Woodbine Racetrack
August 20, 2023
5:45 p.m.
As she moved her eyes from behind the viewfinder of her Canon EOS Mark II camera and set her sights on the finish line, Ericka Rusnak couldn’t believe what she was witnessing, no matter how many times she’d dreamt it before. And although she couldn’t hear it among the roars of the raucous crowd, at the very same moment track announcer Robert Geller proclaimed “A Prince becomes the King”, a realization hit her.
A horse she bred had just won the King’s Plate.
Fast forward a year from his Plate victory, and Paramount Prince continued to represent Rusnak and her mare Platinum Steel with thrilling stakes victories and helpful breeders’ awards, winning three of his first four starts in 2024, including two graded stakes. And while Canada’s reigning Champion three-year-old male is once again a finalist on the Sovereign Award ballot, his half-sister Souper Supreme is a finalist herself for Champion two-year-old filly after a campaign that included multiple stakes wins of her own.
Patrick Husbands guides Paramount Prince to victory in the 164th running of the $1,000,000 King’s Plate. (Woodbine/ Michael Burns Photo)
Add to that a third-place finish in the Lake Erie Stakes for Platinum Steel’s third stake horse of 2024, It’s Time to Shine, and Rusnak finds herself in a position she never thought possible, with her mare a finalist for Broodmare of the Year.
“It’s surreal, I still have to pinch myself like, this is really happening,” she said. “To have three stakes horses from a mare is just great in itself, but all in the same year, that’s very rare. I’m super small, so to be where I am right now with one mare is astounding to me.”
And where she is right now is a long way from how her career as a breeder started, a serendipitous beginning to a story that’s still being written.
Mood Swings
Bred in Ontario by Howard Walton and Hal Gregory, Mood Swings was a bay daughter of Highland Ruckus out of the Seattle Dancer mare Creative Mood. Although her past performances wouldn’t exactly jump off the page at you, she did win her first lifetime start at Woodbine for $32,000 maiden claiming as a juvenile, but that was as good as it would get. Failing to hit the board in her next seven races, she was retired in 2000 at the age of three.
In 2001, Rusnak was looking to purchase a horse she could retrain to be a riding horse and when she came across a Kijiji ad offering a “four-year-old Thoroughbred filly”, she inquired. At first glance, she wasn’t exactly sold.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted her when I got there,” she remembers. “She was literally in someone’s small backyard and was so skinny. She’d had a slab fracture to top it off and the guy selling her lowballed himself, like he just wanted to get rid of her.”
This was not the kind of “project horse” Rusnak was looking for, but against her better judgement she paid the $800, loaded the filly up and took her home.
“Truthfully, I felt bad for her,” said Rusnak. “I had this feeling of ‘what am I getting myself into?’ and I know that feeling well because so many of my animals and rescues are acquired when I have that thought. It’s like jumping into the deep end, but I can’t help but do it.”
The filly, now affectionately known as “Moody”, was sound but had lots of calcification in one knee from an old injury and any thoughts of riding her were forgotten. It wasn’t until a friend looked up the filly’s pedigree that Rusnak’s life and career would change course forever.
What stood out was an undefeated full sister named Highland Mood. Trained by Robert Tiller for Walton and Gregory’s Norseman Racing Stable and Hali Stable respectively, Highland Mood won all four of her starts at Woodbine, including two stakes races. Retired to the breeding shed, Highland Mood went on to produce 2011 Canadian Champion two-year-old colt Maritimer as well as stakes-winning producing dams Giving Mood and Majestic Red.
And just like that, Rusnak was in the business of breeding racehorses.
“That changed my path with her; Mood Swings changed the course of my career, really.” she said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I bred her to One Way Love in 2002 and her first foal was a winner. I didn’t have good success with her though, unfortunately. Her second foal sadly ended up getting hurt in training. Her third died as a weanling from Lawsonia [a severe bacterial infection affecting the intestines]. Not a really great start, so I retired and kept her.”
Hill ‘N’ Dale
In 2004, Rusnak left her job working for legendary Standardbred breeder Jack McNiven’s Killean Acres in Ingersoll, Ontario to be a farm manager at Glenn Sikura’s Hill ‘N’ Dale Farms, perennially one of Canada’s top Thoroughbred breeding operations. It was a move that she credits to Mood Swings for igniting her new passion.
“I became really invested in Thoroughbreds,” she said. “If not for buying Moody, I might not have agreed to come out this way to work and wouldn’t have known about the position Glenn was hiring for.”
Now armed with a few years of breeding experience and Sikura in her corner, Rusnak went to the 2006 CTHS Ontario Fall Mixed Sale looking to bring home her next broodmare. She was interested in a nine-year-old mare named Tearfull Moment (whose yearling foal at the time would go on to become multiple graded stakes-winning millionaire and champion sprinter Field Commission), but when the bidding went above Rusnak’s budget, Sikura stepped in.
The kind gesture didn’t go unnoticed.
“I was sitting with Glenn and her price was going higher than I was comfortable spending. He ended up buying her to allow me to partner, which was very nice of him to do.”
In foal to Van Nistelrooy, the gavel came down at $12,000 and Rusnak was back in the game. Her stable of broodmares grew to three in 2008 when she purchased She Ain’t Much (in foal to Omega Code) and Golden Vow from the Keeneland January sale.
What followed, however, was a harsh reminder of the toll being a breeder can take on a person, not just financially, but emotionally as well.
Tearfull Moment’s first foal for Rusnak and Sikura didn’t sell well, and never made the races. Her subsequent foal was born dog-sitting, an abnormal positioning during birth which often makes survival unlikely. Neither mare or foal survived the difficult ordeal and a heartbroken Rusnak questioned her future in the business.
“That was my biggest crossroad,” she remembers. “It was awful, and it was so hard on me that I remember at that point thinking ‘do I continue doing this?’”
Despite enduring the lowest of lows, she soldiered on and a few months later bought Stormin Wife privately from Sikura’s brother John. That September at the CTHS Ontario Yearling sale, Rusnak sold a colt out of She Ain’t Much that would go on to provide her first significant taste of breeding success.
Bought for $20,000 by the partnership of Sylon Stable and trainer Mike De Paulo, Quick Code won five races as a three-year-old including the 2011 Kenora Stakes, making Rusnak the breeder of a stakes winner for the first time in her career.
The following year, owner/trainer Harold Ladouceur purchased a Sligo Bay filly out of Stormin Wife from Rusnak at the 2012 CTHS Yearling Sale, later to be named Paladin Bay. By the time she retired, Paladin Bay had won four of 18 starts, including three stakes, and over $600,000 in purses.
Rusnak was finally beginning to experience some of the highs after so many lows.
“I tell people all the time it’s the rollercoaster ride that is horses, not just breeding but horses in general,” she said. “You dip down and hit that slump and you think you can’t go on but then something good happens and picks you right back up and you’re at the height of happiness and feeling great.”
Platinum Steel
Perhaps the greatest chapter of Rusnak’s career began with a road trip to Kentucky for the 2017 Keeneland November Breeding Stock sale. In search of another broodmare to add to her small band, she went to the sales grounds with numerous hip numbers in her catalogue selected for inspection.
One by one the horses she’d earmarked either didn’t meet her criteria or were selling beyond her price range.
“I had marked so many pedigrees in the catalogue thinking this is kind of what I’m looking for,” she remembers. “And those horses either don’t meet the criteria physically, so you cross them off, or they go through the ring, and you realize you have expensive taste.”
That was, until a seven-year-old chestnut daughter of Eddington caught Rusnak’s eye in the back ring, so she went to work. Rusnak flipped her catalogue to Platinum Steel’s page and liked what she saw, so she asked the consignor a few questions and with her heart racing, decided to go for it.
“There was just something about the way she looked,” she said. “I started watching her walk around in the back ring and she met the criteria of what I look for in a mare, but physically, that’s what I saw first.”
When it was time for Platinum Steel to go through the sales ring, Rusnak stayed in the back. As the bidding slowed, Rusnak only made two bids including the final one when the gavel came down for a price of $25,000 USD.
The purchase was made a little easier by Ontario Racing’s Mare Purchase Program, which gives Ontario breeders half their purchase price back in Canadian dollars to import in-foal mares to the province. Without it, Platinum Steel would have been yet another to go beyond Rusnak’s means.
“It was because of their program that I was able to afford her,” she says. “She sold at the absolute limit of my budget and without it (the rebate) I wouldn’t have been able to buy her.”
In 2018, Platinum Steel foaled the Kantharos colt she was carrying at that sale and Rusnak subsequently bought him back as a yearling to race herself. Man of Steel failed to win a race in five starts and the mare’s 2019 Giant Gizmo filly named Just Imagine never made the races before a Society’s Chairman colt was born in 2020 and changed everything.
Paramount Prince’s fairytale run to King’s Plate glory during a remarkable 2023 season raised Platinum Steel’s stock so much that her yearling daughter by Souper Speedy (Souper Supreme) brought $100,000 at that year’s CTHS Ontario Yearling sale. As fate would have it, she was purchased by Mike Langlois and Gary Barber, the same partnership that owns Paramount Prince.
With three wins from five starts last year at two, including consecutive stakes victories, Souper Supreme became the fifth stakes winner and eighth stake horse bred by Rusnak. And even though a successful racehorse is everyone’s ultimate goal, breeding a sound, quality individual is always Rusnak’s first priority.
“I haven’t always been the commercial breeder,” she said. “I’m trying to create something that is sound. It’s great to have a really successful two-year-old, but most importantly to me, I want to see something that’s going to remain sound and productive for the breed in general.”
“I think it’s our responsibility to always do everything we can for them to make sure that their life is the best it can be.” She added.
Lasting impressions, future ambitions
While these euphoric moments are indelibly etched into her mind forever, their existence is the result of the day in, day out rigours and sometimes downright struggles that countless breeders like Rusnak face to keep their broodmares and babies healthy, happy and safe. It’s everything they can do just to give foals the opportunity to reach such great heights in a business where months and years of hard work can all too often result in a sale price at auction that doesn’t even cover the stud fee.
That same devotion to the industry is what led to her appointment in December of 2023 as a board member of the Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society’s Ontario division.
It’s all been a ride she never saw coming and is not soon to forget.
“I didn’t think there was any topping 2023,” she said. “I was joking to people that I should just retire from breeding now; how does it get any better than this? The King’s Plate is something that will never go away, it’s so special, but 2024 in a way was even better.”
When Platinum Steel’s 2022 foal, since named Going Platinum, failed to meet her reserve at last fall’s yearling sale, Rusnak decided to race the now two-year-old filly herself. Still in search of her first stakes win as an owner, she’s chosen respected veteran conditioner Lorne Richards, known for his patient approach to preparing young horses, with the hopes that he can campaign Going Platinum into the breeder/owner’s next big thing.
There’s also a little sentimentality that went into the decision as well.
“Lorne had Just Imagine for me (Platinum Steel’s 2019 foal) when I really couldn’t afford a racehorse,” Rusnak said. “He was so good to both of us.”
Rusnak plans to offer two yearlings at the 2025 CTHS Ontario sale, a full brother to Going Platinum and a second colt by Silent Name (JPN), named Elbows Up, out of her most recent broodmare Kit Kat Katie.
And if this chapter of her story culminates with Platinum Steel crowned Outstanding Broodmare at this year’s Sovereign Awards, Rusnak’s more than two decades of enduring late nights, early mornings, vet bills and heartbreaks will all have been a price well paid to experience such a banner year.
“I try not to think about stuff like that,” Rusnak said. “The thought has crossed my mind because I know she’ll be talked about and that alone chokes me up, but I’m just so grateful for this moment.”
Win or lose, it’s safe to say this “small-time breeder” has hit it pretty big.
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