Ashlee Brnjas, a successful and well-known Thoroughbred trainer who raced horses at Woodbine and Fort Erie, passed away unexpectedly on Saturday, September 25th. She was 40.
Ashlee in her hunter/jumper days.
Ashlee got her start in horses as an active competitor in the hunter/jumper world. After a brief hiatus working in the event planning industry for a few years, she missed the horses and wanted to learn about the thoroughbred racing industry. “I had always been around the racehorses, but not on a professional level,” she told Horse-Canada.com in a 2018 interview, referring to her father John’s Colebrook Farm, a 300-acre facility in Uxbridge, ON, which currently stands seven stallions.
John, a longtime thoroughbred breeder and owner, started her out as a hot-walker at the track, but she was only there for about a month before she was given the entire outfit to train. “At that time I had thirty-two at Woodbine, and Tommy Bowden was running the training center, a lifeline at that point. I was very green and new to the industry. It was literally birth by fire; my Dad said, ‘Here is a stable; figure it out.’”