BILL DAVIS
Though he was born AND raised in the heartland of Canadian harness racing -- Ontario -- Bill Davis now practices his trade out west and has continually dominated the sport on Canada’s Pacific coast. Davis, 47, was born in Peterborough, Ontario, to Dorothy and Bill Davis (senior). His father and older brother, Dan, worked for General Motors Canada in Oshawa, Ont., but Dan was also a small-time horseman on the side. Bill helped out his brother after school and quickly developed an interest in harness racing.
Once he was out of school, Bill got a job at nearby Kawartha Downs working for Jerry Robinson. At that time he attained his driver’s licence, but says he didn’t receive much opportunity at Kawartha Downs. This led Bill to make the move to British Columbia when his sister asked him to come visit her.
“My sister was living out in North Vancouver, and it was the summertime and she invited me out. She said there was a track out here, so I figured I’d just see,” says Davis. “I went down to the old Cloverdale Racetrack, and the next thing I knew I had a few drives and kinda liked it so I decided to stay.”
It looks like Davis made the right decision -- after moving to B.C. he met his wife Laurie. “She was working at the track up in the grandstand,” he recalls. “I went up to the grandstand a bit and ended up meeting her there.” Laurie and Bill have now been married for 23 years and have three children -- Billy, 22, who trains and drives in B.C., Megan, 20, who works for Adidas, and Courtney, 15, who is still in high school.
“I’ve had a lot of support from my family to get where I am,” he admits. And he gives plenty of support in return – his two daughters have riding horses (three-day eventers, actually) and every afternoon after he leaves the track, Bill can be found helping them out at the stable with their own horses. But he doesn’t ride, he says. “No, no,” he grins. “That’s their thing.”
Bill currently trains a stable of 22 horses, and in 2008 led Fraser Downs in driving wins (159), driving purse earnings ($1,124,021), training wins (138), and training purse earnings ($959,575). This put him sixth in Canada for training wins, and leading Canada for UTRS with a sparkling .456. Those numbers make it fairly clear that there isn’t much time left open on his schedule, but he says he tries to do as much outside the track as he can, including watching his favourite hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens.
A win in the national driving competition at his home base of Fraser Downs is easy for Bill to put into words. “It would be a great honour,” he says. “The biggest thrill of my life, I’d think.”
KELLY HOERDT
For his first paying job, Kelly Hoerdt, NOW 42, was painting barns at Derby Ranch in Alberta for a whopping $3 an hour. “I was 13 and I’d been suspended from school for whatever reason,” he says with a cheeky grin. “There were plenty at that time.”
The Saskatoon native now resides in Beaumont, Alberta, which he loves for the small town ambience. True blue Albertan, Hoerdt will cheer on the Flames or the Oilers, and he’s rumored to be friends with the father of the lead singer of Nickelback— his favourite Canadian band.
“Before I was consumed with driving I used to ski lots,” says Hoerdt. But the Western Regional champ stables over 60 horses, so it doesn’t leave as much time for his old pastimes. Regardless, Hoerdt still enjoys a good game of blackjack -- mostly in Las Vegas where he’s been at least a dozen times.
But his real off-track calling may be as a budding entrepreneur – Hoerdt is part-owner of The Stretch Pub & Grill in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. “You spend more time with your friends when you own a bar,” he laughs. The Stretch has off-track betting, naturally. Hoerdt and his three partners were called in to save the original bar’s off-track concern, but ended up buying the whole place, gutting it, and reopening.
“I used to go on Mondays religiously,” says Hoerdt, although that usually wasn’t to kick back with his usual drink (a 35-year-old Appleton with Coke). When the place first opened, Hoerdt put in hours working behind the scenes, taking out empties and even washing dishes. He laughs, remembering a time when he had to take a minute from the dishes to go out and watch one of his own horses race on the TVs at the bar. “The guy who cooks for us thought that was pretty funny,” he grins.
The off-track betting is a big part of his bar, but more as a perk than a selling point. Hoerdt just hopes it can get people interested and introduce newcomers to the sport, and compares the idea to visiting a hotel with a pool versus one without. If you had to choose, he says, you’d probably take the one where you can splash around.
The best moments for him, though, involve coming up with promotions for the bar – he and his partners have hosted everything from beauty pageants to live music and comedy, and most memorably promotional thong giveaways with free drinks for those who wear their ‘Stretch’ thongs back to the bar.
“Someone has to check that too,” he chuckles. “So that’s not a bad job.”
It’s better than painting barns, to be sure.
BRAD FORWARD
He’s top driver at Grand River, Hiawatha Horse Park, Dresden, Woodstock, and Windsor Raceways (and Canada’s leading driver for 2008). These tracks all have him listed as B. Forward, but to everyone back home in St. John’s, Newfoundland, he’s just Brad.
He now lives in Woodstock, Ont., along with his wife Sandra, and their three daughters, Katelyn, 12, Melissa, 9, and Jessica, 5. The couple met while Sandra was babysitting for Brad’s brother Scott in Newfoundland. Brad lived in Scott’s basement and first saw her when he came upstairs to make a call. After seeing her once, he says, he found every excuse he could think of to go upstairs and use the phone.
The couple lived in Maryland for over a year, while Brad raced at Rosecroft and Colonial Downs. They moved to Windsor in 1999, on advice from Brad’s cousin in Florida, Jim MacDonald. While in Windsor, Brad counts himself lucky to have found a horse like him. That horse – Firms Phantom – was just like Brad because he hated to lose. Firms Phantom was co-owned by Brad’s mother while in Ontario, but is best known for winning 27 races in a row in the Maritimes before having success in Windsor’s Open ranks.
Brad used to spend his spare time golfing, playing hockey, and playing cards, but now, he says, all that has changed. “It’s all stopped now,” he laughs. “When I race so much, when I do have time off, I spend it with my family. Whether we go to the movies, or we’re out at the park – we could just be in the backyard playing. Whatever it is, whenever I’m off, it’s just with them.”
And at the track, he’s living his childhood dream. “Ever since I was a little boy,” he grins, “it’s all I ever wanted to do. I used to have the extension cord wrapped around the bed post on my bed, or I’d go out in the living room and have two chairs pushed together. I’d have an extension cord wrapped around one chair and sit in the other.”
Those early lessons must have stuck. In the 2008 season, he eclipsed 3000 career wins and $18 million in career earnings, but still says he doesn’t think of himself as being top dog. “I know it’s good in numbers and stuff to be there, but certainly I don’t think I’m any better than the next guy. I had luck come my way. To get there you have to have good quality horses, and I had a lot of good people backing me.”
He credits a lot of his success to his parents’ home on ‘the rock’ and admits he now realizes how they must feel seeing him race. “I know how excited I get watching my little girl play soccer. When she gets a goal I just have to bite my tongue to keep my eyes from watering up.”
PAUL MacDONELL
After a one-time adventure racing jeeps through the wastelands of Aruba, Paul MacDonell, 46, has decided he likes to take it easy. “It’s not hard to get lost,” admits MacDonell of the endless white sand dunes on the Caribbean island. On a vacation in the late 1990s, MacDonell, his wife and another couple spent the better part of a day following the false trails and identical dips in those dunes.
Not otherwise a fan of jeeps or off-roading, MacDonell generally prefers calmer pastimes – playing Trivial Pursuit, hanging out with his dogs, or cheering on his daughters’ Midget AA and House League Bantam hockey games.
A Leafs game is pretty good too.
“I’m a die-hard Leafs fan, unfortunately,” he laughs. “Forty years of torture.”
Horses, beasts as they are, demand a lot of attention – and superstars like Somebeachsomewhere are especially hard to escape. An ideal night for MacDonell is just winding down, he says — a relaxing family dinner and some rare downtime. “This business doesn’t allow much extracurricular,” he jokes.
Born and raised in Oshawa, MacDonell moved to Guelph five years ago to be closer to the races. Before he sat behind horses, MacDonell spent a summer delivering Coke to supermarkets and golf courses. “I wasn’t that big a guy and they’d be throwing these cases of pop at me from the truck,” he grins. “I don’t think I lasted. It was pretty grueling.”
The one thing he took from it, though, was a love of golf. MacDonell enjoys the sport and frequently plays at The Whistle Bear Club in Cambridge, Ontario. He also likes to take winter golf trips to more accommodating climates, most recently to North Carolina and Arizona. Ontario is, after all, less than ideal for winter golfing. “Lately,” he laughs, “I’ve just been shoveling a lot of snow.”
MacDonell says that he’d have liked to be on the management side of sports if the horse racing bug had never bitten him. The champion driver could see himself having become a golf instructor or a hockey coach -- something involved but on the sidelines.
Even now, despite the adrenaline of his record runs with The Beach, MacDonell is generally more at home with his kids and his dogs, puzzling over an orange sports card in Trivial Pursuit, than jetting off on some extreme adventure (like roaming the white dunes of Aruba). It’s nice, once in a while, to be off the clock.
And with any luck, he’ll soon pick a card with an answer of 1:46.4.
DANIEL POTVIN
Not entirely by choice, 47-year-old Daniel Potvin waited until his early 30s to get started as a harness driver. “My dad Jean-Marie (now retired) was a driver in Quebec City and the policy then at that track was that you couldn’t have members of the same family in the same race,” he says. “My dad was driving a lot back then, six or seven races a night, and I didn’t want to hinder him.”
Potvin had a fallback job he enjoyed just as much anyway – he was a blacksmith. He apprenticed with a local blacksmith and developed a passion for shoeing horses, standardbreds in particular. Eventually, he started his own blacksmithing operation, which is still going strong today. It sustains the divorced father of two from Stoneham, Que. through the downtime and keeps him in the game. “I just love doing it,” he smiles, “fitting horses to go faster.”
It also helped him realize his earlier ambition of driving in races. Clients of Potvin the blacksmith quickly became supporters of Potvin the driver. Offers to drive started coming his way, and Potvin began to accept them. By then, the rule barring family members in the same race had been dropped.
Originally based at tiny and now-defunct Pre-Vert racetrack in Quebec’s remote Saguenay region, the Potvins moved to Quebec City when a couple of promising Quebec-bred horses in their barn, Saterlipoppette and Ninja Tortue, demonstrated the talent to compete against the best in their sires-stakes division. “We had to get closer to Montreal,” Potvin explains, “so my dad quit his job as a bus driver and we moved.” Ninja Tortue and Saterlipoppette both went on to win more than $100,000 – a substantial sum in the 1980s.
Potvin owned horses and helped out at his father’s stable, but mostly focused on shoeing while waiting for his break as a driver. It finally came in the early 90s. At first, he drove only occasionally, averaging about 15 starts a month. But in 2001, he became much more active, and his win total spiked to 73. The next year, he had 81 victories, a career peak that stood until 2008, when he totalled 117 – most of them at Sulky Trois-Rivieres and Sulky Quebec. His 680 wins and $2 million in career winnings pale against the stats of others in the national driving championship, but he says you never know what can happen on a racetrack.
After all, he fared quite poorly in the draw for the regional tournament in Trois-Rivières. Midway through the eight-race event, he was in last place, and the driver just ahead of him was Aylmer’s Guy Gagnon. But last apparently, was a good place to be.
Guess which two drivers ultimately advanced?
GUY GAGNON
Ottawa-area horseman Guy Gagnon, 40, packs a lot of living into his week. He races in two provinces, trains a stable of 15 horses, plays late-night hockey twice a week, coaches his son’s novice hockey team in the winter and soccer team in the summer, and skis on the weekend with his wife of 12 years, teacher Louise Ricard, and their children Stephanie, 10, and Frédéric, 6.
“We have an active lifestyle,” he grins. The Quebec City native, whose hockey idol is Colorado Avalanche star (and former Quebec Nordique) Joe Sakic, gave up his hockey dream to focus on standardbred racing, but never lost his love of the game. “I go to Senators games too,” he says. “I’ve played hockey all my life.”
His racing stable, Les Ecuries Guy Gagnon, is the sponsor of his 30-and-older garage-league team, which sports sweaters with a horseshoe logo. He started coaching his son’s team, the Penguins, three winters ago after bringing him to his first practice. “There were 64 kids on the ice and obviously too few coaches,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a big deal for me to get involved; I would have been there anyway, to watch, and I play hockey myself. I took two six-hour coaching courses on weekends and now I’m accredited.”
“The feedback from parents and kids has been very positive,” he adds. “I’m perceived as a motivator and I’m big on team spirit. We all get together for a team chant before the game.”
Leading driver last year at both Rideau-Carleton and Sulky Gatineau (the former Hippodrome d’Aylmer), Gagnon won a career-high 342 races, including the 3,000th of his career, and wound up with earnings of $1.7 million, also a personal best.
Gagnon, whose father worked in the munitions department for the Canadian armed forces, lived near the racetrack in Quebec City, which is how he first got interested in the sport. He won his first race in Quebec City in 1989 with pacer Arctic Dream, trained by his mentor Jacques Beaudoin, and relocated to the Ottawa area with Beaudoin in 1990. His career has been in steady progression ever since.
Gagnon topped 100 wins for the first time in 1994 and has surpassed 200 wins and $1 million in purses every year since 2000, earning two driving titles at Rideau and six at Aylmer. Though he’s captured two six-figure Coupe des Eleveurs finals at Hippodrome de Montréal (with Agator Car in 2002 and Rosanne Ray in 1998). Gagnon says he gets the same buzz from a low claimer. “Winning is my thrill. Big race, small race – it’s the same. For me, it’s like scoring a goal in the NHL.”
GILLES BARRIEAU
The Barrieau family has a storied history in Atlantic harness racing, with talented horsemen like Marcel and Ruffin Barrieau. 44-year-old Gilles Barrieau, a multiple Maritime driving champion, is undoubtedly writing the latest chapter of the Barrieau story.
Gilles grew up in Dieppe, N.B. where his father, Alfred, always had a few horses while he was juggling jobs. “I guess he really had three jobs on the go,” says Gilles. “He was a hard worker.”
He obviously picked up on his dad’s work ethic, as Gilles has recorded over 100 driving wins in the Maritimes every year since 1996. He now calls Saint John, N.B. home, which is where he met Kelly -- his wife of 14 years. It’s a fairly common story, as horsemen go.
“I was in Saint John working here with Marcel (Barrieau, Gilles’ uncle), and Kelly sold tickets at the grandstand.” The couple have one daughter, 13-year-old Devon, who is a grade eight student.
When he isn’t busy with his stable of 12 at Exhibition Park Raceway, Gilles likes to golf and play hockey. But when asked what he’d like to do besides train and drive horses, Gilles has trouble answering. “You got me there,” he shakes his head. “That’s all I ever wanted to do. I guess I’d want to be a professional hockey player.”
Regardless, he’s found his niche in harness racing. Without a hint of conceit, he easily admits that he can’t think of a stakes or invitational race in the region that he hasn’t won. “I think I’ve got every one here in the Maritimes,” he smiles. “As far as I know.”
Gilles cites some career highlights as winning the Gold Cup and Saucer in 1997 with his favourite horse Comedy Hour, and scoring in the National Driving Championship in 2007 at the Charlottetown Driving Park Entertainment Centre. But he admits he didn’t feel quite himself while representing Canada in Australia and New Zealand. “I was just diagnosed with diabetes, and I really wasn’t up to that trip, but I pretty well had to go.”
It’s only now that he’s just beginning to recover.
“I’m feeling better, but it still bothers me. It’s a lot of nerve damage, so I’m just sore everywhere, especially the cold. The cold really bothers me. The doctors told me it’ll be two or three years before I’m back to normal.”
He’s looking forward to going to Fraser Downs to compete in the Nationals, but says it will be a new experience. “I expect it to be totally different then last time, it’s a different environment and I won’t know the horses as much, or the people involved. It’s going to be a bigger challenge but I’m looking forward to it.”
For Gilles, there’s no time for outside interests. It’s just back and forth between the track and home for him -- but he says he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love it,” he smiles. “I can’t wait to get there in the morning.”
MARC CAMPBELL
When you’re seeking both youth and success in harness racing, there’s no need to look much farther than Prince Edward Island to spot 24-year-old Marc Campbell. From Orwell, P.E.I., the young driver is only into his fifth career year, but has recorded over 300 wins in the Maritimes.
His most memorable moment was winning three Atlantic Breeders Crown events on the same day in 2007, with three-year-old filly Forceful Hope, aged mare Howmacs Dragon, and free-for-aller Rigio Hanover. Earlier that year, Rigio Hanover had helped fulfill one of Campbell’s’s childhood aspirations when the pair made it into the final of the Gold Cup & Saucer. “It’s every kid’s dream to drive in the Cup and Saucer, and maybe win it some day,” he says. “I got to drive in it and I was only 22. It was pretty big.”
Campbell previously attempted to establish himself on the Ontario circuit, while working for fellow islander Anthony MacDonald, but he was hit with some tough luck when he fell and broke his leg while outside the barn at Campbellville Training Centre. He came home soon after and has now been married to wife Natasha for almost two years, while running a stable of 17 horses out of the Charlottetown Driving Park Entertainment Centre.
Between operating a stable, driving in overnights on P.E.I. and stakes events across the Maritimes, Campbell admits it can all get fairly hectic at times, but there’s one thing he’s found to minimize the pressure.
“It’s just family time,” he says. “I spend time with Natasha, and Landon (their one-year-old son). We just go for walks, and try and do something else. You just need to get time away from it all to keep sharp. If you’re at it all the time and you don’t get a break, you lose your edge.”
Campbell’s also an avid television fan. He’ll watch anything from professional baseball, to Desperate Housewives, to Criminal Minds, to his favourite movies – The Notebook, Tombstone, and the Rocky series.
But like many other drivers, Campbell just thrives on racing.
“I think I’m really doing a dream job for me,” he admits. “You have to think on your feet so fast. You’re always thinking. It’s what I love about it. I like the pressure.”
Campbell doesn’t have much experience driving on a five-eighths track but is looking forward to the NDC final at Fraser Downs – though Natasha reminds him he has bigger issues to deal with, as their second child is due right at the time of the World Driving Championship in Norway, in May. “Natasha said I can’t go to the worlds if I win,” he says with a laugh. “But we’ll deal with that when the time comes. I don’t even want to think about it.”