The connections of Will Take Charge have reported that the O'Brien Award-winning trotter passed away on Dec. 19, 2024 at the age of 11.
A winner of 28 races and more than $1.3 million, Will Take Charge's career concluded in early 2020 and he lived out his retirement as a gentle and kind companion horse at trainer Jeff Gillis's farm in Fergus, Ont. At the time of his passing, he was owned by Gillis along with Mac Nichol of Burlington, Ont., and Gerald Stay of Buffalo, New York.
A multiple Ontario Sires Stakes winner as a youngster while trained by John Bax, Will Take Charge joined Gillis’s stable after Nichol purchased the gelding near the end of his four-year-old campaign.
The fastest son of Kadabra took on the top trotters in the sport and had a career-best season in 2018 when he was voted Canada's Older Male Trotter of the Year with a record reading 9-6-2 from 26 starts while earning nearly a half-million dollars in purses. His richest victory was in the $186,000 Crawford Farms Trot at Tioga Downs and his fastest was a 1:50.3 score in the Maxie Lee Invitiational at Harrah's Philadelphia that year, equalling the world record for an aged trotting gelding on a five-eighths-mile track at the time. Will Take Charge was a close runner-up in the Arthur J. Cutler and John Cashman Memorials and top three in the TVG Open Trot in addition to representing Canada in the Yonkers International Trot.
Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the connections of Will Take Charge.
(Standardbred Canada)