Coming Back From Tragedy

In 2008, disaster struck for Elisabeth Carrier. A fire destroyed the farm she shared at the time with Mario Viens, and took the lives of her beloved horses. The road back has been long and winding, but today Carrier is dreaming as big as she ever has.

Story by Paul Delean

Photos by Ann MacNeill (Sees The Moment Photography)

IT WAS AUGUST 22, 2008. Elisabeth Carrier and her spouse at the time, Mario Viens, were on their 55-acre farm south of Quebec City, in the village of St. Jean Chrysostome when disaster struck.

“We’d just returned to our farm from the regional circuit races in Ayer’s Cliff, where we raced two horses, and we were exhausted,” Carrier recalled.

“It was around 6 p.m. We were in the house when we heard screaming. A volunteer fireman had driven by and seen smoke coming out of the barn.”

While Viens tried vainly to quell the blaze with a fire extinguisher, Carrier suddenly darted into the inferno, hoping to save their two Labrador dogs and 11 horses inside.

“I acted like a crazy person. It was the wrong thing to do. I could have been killed. But all I could think about was my animals.”

She staggered out of the building and fell on all fours, overcome by smoke, and was rushed to hospital by ambulance, returning later the same day to watch from a neighbour’s porch as flames consumed what remained of the 160-foot barn, despite the best efforts of as many as 50 firefighters.

Smoke inhalation claimed nine of their horses, including all of the racing stock. Among the dead were two homebreds, 10-year-old Duccari, who had won 17 races and $89,856, and six-year-old Leocari, who’d won seven times and collected $48,911.

The two dogs also perished. The only survivors were five broodmares and babies who’d been in an outside paddock, and a horse that the volunteer fireman managed to free from his stall nearest the exit.

That dark day could have been an understandable exit point for Carrier.

It was not.

Today, the same dream that Elisabeth Carrier held in 2008 to someday own a top racehorse, is still alive. While she could easily have been snuffed out six years ago, when the barn fire annihilated her small racing stable, the 64-year-old owner/trainer refused to let that happen.

The dream is not only alive today, but it has an even more personal focus now that the resident of Levis, Que., has retired from the insurance business that bankrolled her lifelong love affair with horses.

“I would have loved to be able to make my living from horses, do it full-time, but that was never possible for me. It’s perhaps my one regret. When I finally had a good stable, the best I ever had, I lost everything. What I can still do is aim for that big horse. I see what happened to Luc Blais and Mrs. (Judy) Farrow (developers of Canadian trotting champ Intimidate), and I’m so happy for them, and it inspires me. Maybe it could happen to me too. Why not? That’s the dream.”

A trainer since the early 1990s who conditions her own stock, Carrier has just over $750,000 in career earnings and 210 wins, most of them achieved at small tracks like Hippodrome de Quebec, Hippodrome 3R, Scarborough Downs and Ayer’s Cliff.

Her most memorable win came in 2002 with a three-year-old homebred trotter called Dextracari, a son of her own stallion Ducky, in a $25,000 Quebec Sires Stake event at Hippodrome de Quebec, that he won by 16 lengths at odds of 28/1.

“He was far from the best in the field, but it was his track and all the better ones decided to run that day while he kept to his business. I still remember that Gilles Plourde was driving. It was my biggest win.”

Carrier first grew enamoured of standardbreds while in her teens. The fifth of seven children, she grew up on a farm in the rural community of Pintendre, just south of Quebec City, surrounded by all breeds of horses. Her father, Lionel, earned his living transporting them. In the summer, she’d ride horses owned by her uncle, who lived next door, in time becoming an accomplished and competitive barrel racer. In winter, they’d hitch quarterhorses to a sleigh and navigate local trails. “And we’d always be passed effortlessly by a neighbour, Leandre Viens, who had trotters,” Carrier recalls.

“He told us that’s what we should have for the sleigh rides. And that’s what we got. We went to Hippodrome de Quebec and bought our first one, Speedy Noireau, from Jean-Marie Potvin for $1,000.”

Speedy Noireau was supposed to be sour and tired but a few months after the purchase he’d regained his spryness and Carrier asked Potvin if he’d try bringing him back to the races. And that was her initiation to standardbred racing.

“He didn’t win often but he made $6,000-$7,000 that first year. For us, that was like found money. We hadn’t bought him for that. It certainly beat getting ribbons (for barrel racing),” said Carrier, by then working full-time for Royal Insurance as an expert on fire claims.

Speedy Noireau was the first of dozens of standardbreds she’d own over the next three decades, and the catalyst for her to get her trainer’s licence. Then-husband Clermont Dumont, a meat inspector for the federal government, also took an interest in the sport.

“I’d had exposure to many breeds but I really liked standardbreds. They’re adorable, so much fun to work with,” Carrier said. “Our pattern was to buy horses others no longer wanted. We didn’t have a big budget. My only real requirement was that they be good-natured and easy to handle. I didn’t want an accident in the barn. I had two small children (daughters Corinne and Marjorie Dumont, the latter now a trainer in Alberta with her partner J.F. Gagne).”

While she dabbled in horse racing, Carrier made a significant career change, leaving the insurance realm in 1984 to start a rabbit-breeding operation with Dumont. It supplied restaurants in Quebec City and Montreal.

“I liked farm life but I wanted to breed something that I could handle alone, and rabbits were more manageable than sheep,” she said. “I quite enjoyed the experience. We had a little barn out back where we kept the horses, which we raced on weekends. The rabbit operation got very big. At one time, we had about 10,000 of them at the farm. We sold as much as $250,000 worth a year.”

She exited that venture after 10 years, when their relationship ended. They split the racing stable and Carrier returned to the insurance business.

Quebec’s racing industry was in a serious downturn in those years, but Carrier was undeterred.

She and new spouse Viens, a blacksmith, settled on the St. Jean Chrysostome farm, and gradually expanded their stable, even branching into breeding.

By 2008, they were up to 15 horses, including a stallion, broodmares, babies and racing stock. And that’s when tragedy struck.

Encouraged by family and friends, she and Viens rebuilt. Carrier’s sister Lyne, a building contractor, brought in machinery to clean up the site. Neighbours, friends and family on both sides volunteered their labour.

Three months later, in time for winter, they had a new 12-stall home built for their surviving horses. A construction project that normally would have cost $350,000 instead came in around half that price, with insurance covering about $100,000 of it.

“Without the help, I wouldn’t be on the map today,” Carrier said. “I will remember that kindness to my final day.”

She and Viens are no longer together, but Carrier still lives at the farm, caring for her “three and a half” horses with the help of neighbor Denis Bélanger, a trainer. Her stable star is five-year-old trotting gelding Aworthy Bi (13 wins, $18,852 in earnings in 2013 and 2014), a hard-luck horse who survived a vicious attack from an unknown animal while in a field.

They’re modest talents competing at Rideau-Carleton, Hippodrome 3R and Quebec’s fair tracks, far from standardbred racing’s major leagues, but that doesn’t dull Carrier’s enthusiasm in the least.

“It’s always been my indulgence and it’s still fun,” said Carrier, who is on the board of directors of Quebec’s regional racing circuit.

“It’s a bit of a crazy world, but it’s my world. I guess I’ve always been a woman in a man’s world – it was the same in the insurance business – but that was never an issue. Raising a foal – now that’s hard. But I like horses… and the people who like horses, they’re people with heart. You need a little crazy in your life. This is mine.”