he was the picture of Landslide,” Nancy said.
Landslide, Royel Millennium’s grandsire, earned $162,835 up until his retirement at age three. He was sent off the favourite in the 1981 Little Brown Jug, but was involved in the accident down the backside that propelled the filly Fan Hanover to the record books.
“When we first raced him, we were offered either $200,000 or $250,000 for Sammy,” Nancy said. “There was also a guy who came up from California interested in buying him. Doug didn’t even come home to me and ask if I wanted to sell him, but instead said to him that he was not for sale.”
As Royel Millennium built potential, his two-year-old season was abbreviated following a rough-gaited mile at Rideau Carleton when he was diagnosed with a spleen entrapment, which can develop into colic, and was forced to undergo surgery.
“You don’t know whether or not a horse will come back at all from that,” Nancy said.
Recovering from abdominal surgery, Royel Millennium slowly returned to training and began to race as a three-year-old, competing 22 times, two of which he was victorious. Then, as a four-year-old, he paced the best mile of his life, timed in 1:52.3, at Woodbine Racetrack after losing a shoe into the first turn.
“When I pulled him up and checked his foot, I just went ‘Oh my God’ because there was nothing there,” Doug said. “There was absolutely nothing; all that was left [of his foot] was a stub.”
“That was one of the very few times I didn’t go,” Nancy said. “Doug choked up on the phone when he called me. He said to me ‘I’ve always said he’s pea-hearted… I’ve never seen a bigger heart out of a horse.’ Doug couldn’t even bring him home; he took him up to Mohawk to get a whole new foot on. It was constructed all of fiberglass.”
Royel Millennium then broke a bone in his hind leg after he jammed it into the racebike shaft when training, forcing him to miss six months. He bounced back and continued to race at five, six, seven, and so on. At the age of eight he was named Older Performer of the Year by Kawartha Downs in honouring participants for the track's 2007 season.
However, after years of grinding cash and kicking dirt, the Browns were left with a leg-weary stallion.
“We never gelded him because we were told that Run The Tables have a higher risk of dying from being gelded,” Nancy said. “Plus he was a real nice, good-natured, smart horse.
“The main thing became trying to find out what to do with a stallion, so my big thing was getting him a home.”
Nancy was acquainted with Kurt Hughes, the brother of Prince Edward Island horseman Jason Hughes. To Nancy, P.E.I. presented Royel Millennium a permanent residence, where he could still race and be able to graze long after. And so she contacted Jason Hughes and sent Sammy to P.E.I.
“The deal was that Jason would never race him in a claimer and after he was done racing, Jason would find him a good home,” Nancy said. “But he remained under my name.”
After about two or three months of racing in P.E.I., in November of 2009 Jason Hughes called Nancy Brown to inform her that Royel Millennium was suffering from congestive heart failure. The veterinarians recommended that, following a heart attack resulting from heart failure, they euthanize him. Otherwise, he would have approximately a year to live.
“I was just blown away,” Nancy said. “I would have to fly down [to P.E.I.] and be there when they put him down because he was my boy from day one. But then Doug suggested we’d bring him up here and let him die here, and so we contacted the vets and they got him as comfortable as they could and trucked him up.”
Royel Millennium arrived to the Browns in December 2009. Waiting for her boy to arrive, Nancy investigated varying treatments for Sammy’s condition in a final effort to revive the horse she cherished. She decided to treat him with Coenzyme Q10, a vitamin supplement which has not been proven, but has shown to aid people with heart failure. Twice a day he was given Co Q10 in his feed, and over time he began to resurrect.
“There was one day Doug was at the farm and he told me he didn’t know what to do because [Sammy] was banging down the walls,” Nancy said. “He saw the horses going out and he wants out. We were told that he could never go out in the paddock alone and, at most, hand walk for twenty minutes. That was it.
“He began wanting to do more every day. He would start talking and pounding at the gate, so finally Doug and I agreed to harness him up and let him out. We’d known that he would go away, so we thought to let him at least go happily.”
“We had a surgeon from here come by to check out his heart,” Doug said. “And so he came and listened to it, listened to it, listened to it… he eventually looked up at us and said ‘there’s nothing wrong with this horse.’
“I walked him some more, but then I called Nancy one morning and told her I couldn’t walk him because of how crazy he was getting. So I started jogging him and turning him loose to kick and play. He kept going and going until finally I thought ‘Well, better start training him again!’”
From there, Royel Millennium continued to grow and strengthen, eventually qualifying and readying to race once more. Eleven years old at this point, he was set to return to the track at Florida’s Pompano Park.
Royel Millennium made his third start November 6, 2010 -- Nancy’s daughter’s birthday. They were watching him race from the paddock and he was staggering his way to the finish line.
“I said to myself, ‘Uh oh, this is it,” Nancy said. “And we were back at square one again; I just wanted to find him a home.”
Nancy was at the Harrisburg Yearling Sale the next year and saw Laurie Poulin, whom she knew for years. Poulin owns a small farm in Florida where she bred one stallion. However, she had lost her lone stallion, so Nancy contemplated sending Royel Millennium to Laurie.
“I’m probably the only one in the world that believed he would be a good stallion,” Nancy said.
The Browns gave Royel Millennium to Laurie Poulin, and he would stand stud at Prairie Bound Stables under a private contract in Florida.
Prairie Sweetheart, winning at The Red Mile
As a stud, Royel Millennium has gradually generated press, the most coming from his second foal and second filly Prairie Sweetheart, who is undefeated in 14 career starts and bested older mares when winning the $112,500 Allerage Filly and Mare Pace at The Red Mile.
He also sired Owosso Flash, who has earned $139,458, and Prairie Panther, who earned $61,690 on the Florida Sires Stakes circuit.
“I thought he’d be a nice Florida sire and kick a couple of good ones out there,” Doug said. “But holy crap, I guess we should’ve kept him.”
Royel Millennium lives the rest of his days on that farm in Florida, breeding with a limited number of mares. In total, he has sired eight horses, seven of which made the races, and the one who didn’t died of pneumonia before she could compete. Nancy remembers the vibrancy of his personality, enhanced by the hardships they underwent together.
“I had never worked with a horse before,” Nancy said. “He was my first one, and I could’ve spent all day, all night with him. After he would finish jogging, I would put my back up next to him in the gate, and he would put his head down on my shoulder and go to sleep there.
“I’ve never been out to buy another horse, and am not looking to buy another horse. But there was a lot of hardship tied with Sam and I and I thought whether or not I really wanted another baby.”
And now, with the success and promise Royel Millennium’s foals demonstrate, Nancy is trying to grab her own little Sammy with a dam of theirs named Damsel.
“Sam’s favourite was [Allamerican] Damsel,” Nancy said. “My joke with [son] Kyle was that we would breed Damsel to Sam and call him ‘Dam Sam’. And that’s still the hope.”
(A Trot Insider Exclusive by Ray Cotolo)